On lyricism and the poetic simpleton

A friend of mine who shall remain nameless (he'll probably call himself out in the comments section anyway) gave me a sort of challenge when he learned that I was finally going to see Ain't Them Bodies Saints, which he'd recommended to me several months ago.

(In my defense, the movie only came out in Australia this past Thursday.)

"So tomorrow we find out if it's lyrical filmmaking or Malick you object to," he wrote in an email to me.

He actually wrote "languid filmmaking" rather than "lyrical filmmaking," but I remembered it as "lyrical" in my head as I was watching the movie.

He's right to characterize my tastes that way, but I guess I took some umbrage at the fairly neutral and thoroughly accurate comment. I have objected to some of Terrence Malick's films, in some cases vociferously (The Thin Red Line) and in some cases bemusedly with moderate affection (The Tree of Life). I'm not a Malick champion, that's for sure.

Yet I do feel like it's not just a personal preference thing, like there's something lacking in me that makes me like Malickian movies less than most people -- most discerning people, who are the only ones I really care about when comparing my movie tastes to theirs. Why don't I like Malick's brand of visual poetry a little more than I do?

Ain't Them Bodies Saints was possibly going to provide some kind of answer to this, though I didn't even know that it warranted the comparison to Malick until my friend wrote the email in question.

Of course, I should have known. The title is like something William Faulkner might have come up with, establishing it pretty well as Southern Gothic. And most Southern Gothic is lyrical or languid or whatever term you might use.

Then there's the fact that Casey Affleck spends the trailer talking just above a whisper about his vows to find his love (Rooney Mara) again. It's actually his regular speaking voice, but the "just above a whisper" comment is meant to make the comparison to the work of Malick, whose everpresent voiceovers are marked by their whispery quality.

It's Affleck's work that made me realize what it is I don't really care for in movies like this:

Uneducated low-level criminals from the South who speak in a string of childlike platitudes about love and destiny, whose simplistic construction gives them a wisdom and authenticity that could never be managed by a skilled wordsmith.

Since you might guess from the previous sentence that I am, or consider myself to be, such a wordsmith, you might not be surprised that I find myself in opposition to such characters.

So it's not the lyrical, languid world of a Terrence Malick film that really bothers me. It's the characters who populate it.

Since some plot description of David Lowery's acclaimed new(ish) film is probably now warranted, I'll tell you that it's set a bit in the Bonnie & Clyde world of Malick's masterpiece Badlands. (See, I do think some Malick films are masterpieces.) Affleck and Mara are young lovers or spouses (it's not quite clear) who have just discovered they're expecting a child. They're trying to make a life for themselves and their child through armed robbery, but that career is cut abruptly short during a shootout with police where their accomplice is killed and an officer is wounded. Although Mara's Ruth took the shot that wounded the officer, Affleck's Bob claims responsibility and is sent away for a long prison sentence. It's at this point when he starts doing VO of the letters he writes to Ruth, promising such things as "Each day I will awaken thinking it's the day I will see you again, and one day that will be true."

Puh-leeze.

Okay, it's a nice thought. I wish I'd come up with it. But the thing is, I can't come up with a thought like that because I'm an Ivy League graduate who would write it and re-write it until all its enviable sense of spontaneity was gone. I'd obsess over it until I killed it.

Not Bob Muldoon. Because Bob is an uneducated low-level criminal from the South (Texas in this case), his emotions are simple and pure and vivid. When adults try to draw children's drawings, they can't make it look right. But Bob's heart and his words of love for Ruth are a child's drawing that comes naturally to him, because he's at that state of emotional evolution.

I'm not picking on Ain't Them Bodies Saints in particular. I'm only picking on it because we've seen this so many times before. The first few times, it felt sort of fresh. This tragic fellow has a quick temper and he hurts people accidentally and he does the wrong things, but his quivering words of love are as pure as a baby's tears. He loves his girl and would do anything to be with her, and that's all there is to that. But by time number, I don't know, 47, I felt I'd seen this story before.

I could never be such a romantic hero in such a Faulknerian, Malickian story. As me, Vance, I'd be overthinking everything, so I'd never have the quick temper, nor hurt people accidentally, nor do the wrong things to begin with. (Oh, I'd do wrong things, but it'd be like plagiarizing a paper in school, not robbing a liquor store.) The romance of the situation is dependent on how little is calculated and calibrated about the thoughts and speech. Everything is "from the heart," not "from the brain."

