2011 Muriel Award: Best Director

Third place:



Lars Von Trier, Melancholia [92 points/17 votes]

Second place:



Nicolas Winding Refn, Drive [111/16]

And your winner...





Terrence Malick, The Tree of Life [175/24]

"Like a lot of us, I eagerly awaited reports from Cannes after the first screening of The Tree of Life (hunched over my laptop, repeatedly refreshing my Twitter feed as the first meager impressions began trickling out). My excitement immediately turned to frustration when I realized I’d have to wait an additional three weeks after its NY/LA premiere to see it here in Seattle, a First World Problem if ever there was one.

But I don’t feel I have much to add to the impressive parsing of Malick’s film or his career that’s been going on since, although I’ve greatly enjoyed all of it. So when Steve asked me to come up with a piece for this award, I hemmed and hawed for a while before settling on this minor anecdote.

I’d always devoured movies growing up, but as a child of the late '70s, most of my film diet consisted of late night cable and local UHF Million Dollar Movies. I lived in the suburbs, and the local video stores didn’t really provide a diverse menu (though I managed to be baffled and intrigued -- and, at the time, bored -- by Stalker at 15 or so). So, for example, my first viewing of Seven Samurai was on the day I moved into my dorm at Penn State (we got IFC on campus cable). I fell asleep.

Thus, when The Thin Red Line approached in December of 1998, I was just 20 and had never heard of Terrence Malick. There was a specific image in the trailer that gripped me, that of Ben Chaplin’s character Bell’s wife, played by Miranda Otto, on a swing, the frame flipped upside-down, while on the soundtrack what sounded like a dive-bomber’s engine roared. I only knew I had to see that movie.

I went home for winter break. At the time, home was a suburb of Washington, D.C., and so I figured I’d get a chance to see the film in limited release, but no such luck. My hopes were dashed by a snowstorm the day before the film’s opening (and two days before my scheduled return to college). I would be forced to gamble that The Thin Red Line would somehow open in State College, PA.

Some time in the followng March, I got lucky. Thanks to the Oscar nominations the film had garnered, the local Carmike 6-plex (some 45 minutes away from campus by bus) deigned to run the film for a week or so. Of course my mind was correctly blown. I had never even seen an experimental film before, and so my initial impressions of this sprawling tone poem were at the time impossible to articulate. I remember saying to my friend Eric, whose love of cinema surpassed even my own, that Malick had unquestionably made one of the greatest films of all time, something that could probably never be surpassed. The sincere hyperbole of an uneducated enthusiast.

The Thin Red Line was a watershed film for me, one that opened my eyes to new modes of filmmaking and eventually exposed me to all sorts of new artists and ideas. It may sound silly to some, but only Pulp Fiction has had an even remotely similar effect on me as a person and a viewer. I relate this admittedly not-very-interesting story to you because I think it in some small way parallels Malick’s work as a whole and The Tree of Life specifically.

His film caused me to get outside of myself, to contemplate a cinematic world much richer and larger than anything I’d previously understood. I think his films are all, to one degree or another, stories of expanding self-awareness, of births of new ways of communication and potential. His work set me on the path of consuming every kind of film I could in hopes of fitting it into my suddenly-refreshed and unfathomably, dauntingly broad view of cinema.

The Tree of Life is perhaps the ultimate story of self-awareness; that of both a young boy as he grows into a man and that of the Universe itself (or perhaps even God). I honestly don’t even feel I have the skill to speak to Malick’s power over me as a filmmaker, much less to analyze his filmography; you’ve all done such a wonderful job of that this year. But I definitely have him to thank for expanding my own self-awareness and my love of cinema." - Matt Lynch

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