Film Chronicle - Brooke Allen.pdf

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Film Chronicle Author(s): BROOKE ALLEN Source: The Hudson Review, Vol. 64, No. 3 (AUTUMN 2011), pp. 476-482Published by: The Hudson Review, IncStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41300702Accessed: 17-03-2015 18:02 UTC

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BROOKE ALLEN

Film Chronicle

The fifth film in Terrence Malick' s FORTY-YEAR CAREER, The Tree of Life , finally opened last summer, putting an end to six years of specu- lation from the pro- and anti-Malick camps. Predictably, I heard some people call the final product a masterpiece, while others (including some people whose judgment I deeply trust) insisted that it was the most pretentious movie ever made. I suspected I would fall into the latter category. I was wrong.

Some directors have created masterpieces almost inadvertently. Look at The Palm Beach Story , North by Northwest , Some Like It Hot Sturges, Hitchcock, and Wilder were setting out to make the best possible genre movies, but they cannot have imagined that these works would be considered tours de force of the art form more than half a century later. Others, like Orson Welles, set out consciously to create a masterpiece every time they took on a new project. Sometimes their attempts are successful; more often they are not. But the fact cannot be avoided that if a director does attempt to make a masterpiece he will have to take a great many risks, exposing him to ridicule and accusations of preten- sion if his efforts misfire.

Malick has taken plenty of such risks in The Tree of Life , a film that aspires to nothing less than cosmic scale as it sets the unremarkable doings of a middle-class family in Waco, Texas, circa 1950 - Norman Rockwell material - against the infinity of time and space. Comparisons to 2001: A Space Odyssey are inevitable, and indeed in depicting the dawn of time, complete with Big Bang, expanding nebulae, roiling volcanic matter, and spinning planets, Malick sought guidance not only from NASA scientists and six special effects houses but also from Kubrick's own man Douglas Trumbull, who worked on The Tree of Life as a visual advisor.

The resulting filmic effects are spectacular, but oddly enough they are no more spectacular than the intimate, homely scenes against which they are placed. Most of The Tree of Life , in fact, was shot within a six- block area of little Smithville, Texas, in a neighborhood close to what residential Waco looked like sixty years ago and close, too, to the arca- dian images buried in every American's childhood fantasies. The wide streets, all but empty of traffic, canopied with spreading oaks and pecan trees; the handsome, unpretentious wooden houses set well back behind lawns that, in those days, were neither manicured nor overfertil- ized, and still unpolluted by power mowers and leaf blowers; the



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neighborhood urchins wandering in packs, looking for mischief. This is the reimagined Waco of Malick's childhood, brought back to life by the director, his production designer Jack Fisk, and the crack cinematographer Emmanuel "Chivo" Lubezki.

Then there is the O'Brien family, as picturesque as the place they inhabit. The parents are in their way as gender-defined as Leopold and Molly Bloom: the father, played by Brad Pitt, is authoritarian and demanding in the style of his time and place, the mother (Jessica Chastain) all-forgiving and embracing. The three boys, Jack (Hunter McCracken), R.L. (Laramie Eppler), and Steve (Tye Sheridan) are "boys" in the classic Tom Sawyer tradition, but they are also sensitive, sometimes painfully so, and forever searching, in the manner of all young people, for underlying meaning in the scattered and mysterious clues life has presented them with so far.

There is no plot to speak of, and no suspense - since the opening scene, which takes place about ten years after the main part of the action, shows a now-middle-aged Mr. and Mrs. O'Brien receiving news of nineteen-year-old R.L.'s death. Their search to find meaning in this cruel stroke of fate is mirrored in various intercut scenes from the future, with a now fiftyish Jack (Sean Penn) moving through sterile, highly designed, twenty-first-century Houston, where he appears to live a sterile, highly-designed life. Lines of dialogue detached from their immediate contexts and heard over seemingly unconnected scenes of action - a stylistic choice Malick has carried to new heights in this film - link themes with images. Cinematographer Lubezki discusses the technique in action: "So the actors are performing the dialogue, but Terry isn't interested in dialogue. So they're talking, and we're shooting a reflection or we're shooting the wind or we're shooting the frame of the window, and then we finally pan to them when they finish the dialogue." This is a fair enough description of the film's look, but it isn't fair to say that Malick's not interested in dialogue. Perhaps it's more truthful to say that he's interested in dialogue as speech rather than as a constructed entity, for speech has a powerful function in this over- whelmingly visual movie.