It occurs to me that these sentiments are similar to some I expressed when I was struggling with why I didn't connect with Drive the way some people do/did. Here's a link to that piece if you want to read it. In that case it was more the strong silent type than the child-poet, but in both cases, it's characters who are essentially different than I am.

I wonder why we, as an audience, get so much more out of love stories between simple folk than love stories between university professors. At this point, we don't even get the opportunity to see love stories between university professors, so uninteresting is their love. Those eggheads aren't spontaneous or reckless or dangerous. Therefore, they're not romantic.

There must also be some kind of sense of superiority going on here. I think we need to look down on Bob and Ruth as children, of a sort -- our intellectual inferiors. We can examine their love as though it were the love of two lemurs in a zoo. There's something feral and elemental and basic about it. Advanced love is too hard for us to process in a pastime designed as escapism, since most likely we're dealing with some fucked up version of advanced love in our own lives, where people give each other the silent treatment for reasons they don't even remember, and no one gets involved in shootouts.

But back to this issue of the lyrical or languid style of filmmaking that Malick and David Lowery have in common. (You'd say Lowery is ripping Malick off, except that it's too well-made to really deliver that kind of indictment.) Another 2013 film disabused me of the notion that I couldn't wholeheartedly endorse the style of filmmaking Malick has made his calling card at least since The Thin Red Line. It has the photographic beauty of a Malick film, and if anything, it makes even less sense.

That film is Upstream Color, and I've already seen it twice.

I wasn't a fan of Shane Carruth's debut feature, Primer, but I ate up his sophomore film with a big spoon. Even though most of the time I had to rely on flimsy half theories of what was even going on.

Could it be a coincidence that these characters are modern, intellectual northerners?

I mean, we're not talking about brainiacs or anything, but Kris and Jeff are both denizens of a large, bustling city. No one talks about how close they are to seeing or touching each other. If they talk about anything at all, it's weird conspiracy theory shit that doesn't even make sense to them.

And I discovered while watching Upstream Color that I didn't need to know what was going on at all, as long as I felt like I dug how it was going on. In fact, I simply luxuriated in being immersed in an experience that was unlike any I had ever had.

Unlike in Ain't Them Bodies Saints, a tale as old as William Faulkner.

I can't leave this topic behind without acknowledging a certain hypocrisy in what I've just written. I say that these characters ring a little false to me, but the fact of the matter is, one of my very favorite movies of all time features a tragic relationship between two poetic simpletons. That movie is Raising Arizona, and Nicolas Cage's voiceover is just about the shining example of everything I'm railing against here.

But that just adds strength to my claim that it's all about the timing. That was 1987, when I hadn't already seen these characters so many times before. And, that was a comedy, in addition to the tragic romance. There was barely any languidness or lyricism to be seen.

So I can answer my friend as follows: It's not languid filmmaking, nor lyrical filmmaking, nor Terrence Malick I object to.

I object to these characters who can't find the words, who always find the perfect words. 

Squeezed out by a sellout

Way #42 to botch an illegal theatrical double feature: The second movie is sold out.

Actually, "botch" is not the right word for it -- some quick thinking actually saved me some potential embarrassment at the theater tonight.

See, I went to see a 7:45 showing of Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life (more on that in a moment), and the ending lined up perfectly with the beginning of a 10:15 showing of Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris. I'd lucked in to an advantageous positioning of the screening rooms, the kind necessary to pull it off -- once you pass the ticket taker, you have access to five different theaters, two of which were playing my movies.

The thing I didn't anticipate, but should have, was that the 10:15 showing of Midnight in Paris might sell out. I knew the theater had been crawling with people all day and that a lot of earlier shows had sold out, but the 10:15? It seemed at least reasonable that it would escape that fate.

So I got texted permission from my wife (no peeps from the baby) and headed in to the theater. By walking confidently I passed the three ushers at the front without any of them asking me if they could show me to my seat. The theater was probably 3/4 full and it was about 10:14. So I went as far back as I could and chose a reasonable seat.

I hadn't been sitting for more than 30 seconds when I realized that although I hadn't needed the ushers to show me to my seat (probably because I didn't have one), many others were not so confident in their own ability to follow a straightforward system of row letters and seat numbers. If the person who had my seat was the next one into the theater, the usher would point them to the correct seat and immediately see that I was in it. At which point an incident might arise where my ticket needed to be produced. A ticket I didn't have.

