The Tree of Life (2011)

Sean Penn talks to himself because Brad Pitt is his dad and he’s messed up because his little brother just died…okay….wait a sec, now there’s galaxies exploding and some dinosaurs…did I just lean on the remote or something?

The Tree of Life is a 2011 film directed by Terrence Malick and starring Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain and Sean Penn.

I first saw this film on a date with my then-girlfriend. About half way through she asked me “what is this movie about?” I meant to reply, “I don’t know,” but I had a Freudian-slip and instead said, “I don’t care.”

And that pretty much sums up my reaction to this film.

The best scenes by far are the ones involving Brad Pitt’s character, “Mr O’Brien”, interacting with his three sons. These are without doubt the scenes that make the most sense. I like that Mr O’Brien is never portrayed as an ogre. He is very hard on his boys but you understand why. He wants them to grow up strong, and not abandon their dreams like he did. You also get the feeling that this is just how he was raised he has no other notions of what a man or a father should be.

This brings me to the central theme of the film which is Nature vs Grace. Mr O’Brien represents Nature, while their soft, welcoming mother, played by Jessica Chastain, represents Grace. At the beginning of the film we’re told Nature or Grace is a choice, however as the film goes on we realise it’s not that simple (nothing about this film is simple…but I’ll get to that in a bit). Eldest son Jack (Hunter McCracken, later played as an adult by Sean Penn) says toward the end of the film that influences from his mother and father “wrestle inside him” and always will.

I think my initial mistake was trying to figure this film out. Once my brain recovered from the ensuing meltdown I decided to watch it again but treat it like a painting. I just sort of looked at it, and didn’t really try to make much sense of what was happening before my eyes. I enjoyed it much more this way.

That said I don’t actually enjoy this film that much. The biggest issue for me is that by making the film so incredibly obscure, Terrence Malick manages to make all the characters strangely distant. I just wasn’t invested in any of them. There’s the trademark Malick voice overs, but it has nowhere near the emotional impact of say, the soldiers meditating on life and death in The Thin Red Line. It really doesn’t have much impact at all.

I’ve heard this film referred to as ‘pretentious’, but I don’t think it is. I just think that without any kind of real narrative, it just sort of fails to achieve what it seems to set out to do. It’s actually a lot more like a really long music video than a film.

The visual stuff is all very cool and some of it is downright beautiful. But my favourite moment is actually a very small scene where Jessica Chastain is walking along a street with her sons and as she pauses for a moment, a butterfly lands on her outstretched hand. There's something really amazing and spontaneous about it. That single visual gave me a much more profound sense of Grace than any other single moment in the film.

Still, as I mentioned before, my reaction again this time around was just to sort of shrug and think “well, it looked nice, but I still just don’t care.” Terrence Malick reminds me a lot of Stanley Kubrick. If I was going to compare this film to any other, it would be 2001: A Space Odyssey. Both are oddly meditative, visually stunning, and really, really strange.

Up in the Air (2009)

George Clooney does some really awkward dance moves, the creepy stalker chick from Two and Half Men marries the disabled war veteran who beat up Robert Downey Jr in Due Date, and lots of hardworking Americans get canned.

Up in the Air is a 2009 movie directed by Jason Reitman and starring George Clooney, Vera Farmiga and Jason Bateman.

Despite being a George Clooney fan I avoided this film for a long time because I thought it was the type of movie I despise – the sort of film The Simpsons makes fun of; films about “people coming to terms with things.”

I knew the general gist – Clooney plays a man whose job (a corporate asshole hired by employers to fire people) keeps him travelling. He lives out of a suitcase, barely sees his sisters and has no attachments besides a mutually beneficial loyalty to his boss (a wonderfully sleazy Jason Bateman). I figured it was about Clooney’s character finally ‘finding his feet’ and the woman of his dreams yadda yadda.

And for the most part that’s what this film is. It’s predictable, sometimes corny, rarely laugh-out-loud funny, but watchable due to Clooney and Vera Farmiga, who plays Alex; a woman seemingly as vacuous as Clooney with whom he begins a casual relationship.

But then it redeems itself at the end when it has Clooney doing the ‘coming to terms with things’ moment – showing up on Alex's doorstep. It’s set up like a happy ever after moment but instead he’s greeted with the cold reality that she is married with kids and has been lying to him.
I especially like the way she essentially ‘fires’ him in the same passive aggressive way he’s been firing people throughout the film.

The film has a really obvious metaphor that I would normally pretentiously sneer at, but this time it actually made me laugh (maybe it was the sleep medication I was on – which clearly wasn’t working). After spruiking idiotic self-help seminars on how to ‘empty the backpack’ of your life – free yourself from the baggage of friends, family, and possessions – Clooney’s character is forced to carry around a cheesy cardboard cut-out of his sister and her fiancé that juts out of his carefully packed carry on suitcase (she’s asked him to take lame tourist selfies with it at various landmarks he visits on his travels). The metaphor is as subtle as a knee to the groin, but director Jason Reitman somehow makes it work. I guess growing up with Ivan Reitman as your dad would instil a certain deftness at juggling sentimentality and comedy.

What I liked most about the film was that Clooney’s character essentially doesn’t change. His character arc is a full 360 – he ends the film the way he began; groundless and happy to be. The film essentially employs the rationale that made Seinfeld so great – the philosophy that good comedy should have ‘no hugging and no learning’. Works for me. Two sleep-deprived hours well spent.