How does one find meaning in tragedy? A chorus of voices, in which the gende one of Mrs. O'Brien predominates, evoke the Book of Job. "Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither: the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord." It's the hardest lesson in the world for all of us; it always has been. For those who believe in God, it might be harder; how can a good and all-knowing God allow evil, tragedy, waste? We're back to Leibniz and Voltaire. At one point Pitt, as Mr. O'Brien, wonders aloud how he could have been fired from his job. After all, he's never missed a day of work and has been not only an exemplary employee but also a good and God-fearing man who tithes every week.

The Tree of Life is an intensely religious movie with a strong religious statement. Malick's religion is clearly not the conventional Christianity of the O'Briens, though he offers no critique of that creed. There are as



478 THE HUDSON REVIEW

many ways to worship the ineffable as there are human beings on earth, and the O'Briens' way, bred deeply into them, is no worse and perhaps no better than any other. Religious ritual, with its mission to endow each part of life with meaning and its mandate to take account of the infinite even in our most mundane actions, is treated with respect. One can even interpret the film's dramatic birth-of-the-universe scenes as a visual reconciliation of the scientific and biblical accounts of creation. "The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the waters." The scientifically accurate scenes on screen do not really deny this image. And heaven? "God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven." Alexandre Desplat's use of almost operatic scoring under the Big Bang and other creation scenes, again a la Kubrick, intensifies the aura of holiness, so that later in the film when the lovely Mrs. O'Brien throws out one arm to the sky and cries, "That's where God lives!," it seems a natural progression. One message of Tree of Life is the same that Thornton Wilder was trying to get across in Our Town : the holiness and transcendental perfection of daily life, just as it is lived. It takes losing his job for Mr. O'Brien to get the message: he had been under the mistaken impression (remember Job!) that he had control of his own destiny and consequently spent too much of his life focusing on work, duty, routine. "I dishonored it all and didn't notice the glory."

Malick has infused this glory into the O'Brien family and their surroundings through innovative technical work and a willingness to throw conventional narrative and camera work to the winds - not to show-offy effect, as is too often the case, but in an earnest and very largely successful effort to convey the feeling of life as it is actually lived. In shooting the film, Malick dispensed with "coverage" - the traditional placement of cameras stationed in various parts of the location and used to make the scene look "realistic." The free-floating result, though, is equally realistic, possibly even more true to the way one experiences a scene in real life, for both experience and memory turn out to be fragmentary rather than linear, and time and space are always destabi- lized. Malick's efforts to convey all this on film are respectable experiments in the tradition of Bergson and Proust.

He is at his most brilliant at showing the world through the eyes of Jack as a toddler. He doesn't do it the easy way, by placing the camera at a child 's-eye level, but shows us the sort of slender moments - swift images blazed on the mind's eye - that comprise all of our early childhood memories. Violent or frightening scenes are particularly intense: an old man having a heart attack under a tree is seen only for the briefest instant as Jack's mother rushes him away from the disturb- ing sight. Dialogue, here as elsewhere in the movie, is unmoored from its context as stray sentences make an impression on children who don't exacdy understand what is being said.



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The narrative becomes more linear and "realistic" as Jack ages (rather in the spirit of Joyce's Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man), and we hone in on what is probably the central relationship of the film, that between twelve-year-old Jack and his father. Hunter McCracken, an amateur like the other children in the movie, gives a performance of such emotional intensity (and humor, too) that he almost overpowers the film, but not quite. I can hardly believe that a time has come when we take Brad Pitt seriously as a major actor, but it has in fact come to pass: approaching fifty years old now, Pitt is no longer the pretty boy of yore, and his portrayal of Mr. O'Brien is utterly serious and engaged.

Some dyed-in-the-wool Northeasterners of my acquaintance have seen Mr. O'Brien as a dictatorial, even abusive father. I think that on the contrary, The Tree of Life is to some extent Malick's love letter to his father. Mr. O'Brien is a tightly wound man, to be sure, with a hot and sometimes even violent temper. He admits to having once wanted to be a serious musician (scenes of him playing the piano and, occasionally, the church organ carry a special level of emotion) ; it is implied that the frustration of this ambition might have contributed to his habitual tension. But he is a demonstratively loving father who is clearly doing his best to give his boys a good upbringing according to the lights of his culture. They will address him as "Father" rather than "Dad" and say 'Yes sir" rather than 'Yeah." They will sit at the dinner table like civilized human beings. They will not slam the screen door. (When Jack has slammed it one time too many, his father orders him to "close this door quietly fifty times" - and the boy does it, though mutinously.) I myself had Texan grandparents and can remember countless scenes along these lines. The adults weren't being egregiously controlling; they were just trying to pass on the rules of a polite, disciplinarian, hierarchical society.

