Saturday, February 25, 2012

Tree of Life



I don't need to know what is going on. I understand that this movie is a meditation on life, or even a form of prayer, with many probing questions. "If you aren't good, why should I be?" being the most touching and truthful.

The movie uses many images of boiling clouds, boiling lava, boiling seas, like a National Geographic special without the obvious statements of the voiceover narrator.

It is when the two paths are described-- grace vs nature-- that it seems debatable. Or did the word "nature" imply "human nature"? After watching so many scenes of trees, plants, mountains, skies, sun spots, eclipses, etc., you sort of assume the subject of the movie is more sweeping than just human nature.

Brad Pitt is superb.

He plays a frustrated musician whose engineering patents don't get approved. His bitterness is palpable, along with his confused and confusing way of demonstrating his love for his children by alternately baiting and berating them.

I love the way Malick can tell a story when he wants to with economy and grace, for instance with young Jack watching the argument of his neighbors through the window. The boy actor McCracken is also superb. You can tell he doesn't want to witness the meltdown of his friend's parents, but he must. It informs his understanding of his own parents. None of this is said. We watch him watch,and understand.

Malick also loves shooting at dusk just as the sunlight is leaking out of the sky, leaving a neutral shadowless luminosity. The effect is to add meaning to any action because this point we are racing the clock until darkness descends.

I wish I knew why the middle son was killed (during the war? suicide?) or what it meant when Sean Penn and his wife were dressing formally -- for his mother's funeral? We know we are not watching a linear narrative where a connects to b. We are invited to jump from J to P, back to C. and so on. All letters of the alphabet are not supplied.

Still, I could have done without the dinosaurs.

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Habemus Papam



Nanni Moretti, the Italian film director, is often compared to Woody Allen because he writes, directs, and acts in his films, and his films sometimes feature psychiatrists who explore the characters' inner lives. There is also a fair amount of humor in both filmmakers' work.

However, the tone of Moretti's movies is more philosophical and his scripts tend to wander around. Woody Allen carefully constructs screenplays that tell stories. His dialogue  propels the action. Moretti explores what happens inside of us in slow, more patient ways.

In We Have a Pope, we get a chance to explore the inner life of the pope. What would it be like to be elected to a position so overwhelming that once you had accepted it you realized you couldn't possibly live up to it. What if as a result a whole religion was put on hold, not to mention the body of cardinals who were stuck in house prison, in their unending conclave, until the situation was cleared up.

Nanni Moretti plays the psychiatrist who is brought in to help with the situation. Lest the movie seem like a cross between Runaway Bride and Waiting for Godot, the psychiatrist decides to organize the cardinals into teams (one for each continent) and coach them to play a volleyball tournament. The casting is excellent. Michel Piccoli looks like a pope. His surrogate, a Swiss Guard, hired to move the curtains about in the illusion that the pope is near at hand, is great fun to watch as he eats the pope's food and enjoys other perks of the job.

The cardinals all look like cardinals. The costumes and sets are gorgeous, but the Catholic Church has excelled at those things for hundreds of years.

There are moments of sublime surprise, many having to do with Chekhov's The Seagull. This play within a play helps us understand the melancholy of Moretti's vision almost more than anything else.

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Automaton

Thought this was very enlightening to those of us who read The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick, or saw Hugo, the movie.