What's unique about film . . . Terrence Malick's Response

Film has built this reputation of outputting visual stories tagged with an emphasis on recorded performances. Novels and comics are the inspirations of the many popular films, as people, understandably, want to see their imaginations realized on the silver screen. But when we consider the distinguishing mark of film from other art mediums, unfortunately it is neither screenplays/stories nor acting. Storytelling permeates itself through many mediums, while the art of acting was birthed long before film in theatre.

Noel Carroll notes that early philosophers did not view film as an art, but a mere recording device for the true art of acting. The way a vinyl record is not art, but the music recorded on it, likewise with film, a series of moving photographs is not art but the performance it displays. It wasn’t until noticing film’s specific technical devices that have allowed people to argue for film as an art form. Cuts and splices, dissolves, superimposition, and close-ups are a few examples that give film its artistic intention. They’re what distinguish film, from the haunting that is theatre. And unlike theatre, these devices take away from actors.

Terrence Malick, the subject at hand, leaves to literature what belongs to literature and leaves to theatre what belongs to theatre, and makes explicit what is unique about film: He conveys ideas with careful consideration in his cinematic language. This can be seen by how he manipulates film techniques, takes importance away from actors and the script, and how he utilizes lyrical narration to enhance the pictures. Good writing and good acting are art forms in their own right, but as far as film’s place in art they’re the cherry on top. Nevertheless, so it goes with the flock and some critics, the normality of movie-going has taken shape in acting and storytelling, without which a film has no legs to walk.

Slow pacing is a technique that can upset the movie-going flock, but resistance towards a film like Malick’s The Tree of Life could not result from the boredom of slow pacing. ‘Slow-pace’ describes lengthy shots and lack of camera movement, such as in Ozu’s Tokyo Story (1953). In The Tree of Life there isn’t either, as the camera tracks, dancing along the actors, and as there are many cuts. What is meant is that the film takes forever to make its goddamn point story wise, resulting in its point not being easily seen. This is true given that since The Thin Red Line, Malick seems to be making his stories harder-to-follow.

And while the performances are good, Malick here still intentionally or unintentionally abuses his actors, as he’s been accused of doing—even more so in his following film, To The Wonder. By abuse, he dilutes their importance, by editing them out without their knowledge, or reduces the value of their sacred monologues. David Sterrit says, “ . . . to undermine the hegemony of the Hollywood star system.” In his review of To The Wonder, Roger Ebert, who was not one of those irritated by Malick by any means, calls attention to how the actors are used as models, which is accurate, to Sean Penn in The Tree of Life, and particularly to all the actors in To The Wonder (which contains the least amount of dialogue in comparison to his previous films) as his films of late have been mostly improvised, a technique that is now infamously known among Malick’s audience.

In a roundtable video discussion with David Ansen, Christopher Plummer emphasizes Terry’s need for a writer, after working with him in A New World, since his lines were “pretentious” and difficult to make feel real. He adds his dissatisfaction with how his words became score for the film. He also expresses his sadness for actor Adrien Brody who was almost cut out of The Thin Red Line after being marketed as the lead.

For Plummer, Malick is a master at crafting “paintings”, but film not only needs “paintings”, but a good story with good acting, which seems to get lost for Malick, at least for these actors. The taking away of their sacred screen time is problematic for a film, because after all, a film is nothing without a good script for the actors to play with—a belief that is misguided and unfair. It would be like bashing a song for not having vocals and lyrics. Lyrics can been seen as artistic and evoking emotion just as much as the music, and vocals can be beautiful and moving as any instrument can be, but music lives without them. And the same for film, it could live, as art, without the reverence of actors and story, despite being uncommon and unpopular, and to many maybe even uninteresting. And for many people, Malick’s films are beautiful pictures and incomplete—they’re “paintings.”

In a superficial way, these claims are well-founded. Yes, Christopher Plummer is right when he said his lines became score for the film, because they indeed are. And Roger certainly is right when he wrote how Malick’s actors feel like models, because they indeed are.