I quickly jumped into the aisle and pretended to be very involved in my cell phone. My intention was to wait it out until they dimmed the lights and reassess my situation. Actually, I did text my wife to thank her for allowing me to catch the second movie. But before I even finished the text, I changed its wording to tell her I was coming home after all. An usher came in to greet us over the microphone (standard practice in this theater) and told us that although it might not look like it right now, this show was sold out. Okay, that seems pretty straightforward -- time for me to leave. Which I did.

I don't know that I could have really watched a whole second movie after The Tree of Life sapped the life out of me. I spent the first hour of that movie enthralled by the experience of watching it, and the final 78 minutes checking my watch.

I've worked my way around to giving a grudging respect to Malick's poetic abstractions. I love Badlands (though I'm not sure if that counts as a Malick film the way we know it today) and I despised The Thin Red Line, though I did appreciate it better when I watched it again for my Second Chances series last year. In the meantime I also saw The New World, and was swept away by the beautiful cinematography, which carried me through the more Malick-y parts (of which there were of course very many). After tonight, Days of Heaven is his one film that has still eluded me.

And so I knew full well what to expect when coming in. I expected a beautiful-looking film with lots of character voiceover -- not to be confused with narration, because there's nothing about this VO that's expository in the slightest. I expected a dreamy quality to all the action and a non-sequential narrative. And I expected (though this is kind of covered by "beautiful-looking") some of the best cinematography you can find on screen today. I expected what some of the audience was obviously not expecting, as some of our audience walked out. (I couldn't tell how many, because some of them were undoubtedly going to the bathroom -- but any time I saw two people go out together, I doubted it was a bathroom break.)

And yet I still wanted something more concrete from Malick, even though I knew I shouldn't expect it. I hoped it would all lead to a more satisfying payoff than what I got -- even though again I knew I shouldn't expect it. The movie does have a payoff, for sure -- there's definitely Malick's version of a climax. But that climax didn't bring it all home for me.

And yes, I had trouble staying awake. I had a busy day after a night of sleep interrupted by baby feedings, so my inability to focus for the entire time was not exactly a surprise, especially in this film. I'd come prepared with Girl Scout mint cookies, Altoids and a five-hour energy drink, but none ultimately did the trick. I was especially disappointed in the five-hour energy drink, though this should come as no surprise because it's never worked for me in the past. I keep thinking that next time will be the time it gives me the jolt I need to make it through the end of a movie I started too late at night (7:45 may have been too late for this movie), but the swigs I took of it tonight actually seemed to make me more sleepy. I'd take a swig and close my eyes for one of those jolt-awake naps less than 15 seconds later. They should call it "10-second energy drink" instead.

I prioritized The Tree of Life over a myriad of other viewing options primarily because of its recent win at Cannes. However, the Cannes winners have always exemplified the iconoclastic spirit of that festival -- I sometimes think that Cannes gives out prizes only to films that they know will divide audiences, just to be contrarian. List of Cannes winners that fit this description in another post.

So if you like Malick, this film is defintiely for you. If you don't or are not sure ... well, are you willing to pay theatrical prices to see a bevy of astonishingly beautiful images on the big screen, even if that's all you end up taking away from it?

That's for you to decide.

Third World's the charm

It may have taken me 23 days, but I've finally finished watching Terrence Malick's The New World, one of the most beloved films on the film blogosphere.

At the time it came out in 2005, I dismissed it as just another hyper-poetic exercise by one of cinema's true hermits. The man took 20 years between films from 1978 to 1998, and when he returned, it was in the form of The Thin Red Line -- which I considered pretentious claptrap up until a few weeks ago, when I revisited and found it to be slightly less pretentious claptrap.

But then I saw a couple different best of the 2000's lists on the blogosphere that had The New World listed at or near the top of the entire decade, so I knew I had to prioritize a viewing. It worked out quite well to watch it in conjunction with my revisitation of The Thin Red Line, to put me in that special Malick mood.

Except it didn't quite. About an hour into the movie, the DVD started acting up. Sometimes it would freeze, sometimes it would digitize away into little blocks. You could push through these problem patches by using the fast forward button ... except when you couldn't. I'd get stuck and try to move a whole chapter ahead, but that wasn't working either. I wiped the disc off, but found that it had a million little scratches that weren't going to come out through a buffing. It was a compromised product.

So I returned The New World to the library and placed it near the top of my Blockbuster queue, in order to continue my viewing. When that disc came, it took me a couple more days to finally insert it into the DVD player, at which point, the player wasn't even recognizing there was a disc in there. When I removed the disc, I saw that the thing was damn near cracked in half, completely unplayable. I reported the damaged condition of the DVD to Blockbuster, who apologized for the error and notified me that another New World disc -- which would be my third in total -- was on its way. You could imagine at this point I was doubtful I'd ever actually see the movie.

