2011 Muriel Award: Best Cinematic Moment

This category always elicits the widest, most fascinating range of choices. I gotta say, I look forward to seeing what everyone votes for in this category probably more than any other. What I didn't expect was that this would be also the closest category this year. Up until the end, it looked like a neck-and-neck tie.

Now, as usual, here's a smattering of stuff that got love from a fair amount of people:



The Trip - Dueling Caines



Tucker & Dale vs. Evil - the woodchipper

13 Assassins - "Total Massacre" (Click through to watch)



House of Pleasures - "Nights in White Satin"



Bridesmaids - airplane!



Drive - the elevator



Martha Marcy May Marlene - "Marcy's Song" (scene unavailable; enjoy Hawkes singing!)

And also, as usual, here's where I get all agitated about being THE ONLY VOTE for a scene that's SO CLEARLY AWESOME! (Actually, this I understand being a solo vote for - I'm probably the only person who saw it, and it doesn't make a lot of sense out of context. But it makes my blood freeze without fail, so here it is.)



So, what else? Oh, right... the winners...

Third place:

Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol - Climbing the Burj Khalifa [109 points/11 votes]

Second place:



Melancholia - prologue [191.5/18]

And your winner...





The Tree of Life - Creation [193.5/16]

"The Tree of Life opens with a quotation from the book of Job, part of God’s response to Job’s protest against his unjust fate. Job has demanded to know the reason for his suffering; God responds with a series of questions, the first being, "Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?" As God proceeds to recite his list of accomplishments, the response can be read as defiant, even petulant; it’s like God’s way of saying “Because I’m your father, that’s why.” But while it seems at first like God is dodging Job’s question, he might be giving the most honest possible response, pointing to the complex and beautiful world he has created as evidence that he is always with Job. It seems likely that Terrence Malick believes in the latter interpretation; his latest and most formally audacious film famously places its central narrative on hold early on for an extended sequence depicting the creation of the universe.

The sequence arrives about 30 minutes into the film, after we have witnessed Mr. and Mrs. O’Brien (Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain) mourning the death of their middle child about 30 years ago, then jumped ahead to their adult son Jack (Sean Penn) going through the motions of his day, lost in his own head (we hear a moment of Jack talking to his father on the phone, apologizing for an argument and admitting, “I think about him too”). As the sequence begins with shots of gas clouds moving through the darkness of space, we hear a voiceover of Jack’s mother, calling on God to explain himself (“Who are we to you? Answer me”). The answer comes in the moment of creation – the abyss parting to reveal a crack of light, an unmistakable image of birth (one YouTube commenter helpfully referred to the image as “skygina”) accompanied on the soundtrack by the soaring vocals of Zbigniew Preisner’s “Lacrimosa,” from his Requiem For My Friend. Originally intended as a collaboration between Preisner and filmmaker Krzystof Kieślowski (who wrestled with many of the same cosmic themes as Malick) and completed as a memorial after the director’s death, the piece serves to score the birth of the universe not with shouts of joy but sorrowful wails. Is this God who presents us with the vastness of existence as his signature indifferent to our suffering? Or is the wonder of this moment of creation meant as evidence that God is present with us in every moment, even (especially?) our moments of doubt? The Tree of Life is the rare American film that provokes such questions.

While Malick is clearly a spiritual-minded man and, by some accounts, a Christian, his version of the beginning of life adheres to the big bang theory and our scientific understanding of our origins. Stars and quasars give way to supernovas and the explosive formation of solar systems; our world forms a life-sustaining atmosphere; single- and multi-celled organisms evolve into early aquatic life, which eventually slithers out of the sea. This is all familiar to us, but the film does an amazing job of reminding us how wondrous and mysterious our existence is – my favorite shot is the strange sight of curlicues of DNA strands wriggling their way towards organization, a freaky reminder that even the smallest part of each of us has a lust for life. Special effects legend Douglas Trumbull came out of semi-retirement to supervise the creation sequence (largely without the use of CGI), and as with Trumbull’s work on films like 2001, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Blade Runner, The Tree of Life reminds us how exciting it is when visual effects are used not just for empty spectacle but to illustrate truly great and awe-inspiring ideas. Whether you believe in God or not, just to contemplate the beautiful origins of our existence for twenty minutes or so is a humbling experience and a reminder of cinema’s rare capability of serving as a form of meditation.

And from this sequence we’re deposited into the main narrative – Jack’s memories of his childhood in Texas, his well-meaning but intimidating father and his graceful, idealized mother. And through the rest of the film, our mind returns to the creation sequence and its reminder that we are all a part of that story – of God – and that each of us, in our own lives, is playing out our version of the story (nature vs. grace, the fall of man, being and nothingness) that has and will be everyone’s. And, most amazingly, we are finally reminded that the epic scale of the film – from the beginning to the end of everything – exists entirely in the memories and ruminations of the adult Jack during one ordinary day. Kierkegaard believed that it is only through the individual experience that one can come to know God; however one defines God (or even if one has no use for a God), The Tree of Life is a beautiful illustration of questions we are all silently asking in our own way. How wonderful, when most mainstream movies are so incredibly timid, that we know we have Malick to wrestle with the unknown, inviting us to join in his unique form of cinematic communion. Honestly, if church were anything like a Terrence Malick movie, I’d attend every week." - Andrew Bemis

See the full results.