The Summer of Malick

Enter a theater in the middle of a Terence Malick movie and anyone could conceivably mistake it for a nature documentary. His five-film career dabbles in Western geography, locusts destroying wheat, exotic animals and now, the universe's origins and dinosaur encounters framing family drama in Tree of Life.

Leading up to Tree of Life, The Belcourt Theatre ran a retrospective of Malick's previous films. I caught Badlands and Days of Heaven, but skipped both The Thin Red Line (great but long and already saw it) and The New World (the subject doesn't really interest me).

From the beginning, his signatures emerge - establishing shots of the natural world, amazing vistas, sun-dappled trees and filming at much as possible at the Golden Hour the time after dawn and before twilight that accentuates colors and tones. It is especially notable in Days of Heaven, where the cinematography bathes almost every daylight scene in luxurious hues. Badlands is great right out of the box, with Martin Sheen's killer shockingly humorous after the manhunt ends and an army of lawmen take him in.

In late July, last domino finally fell, Malick's long-developed personal project, Tree of Life. Set in the 1950s and with a detour through Big Bang and Age of Dinosaurs, it's a shocking film, if only in delivery. Malick's singular vision makes the film riveting, even when it just depicts kids behaving badly in the 1950s and the weight that leaves on them as adults.

From the introduction of the central family's mother as a young girl, Malick is masterful. Some say it sags in a scene when Jack (who grew into Sean Penn) frolics on a beach with his family. But the death I believe it symbolizes works in concert with Malick's depiction of the end of the Earth, Sun and universe (at least that's what I though it depicted).

It's easy to come away with your own meaning. Mine goes like this. Life has always been brutal and harsh. Sometimes we survive by sheer luck. At other times, we're stuck with mortal wounds and only able to absorb a final sunset. Tree of Life conjures the issue of our significance or lack thereof, just as The Thin Red Line's battles will scar the islands but life will go on.

Malick directs and constructs films in unconventional ways - he is more concerned with imagery revealing his story. The story's twists lie in taking the family back to the origins of the universe (effects made largely without CGI, but through chemical reactions and close-ups on petri dishes.

People in Malick's films don't say everything we think they should; neither do we. The voiceover monologues frame the story and eliminate the need for that dialogue. Why hear a character speak when the audience already knows what they think?

The images speak loudly. For almost every viewer, there will be a touchstone to their childhood, reaching back to when the days ran forever and worries were few. Everyone focuses on the mosquito fogging truck and the kids joyfully racing through its clouds, all hoping to get lost on their home streets.

I got stuck on the shot of the father and three boys taking grease paint to their eyebrows and drawing in mustaches. It was a moment of rare purity between their father's angry bouts caused by his failures.

After Tree of Life, I still look at Malick's small filmography in awe. There flaws, sometimes deep ones, but the ambition and desire to push filmmaking further cannot be understated. Each film speaks to universal themes. I haven't seen any of them twice, because I wonder how the meaning will alter if I did. I struggle to think of a director whose films are so circumstantial to the audience member. Everyone takes away something different, even those who hate it. That's rare in any medium.