But the third New World disc was pristine, and I put it in the player on Friday night. Unfortunately, the film's beautiful, soothing imagery has a tendency to put you to sleep if you're watching it too late at night, which once again I was. (I'd had a couple short naps during my first attempted viewing, where I'd pause, sleep for 20 minutes, then start again.) And given that I was three weeks gone from the start of the movie at this point, I had to refresh myself a little bit on where I'd left off. After my refresher, the clock had passed midnight, so I probably gained only about 20-30 minutes of new ground on it before I was once again claimed by sleep.

Tonight, with only one more short nap, I finished.

My thoughts?

Well, I don't think Terrence Malick will ever be 100% my cup of tea, but I do see what the other film bloggers admire about this film. In terms of pure physical beauty in the cinematography and the period recreation, it's up there with any film I've seen. But I must admit that the character voiceovers do verge on the excessive for me, as they do in The Thin Red Line. Unlike that film, The New World stays on the right side of the thin line between artsy and fartsy.

And now, to nap for the rest of the night.

Terrence Malick loves blowing grass

This is the latest in a series in which I reconsider acclaimed films I didn't like as much as most people did. I call it Second Chances, and it runs on Tuesdays.

Not that kind of "blowing." Get your mind out of the gutter.

"Blowing" like the regular kind of blowing, and "grass" like the regular kind of grass. (Though he might like inhaling the other kind of grass, I don't know.) And Terrence Malick can't get enough of it, if his last two films are any indication.

For the first time in this series, I prepared a viewing of a film by watching another film from the same director. I had been reading a lot on the blogosphere about The New World, and how strongly some of my fellow film bloggers felt about this retelling of the story of John Smith and Pocahontas, which some of them considered among the best films of the 2000s. I thought The New World might help me get in the Malick mindset, and give me a fresh perspective on The Thin Red Line, which I had found protracted and pretentious at the time.

It worked, to a point.

I say "to a point" for two reasons:

1) I only watched about half of The New World, at which point I had to shut it off due to DVD quality issues. It was blotching and freezing, and wiping off the disc on my pant leg didn't help. So after trying to fast forward through the problem scenes a couple times, and realizing they were all problem scenes, I decided to abort. I'd rented this from the library, and figured I'd just proceed with an unscratched copy from Blockbuster.

2) Even though I was enjoying The New World more than The Thin Red Line -- a sign either of being 12 years older, or genuinely liking Malick's approach better this time -- it only ingratiated me to his style of filmmaking a little bit more.

You see, to me, Terence Malick's approach to cinema can be defined by the idea that he likes how it looks when tall, blowing grass appears on film. Whether it's Virginia of 1607 or Guadalcanal of 1943, blowing grass frames men in moments of great intellectual and emotional crisis, and darn it if it doesn't look pretty.

The Thin Red Line is nothing if not pretty, especially as shot by master cinematographer John Toll. Like the part of The New World that I saw, it's essentially a nature film in which human beings sometimes seem more like necessary props and parts of the environment than specific characters. Neither film is plot heavy in the slightest, though both tell a story that's famous to us -- in the case of The Thin Red Line, even if it's not the most famous battle in World War II, at least it's the second film version of the James Jones novel on which it was loosely based. Perhaps this is intentional on Malick's part: If he tells a story we already know, he doesn't need to tell it with very much concern about communicating its particulars, and can concentrate on his high-minded intellectual ramblings about good and evil, life and death.

In 1998, these ramblings frustrated me to no end. I felt toyed with after The Thin Red Line. Terrence Malick had gathered together no less than 42 familiar actors (or actors who would go on to have big careers, making them even more familiar on a second viewing), given almost none of them a proper introduction, and then sent them through one really long battle scene, one really long segment of pointless aftermath, and one short offensive at the end. Meanwhile, he'd had at least a random half dozen of them narrate their thoughts in the most soporific tones imaginable, with the most broad, pretentious pontifications on fate and human nature you could conjure. Which seemed especially strange in a show-don't-tell medium, in which Malick clearly displayed mastery over the visual side of the medium.

Watching The Thin Red Line the second time, I don't feel quite so offended by all of Malick's pontificating. I understand that this is an arthouse war movie, probably more than I was prepared for it to be when I first went in. However, I did inadvertently set myself up to feel frustrated once again by its imposing length. For some reason I convinced myself it was only 2 hours and 20 minutes, so then, when I realized it was still going to wade onward for another 30 minutes, it renewed some of the impatience with Malick that I had been trying to quell.

