I was prepared to jump on the Number-1-Rating bandwagon when the film first began with a quote from the book of Job, a strange glowing light and a whispery voiceover by Jessica Chastain. I was expecting it to be strange and plotless, but judging from the trailer I was also sure that the movie would be full of beautiful imagery and excellent cinematography, so I was determined to get through all 2 hours and 12 minutes, even if it killed me.
Well, I'm still alive. So many people said that this movie has no plot, and though it may be true that is it less of a chronological tale and more of a of an art form, there is undoubtedly a story, told nearly entirely through the camera. There is minimal dialogue in the movie, and for the most part I felt that this worked to its advantage. I'm a huge fan of telling important details completely through the camera, and in this movie Malick is the master of that.
The film is told through the eyes of Jack, journeying through the most memorable years of his life as a boy in the 1950s. The story is an impression of his memories: his complicated relationship with his father, his mother's love for him, and his loss of innocence. This film is a journey of faith, both for Jack and for the audience, relying on what he chooses to show us in order that we might understand him and his struggle with the two opposing forces in his life, emulated by his parents: grace and nature.
I found myself wondering how two people who were such opposites had come together. Brad Pitt (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Inglorious Basterds) is the inventor father, priding himself on being a smart and strong man and wanting his boys to grow up the same. Throughout the film we see Jack wrestle with conflicting feelings of wanting be like his father and yet hating him at times. Pitt's character represents the world and he puts himself first.
Jessica Chastain (The Debt, The Help) is the gentle, graceful mother who showers her boys with love and affection. She cherishes the boys' childhood and reminds me a little of Wendy from Peter Pan. The film opens with shots of her character as a girl, and there are many occasions where we find her running down the street with her sons, laughing as she chases them, often barefoot and even jumping on the bed in one scene. She clings to innocence, rarely disciplining the boys but perhaps teaching them more than anyone the most important things they need to know in life.
Glimpses of the adult Jack (Sean Penn (Milk, Fair Game)) bookend the story, a troubled, lost soul who questions his place in the world. He is seen wandering through imagined canyons and through office buildings; his world is full of tunnels and empty spaces; he travels but he doesn't get anywhere until he meets his younger self near the end of the film. There are things he needs to reconcile with his past.
This movie is about so much more than meets the eye. The first half hour, images of nature and the beginning of the world, flash before your eyes as you view the rest of the film, and for that reason it's entirely necessary that the interlude is in there. It needs to be long so that it stays with you. It fits perfectly with the themes of nature and grace, and makes you think of the natural beauty and conflicting behaviour of the world, portrayed in each of the characters. The characters themselves are far more complex than they first appear to be, as so much of the story is told not through their words but through their actions. A scene in which Jack shoots his younger brother in the hand with a BB gun is followed not by his verbal apology but by the way he holds a fan towards his brother's face to cool him off, presses his fingers to his brother's lips to make him smile, and hands him a plank of wood to hit Jack if he wants. There are things that happen in glimpses, memories from childhood about a house fire nearby, an accident at the pool involving a neighbourhood boy, and the time the boys' father went away and they chased their mother through the house with a garden lizard.
For all the things I liked about this movie, no film is perfect, and there were two things that stood out to me that I didn't like so much. At times the classical soundtrack is over the top and a little offbeat, and I did find it distracting especially in the first half.
Twenty minutes into the film, during the creation interlude, we see some dinosaurs. The point of the interaction between two particular dinosaurs in this scene was to provoke this question: What is that essence that drives us to commit heinous acts of violence one moment and act compassionately the next? This happens to the characters several times in the movie, so I understood Malick's need to provoke these thoughts from his viewers not just through the humans but through animals and nature, but I felt the CGI was an incredibly poor move. The wonder of this film comes from the fact that everything is natural. There is a scene where Jessica Chastain's character is walking down the street and a butterfly lands on her outstretched fingertips. I read somewhere that Jessica and the crew followed that butterfly for three blocks just to get that shot. And it really was perfect. It would have ruined it for me to learn that the butterfly was digital, and the dinosaurs did the same thing for me. Unfortunately, they actually turned up in the movie. This really took away from the experience for me, and I wish that they hadn't put it in.
In saying that, this is a beautiful film, amazing because of the amount of time and effort it would have taken from all cast and crew to complete, a movie that stays in your mind for a long time afterwards. It's one of those questioning films. Not everything that comes to mind is answered by the end of the movie, but that's what life is like, isn't it? You wonder about things. You let your imagination run wild over what if and how and why?
My recommendation for watching this movie is to let everything go. Watch it with someone who won't talk too much during the movie. Turn out all the lights. Empty your mind of everything and just enjoy this experience, because that's what it is. It's not so much a movie with a beginning, middle, and end, but a expression of life and art. My final rating, only marked down for the cgi and partly for the score, is 4.5 stars.
