The critic Jim Emerson once pointed out that some movies worked better when seen in solitude, because they were too personal to share with an audience. When you watch a film you feel strongly about alongside a bunch of indifferent or critical viewers, it can feel like “having other people in the most private recesses of your consciousness, making fun of your dreams as you're dreaming them”.
Most serious movie-lovers will know what Emerson means. And for me the cinema of Terrence Malick fits this thesis, as I discovered the other day while watching The Tree of Life.
Even Malick’s best work is massively self-indulgent, and definitely not to all tastes. His 1973 debut Badlands was a (relatively) plot-driven film about two young outlaws, but his subsequent films have been determinedly anti-narrative — focusing on creating a mood rather than on doing something so pedestrian as telling a story. He often overlaps his characters’ spoken dialogues with barely heard voiceover reflecting their thoughts, and though he casts big Hollywood stars, he is a keen chronicler of the countless little dramas unfolding in the natural world — to the extent that passages of his films resemble wildlife documentaries. His adaptation of James Jones’ war novel The Thin Red Line befuddled many viewers because it wasn’t so much a World War II movie as a film about a beautiful island and its flora and fauna, where a few human beings (played by a queue of well-known actors) just happened to be busily killing each other.
But even by his usual standards, The Tree of Life is portentous and overblown. It places vignettes from the lives of a 1950s American family against a dauntingly large canvas that tries to accommodate the history of the universe, the evolution of life and the key questions about existence and consciousness. While the ambition is admirable, a two-hour-long film is scarcely enough to deal with such a subject on the scale that Malick wants to deal with it. (Quite possibly, even a 12-billion-year-long film wouldn’t be enough.)
Even as a Malick fan who had an idea of what to expect, I found Tree of Life tedious to sit through. So naturally, I must sympathise with the agony suffered by viewers who know nothing about this director but who had come to see “a Brad Pitt movie”. One such lady was sitting behind me. During a mesmerising sequence that dealt with nothing less than the birth of our solar system and the dawn of single-celled life in the primeval soup, she shifted in her seat, sighing and flapping her hands. After 15 minutes she said to her companion: “I think they must be showing what happens to that guy after his death.”
This isn’t a terrible interpretation when you consider how abstract the sequence was (especially for those who haven’t brushed up on their evolutionary biology), and how seemingly unconnected to the 1950s story. The problem is, she went on saying it even after the scene with the dinosaurs. The Afterlife is Jurassic Park? Who knew.
And so it went until the lights came on, whereupon some people hooted loudly and others staggered out of the hall like zombies. Personally I walked away disappointed by the film but also wondering how I would have felt if I had seen it in a hermetically sealed room, cut off from human contact.
A south Delhi multiplex is about as far as you can get from such a viewing experience, but since I’m told that the film is now playing to empty halls, I’m contemplating a second trip.
Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based writer