The film made me wonder how much of the experience of watching a film should be beauty for beauty's sake. It's true that I was captivated by Toll's cinematography, of which that gently blowing grass was a primary, front-and-center example. And so this made the basic physical experience of watching the movie pleasant. And sure, who doesn't love watching Jim Caviezel swim in the beautiful South Pacific with a lot of native children? It is, on the most basic level, a pleasing experience.

But it's where Malick thinks that his movie is the most profound thing that's ever been made that The Thin Red Line loses me. There was a time in the history of cinema in which war movies existed primarily to celebrate heroism on the battlefield, in which people died, but not in very horrible ways, and the patriotic music on the soundtrack was supposed to make you feel pretty damn great about the American war effort. Of course, eventually this approach was supplanted by the "war is hell" approach, as particularly exemplified by the Vietnam movies of the 1980s.

By 1998, however, I already knew that war was hell. Just earlier that year, I'd seen a particularly convincing entry into "war is hell" cinema named Saving Private Ryan. Maybe The Thin Red Line came too soon on the heels of Ryan, but the theme seemed beaten into the ground even just six months later. Malick included one too many meaningful looks between soldiers and melodramatic swells in the soundtrack for my liking. All of this stuff I get: War is fought by young people who are scared and confused; soldiers are sent to their deaths for purposes that gain no strategic advantage, by commanding officers who are removed from the circumstances; battlefield injuries are frightening and gruesome; even the enemy is just as scared and helpless as you are.

In devoting so much time to several examples of each of these truths, Malick was drumming things I already knew into my head, and without much subtlety. I remember one particular image that stuck with me as an example of his overwrought approach to the material: An American soldier screaming silently as the music swelled, but not on the battlefield during a moment of chaos. Rather, this was after the Japanese camp had already been taken and held, and he was screaming/crying about some vague atrocity he'd committed, or someone else had committed, or something. I GET IT. WAR IS HELL. PLEASE TAKE YOUR FOOT OFF THE PEDAL NOW.

I will say that the film was interesting to watch just to see all the actors it brought together, and how some of them looked so much younger. For example, only 12 years ago, we didn't even really know who John C. Reilly was. Or Adrien Brody. Or Ben Chaplin. Or Jim Caviezel. In fact, the number of recognizable faces almost distracts from Malick's intentions of creating his poetic, anonymous every-soldier movie. There's also Woody Harrelson, Elias Koteas, Sean Penn, John Cusack, Nick Stahl, Kirk Acevedo, Dash Mihok, Jared Leto, Nick Nolte, George Clooney and John Travolta. And that's only who I can remember without consulting IMDB. (I just looked on wikipedia, and apparently there was also footage that was shot but not used featuring Billy Bob Thornton, Martin Sheen, Gary Oldman, Bill Pullman, Lukas Haas, Viggo Mortensen and Mickey Rourke. Just imagine how much more spread thin it would have felt then.) Was it really worth it to get all these guys together, just because they were big fans of either Badlands or Days of Heaven? Especially since it meant that it would be even less clear which ones were worth following, and which weren't? And especially because it meant that certain cameos, such as the mustachioed Travolta or the throwaway final scene with Clooney, were basically just laughable?

The Thin Red Line proves that it's entirely possible to make a beautiful film that doesn't really succeed on its own terms. I am comfortable with saying that I find most of the movie totally beautiful to look at, and sort of even get into the vibe of the film, while still saying that the approach is ultimately scattershot and wrong-headed. I know Malick is trying to take me out of my comfort zone of having a single protagonist, and I know Malick is trying to confront me with the soldiers' pseudo-intellectual musings about the nature of mankind. But it doesn't mean I have to love it.

However, I do have to accept that this is the essential Terrence Malick in his all his grass-blowing glory. His next film, starring Penn and Brad Pitt, is called The Tree of Life, and is scheduled for release this fall. If that title weren't telling enough (and didn't remind me enough of Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain, another film Malick would have been comfortable directing), then how about this for what passes for a synopsis on wikipedia: "It's the tale of a Midwestern boy's journey from the innocence of childhood to his disillusioned adult years as a 'lost soul in the modern world,' and into his quest to regain meaning in life."

Second Chance Verdict, The Thin Red Line: I won't curse its name like I used to, but I still think a tighter film with fewer characters and less philosophical meandering would have suited me better.