Inevitably, as Jack approaches adolescence, his once-automatic love and respect for his father comes under question. The bossing rubs him the wrong way; there are bitter scenes. At one moment, simultaneously horrifying and funny, Jack sees his father lying under the car to fix the undercarriage; only a flimsy jack is holding up the automobile. We see the thought flash through Jack's mind - how easy it would be to send it crashing down! Of course he does no such thing, though he prays "Please God kill him." This is serious, and at the time he means it; but after all, it is all adolescent rather than pathological.

One of the film's great themes, again with biblical overtones, is that of reconciliation - and this is what wins out over adolescent rebellion, parental temper, and suppressed rage. At the very end of the film in one of those surreal fantasy scenes that can so easily go wrong if treated heavy-handedly: the middle-aged Jack (Sean Penn) is led through a doorframe into a desert landscape where many people appear to be wandering aimlessly, stunned, a la Night of the Living Dead. Here Jack recognizes his twelve-year-old self, his little brothers, and his still-young parents. They are joyfully reunited. Is this Malick's view of the afterlife? Or - and I think this is more probable - is it his acknowledgement that




no matter how bad family relations get on the surface, somewhere in our minds there is a special place where our love for one another is still pure and untouched, our images of one another are still youthful and burnished, and where we see ourselves, and each other, at our very best?

While I find the movie to be a masterpiece, it is not without its problems, and if I had to find fault with any member of the production team, it would be with Jacqueline West, the costume designer - though presumably she is only executing Malick's vision. I can remember very well what style of clothes Texas businessmen of Mr. O'Brien's genera- tion wore, and it was nothing like Pitt's hip, classic getup. In fact all his costumes look much more SoHo than Waco, while Chastain 's entire wardrobe appears to have come out of an Anthropologic catalogue - as does the ethereal Chastain herself. And no one (this is Texas after all!) ever seems to sweat. One understands that Malick was walking a fine line, trying to combine the realism of a particular place and time with a universal and perhaps ideal image. But he fails entirely to reconcile these two images, so that fantasy often obscures felt reality. I would have been happier to see Pitt with pens sticking out of his breast pocket, or Chastain with the occasional sweaty armpits and runny mascara.

But ultimately these issues are not too important. What is important is the way Malick has expanded the capacities of the medium in the way that only the best directors succeed in doing. Pioneers of early cinema like Georges Melies and Rene Clair envisioned a long period of experi- mentation with film's technical possibilities, but the advent of sound set the medium onto a generally realistic track. Malick has taken it a step further away from the vestigial proscenium effect by radically unmoor- ing the visual point of view and dissociating dialogue from action. Oddly enough, this is never confusing; we understand the story and its progression just as well as if it had been told in a more linear fashion. Malick may in fact have come up with a more "realistic" depiction of consciousness than any of his contemporaries.

If Malick has transcended formula in The Tree of Life, Lee Tamahori, with his new film The Devil's Double, has taken one of the oldest formulas in cinema history and rejuvenated it in bold modern style.

Let's call it the Prisoner of Zenda formula. Two men happen to bear an uncommon resemblance to one another. One of them finds himself in a position of peril. The other one stands in for him and undergoes a series of dramatic, sometimes swashbuckling, adventures in the guise of his lookalike.

The most famous Hollywood examples of this formula, both based on popular novels, are The Prince and the Pauper and The Prisoner of Zenda, both of which had their best versions in 1937 - The Prisoner of Z£nda featuring an unforgettable performance by Ronald Colman. The teaijerk ending of the earlier A Tale of Two Cities had a similar theme, as did the much later The Parent Trap.

Of course The Prisoner of Zenda was pure fantasy. The Balkan kingdom



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of Ruritania was a figment of its author's imagination, and so was its dissipated prince, so hungover that a stand-in had to take his place at his own coronation. No one could ever mistake such goings-on for real life. Or could they? Would they be wrong if they did? Life has a way of sometimes being even more baroque than fantasy, and in recent years we have seen a real-life version of Prince Rudolf, but far more baneful than that relatively harmless character: the crown prince of Iraq, Saddam Hussein's eldest son Uday (killed in 2003 by U.S. troops). There was also, we now discover, an Iraqi counterpart to Rudolf s valiant stand-in. This was an army officer named Latif Yahia who, bearing a very marked resemblance to the maniacal Uday, was forcibly dragooned into service as his body double, taking his place at events that were either deemed too dangerous by the secret police or deemed too boring to attend by Uday himself.

