Third place:
Newton Thomas Siegel, Drive [105 points/17 votes]
Second place:
Manuel Alberto Claro, Melancholia [123/30]
And your winner...
Emmanuel Lubezski, The Tree of Life [274/36]
"I recently showed select parts from The Tree of Life to my two girls (Audie, three and Eliot, five). I stuck to the "pure cinema" stuff, bypassing all the moments of angst-ridden Sean Penn and abusive Brad Pitt. After watching my truncated, 45-minute version, I heard the girls discussing Malick's film at the dinner table."What's dat movie called? With the dinosaurs?" Audie asked.
"Tree of Life," her older sister replied.
"Oh." Audie thought for a moment, and then added: "It's about a little boy growing old."
The point of this labored, "kids-say-the-darndest-things" digression is the ultimate simplicity of Malick's film. I find it funny that -- for all the critical hand-wringing over the film's meaning -- a three-year-old was able to nail Malick's thesis. While The Tree of Life isn't a children's film, it's one of the best cinematic evocations of childhood this side of The Red Balloon.
Malick's strength has never been writing. On paper, I can imagine the breathy poetics of his post-Badlands work might even read a little purple. His words are obtuse and earnest. On first viewing, I found the constant "what is war?" ponderousness of The Thin Red Line maddening. Eventually, I've come around to the film precisely because the imagery is so indelible. Certain moments -- a fledgling flapping its useless wings in the heat of battle, soldiers creeping through chest-deep grass -- say more about war's mystique than confounding free verse ever could. John Toll's cinematography for Line is experiential, transcending all of the punditry about whether or not the film is pro- or anti-war or patriotism or whatever.
So also with Malick's collaboration with Emmanuel Lubezki on Tree of Life. The first time I saw it, it was the part-Brakhage, part-Kubrick creation sequence that stuck most in my brain (partly, I'll admit, because it was the most voiceover-free stretch of the film). Malick uses the event of a death in the family to construct a briefly encyclopedic view of the repercussions of mortality, how the very idea of death seems to cause a rift in the infinite. The film opens with a quote from Job and the creation section almost seems like an evocation of God's response to Job's question of why bad things happen to good people. The age-old question is not really a puzzle to be solved; it's a call to meditation.
And Malick's images are that meditation, cumulatively evoking ideas without having to underscore or spell anything out. That's why, rewatching Tree of Life, I'm now convinced that the section following creation, where we watch the genesis of a different type -- that of the O'Brien's family life -- is the pivotal section of the film. This is the Edenic center that the eponymous object points to. And it's here that, for once, Malick allows his mirth to leak into to the proceedings. Bubbles, fireflies, mirrors... somehow we see everything as a child would, fresh and whimsical, without all of our calcified adult contextualizing.
How the hell does he do it? I don't know. Admittedly, it takes a little bit of willful suspension of cynicism to be engaged. Malick may just be America's premier silent filmmaker (and at times, during some of the free verse flights of fancy, how I wish that were actually so). The Tree of Life is a refreshing (and, unfortunately, isolated) instance of pure cinema making a play for the multiplex, favoring visual storytelling over star vehicles, clunky exposition and Screenwriting 101 three-act paradigms. It's as simple as cinema gets: image-as-story. Even a three-year-old can tell you that." - Philip Tatler IV
See the full results.
Wonderful exploration, Philip.
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