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- First reviewJune 6, 2011
- Last reviewJune 6, 2011
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Kebertxela's Reviews
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5
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5
Transcendent
PostedJune 6, 2011
Kebertxela
from New York
This is a complete miracle of a film. I left the theater feeling momentarily returned to a state of childhood innocence. Terrence Malick articulates a simple, sincere way to live "spiritually" in a universe that is often beautiful, often terrible, and ultimately probably completely indifferent to human life (or any life, for that matter.) The performances by Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain as the parents are astounding, but even more so the two sons, played by Hunter McCracken and Laramie Eppler. (There's a third son in the film, but he's always in the background of the action.) The film alternates between rapturous and terrifying cosmic passage, and a coming-of-age story which brims with stunning insights. (Indeed, some of the psychological realism present in certain of the scenes seems new in Malick.) Through it all of course is Malick's (and art director Jack Fisk's) eye for fleeting details and ephemeral (often strange) snatches of beauty. The structuring of time and memory is brilliant. I do have one reservation about the film as a whole, which is that the finale on the beach--most likely a dream in which all the figures are the dreamer himself--does not really work. The symbolism seems too tidy and heavy-handed. Whereas the young Jack's spiritual awakening is clearly and convincingly depicted, the adult Jack's re-awakening, in the course of one day, as he thinks about a dream he had the night before, don't come off quite as convincingly. We see that adult Jack (Sean Penn) lives in a sterile glass house with a partner who doesnt seem to love him, where Nature seems excluded (dried flowers brought in for decor looking alien in the cold house); and that he works in a giant sterile glass building where Nature (in the form of potted trees) is also alien and excluded. We see him remembering a later period of his youth, in the 1960s, when he would have begun to have lost his sense of spiritual connection to the world. We understand that as he tries to rediscover his lost spiritual peace, he contemplates cosmic history and contemplates especially the time period of the 1950s when he felt he had it; but then the sequence on the beach seems to be overkill, after we work through all those other memories. I don't really know how else Malick might have conveyed the contemporary Jack's re-awakening, but something indeed seems lacking at this last dramatic moment. Who knows, maybe I'll change my mind about this when I see the film a third time. (Or a fourth, or a tenth.)
Yes, I recommend this movie.
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