The first three-quarters of the film closely follows Latif 's 1997 memoir I Was Saddam 's Son , written from exile in Austria. Latif had been a schoolmate of Uday's, and when the need for a body double arose, he was the natural choice. His own opinion didn't come into it; when he turned down this "offer you can't refuse," he was thrown into solitary confinement for six months, tortured, and presented with the prospect of his entire family being wiped out. It was perfectly clear to Latif that Uday would have no compunction in carrying out this threat, so he signed on, from that moment entering the Hall of Mirrors that was Saddam Hussein's court.

Uday was a psychopath in Grand Guignol mode, a dream role for a technically skilled performer. Enter Dominic Cooper, the young English actor whose star has been ascending since his breakthrough role as the hottest and brashest of Alan Bennett's History Boys. Cooper has proved himself a fine actor (An Education) who doesn't mind hamming it up on occasion ( Mamma Mia!), and he must have snapped at the scenery-chomping possibilities inherent in this project. For Latif Yahia, at least as portrayed by Cooper, is a proud, self-controlled, handsome man, very much in the Ronald Colman manner in fact (Cooper sports an artificial nose for the role, giving him a romantic, desert Arab appearance). But with some cosmetic dentures, a nose job, and a dramatic change in manner Latif becomes Uday - and Uday, with his scruffy bangs and protruding teeth, bears more than a passing resemblance to Jerry Lewis. With practice Latif finds it ever easier to morph from one character to another, and watching Cooper perform this feat - sometimes we're not always sure which character he is actually supposed to be at the time - is as grimly fascinating as watching Jekyll turn into Hyde.

If Cooper as Latif channels the noble Ronald Colman, his Uday harks unmistakably back to Kiss of Death and Richard Widmark's famous portrayal of Tommy Udo, the psychopathic gangster with the flashy clothes and the scary giggle. Uday giggles, too, as he brandishes automatic rifles, rapes newlywed brides, disports himself with drag




queens, shoots friends who get in his way, and picks up schoolgirls in his car only to discard their deflowered corpses a few hours later. It is a tour de force of over-the-top acting on Cooper's part, and I mean that as a compliment: I haven't seen anything quite like it since Jeremy Irons' astonishing performance as identical twin gynecologists in Dead Ringers . (That, too, was based on a true story - can anything after all be weirder than reality?)

There is a funhouse feel to life in Saddam's court, where nothing is quite what it seems. For one thing, Uday is not the only one with a surgically enhanced body double. There is a brilliant scene in which Saddam greets Uday - or at least that is what we think we have seen until the true identity of both men is suddenly called into question. Was it Saddam, or his double? Uday, or his? If it was Saddam, did he realize that his son was not his son? (Philip Quast is excellent in the role of Saddam, by the way, as is Raad Rawi as a sad eminence grise of the regime, as trapped in its clutches as Latif himself.) And what about Serap (Ludivine Sagnier), the Beirut cutie Uday has designated as his special squeeze, and who subsequently attaches herself to the definitely more appealing Latif? Is she with Latif- or is she Uday's spy?

One of the film's high points is its re-creation of the outrageous interiors of Saddam's palaces, particularly Uday's suites therein. Here special mention should be made of the fine job done by production designer Paul Kirby and set decorator Caroline Smith: like so many dictators, Hussein pere et fils took their design cues from Las Vegas, using real gold instead of fake. The revelation, so soon after the release of the film, of the equally grandiose interior decoration of the various Qaddafi palazzi in Libya had me turning to Peter York's fabulous book on the subject, Dictator Style: Lifestyles of the World's Most Colorful Despots , which includes interior photographs of the homes of tyrants from Hitler to Ceaugescu to Mobutu. York is able to make certain generalizations that the photographs certainly bear out: dictator decor, he writes, is not about beauty or even about personal taste, but about intimidation pure and simple: these people are in the business of impressing underlings, and if it takes massive amounts of gold and bling to do so, then so be it. The same applies to the countless objects celebrating the dictator (busts, portraits, etc.) and with the inevitable statues of panthers, eagles, tigers, and various other predatory animals. Kirby and Smith have done a stellar job at re-creating these mountains of kitsch.

In the end Tamahori and his screenwriter Michael Thomas diverge from the truth of Latif Yahia's narrative in favor of an old-fashioned Hollywood ending, but perhaps that was inevitable; they are working within the Prisoner of Zenda formula, after all, and it is dramatically more satisfactory for Latif to wreak his own vengeance on Uday than to have to flee ignominiously to Europe. If the filmmakers had stuck closer to reality, The Devil's Double might have lost its swashbuckling vigor - might even have bucked the formula altogether. And that would really have been a shame.



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