At the start of The Tree of Life we are aware that there is a death in the O’Brien family, i.e. the death of their middle son. In typical Malick fashion, there are various voiceovers, particularly of Mrs. O’Brien (Jessica Chastain) questioning to God why this would happen. We never hear audibly that their middle son has died. Malick takes a different approach: He focuses on the parents’ reaction to the news that is delivered silently. Mrs. O’Brien’s utterance is out-of-sync with the frames while she says, “I just want to die so I can be with him.”

Here we have many cuts, one in particular of a black tree, leafless, with curly branches in front of a grayish and bluish sky. The gloominess and horror is evident just by looking at the shot as a still. We can see the consistency of the shot in line with the horror and devastation that has befallen Mr. and Mrs. O’Brien. To use Christopher Plummer’s observation, Malick indeed uses the actor’s vocals for score, as it is here in this particular shot. We get Mrs. O’Brien’s horrific and devastating crying, adding a layer to the moving pictures. It certainly is score. One would think, as Plummer might, the moment would be more effective/affective should we see Chastain, instead of hearing her faint screaming and mourning over her son—this mourning could have easily been noted in the sheet music for the score. But in taking the moment from Chastain, the shot proves to be more effective/affective.

The shot underlies the challenging questions toward God. Instead of displaying God’s glory and hope for the O’Brien’s, at this moment the shot shows his abandonment—or simply nonexistence—towards the O’Brien’s. All the more reason for Mrs. O’Brien to feel the way she does. The hope in her God is lost because her hope was seen in her son, as Malick explicitly identifies this hope over a shot of her son. Without her son, her hope in God is shaken.

And despite my complaint about the perceived importance of actors and story in film, Malick still has a story and gives great moments to his actors, unlike To The Wonder where he takes away from them almost completely. The point, however, still stands, as it is not to make a grand stand against story and acting in film, but instead to show how the demarcating elements of film are explicit through Malick’s effective vision of manipulating film’s unique technical devices, as he does over and over again in this masterful film. Where words become so limited to convey grand ideas, to evoke emotions pertaining to one’s relation in the universe, or to an unavailable God, The Tree of Life appears to convey and evoke these emotions, even when the answer[s] still remain[s] unclear by film’s end. Many might take the shot of Mr. O’Brien (Brad Pitt) meandering in the forest, as ambiguous, fluff or filler, “a painting,” an example of an auteur without a script, winging it, but the shot suggests the contrary. It is perfectly placed between what precedes it and what follows. Mr. O’Brien is away from his home and civilization, walking without direction, reason or purpose. We know there is no where for him to go, as the long shot suggests. Where is there to go? The question is asked for the long term scheme of life, which the film ultimately takes upon itself to discuss, and at this moment prepares itself, as it precedes a fade out, which intentionally does not provide any immediate resolution to the family’s grief.

Malick manipulates common film techniques. A camera tilt up does not suggest what it commonly does, i.e. the superiority of a character to their environment, as in Scorsese’s Raging Bull (1980). Take the shot in The Tree of Life when the camera tracks a group of business people in suits walking through a glass building. While tilted up, the contrary is suggested. The people are shown as inferior in relation to their environment. This is as clear as the windows behind them, given the context of the shot. The environment extends to the glorious heavens above them, where we now see the characters’ relation to the deepest skies, minute in comparison to the vastness of the universe. And for the most part while the hope rests in our loved ones, where all meaning is satiated, it is in the loss where this hope is shaken. Mrs. O’Brien looks to the heavens for answers, a longing for the workings of nature to be synonymous with the workings of a loving and caring god.

David Sterritt reasonably interprets Malick’s treatment of his actors as a response to the hegemony of Hollywood, which does not end at his treatment of his actors, but how he approaches his films as a response to the hegemony of Hollywood filmmaking. Period. That is the traditional Hollywood story focused on the relation of the actor’s performances and script, rather than the power of cinematic language to convey ideas about our world and relation to it, about our existence, the battling of opposing forces in nature, and the unanswerable questions and speculations at the root of human thought.

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