Salon.com > The Tree of Life

The remarkable reinvention of Brad Pitt

Sat, 25 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

In all honesty, it took watching Brad Pitt's performance at the Cannes Film Festival last spring for me to consider him in a new light. I don't entirely mean Pitt's fine performance on screen as Mr. O'Brien, the tormented, hard-ass midcentury paterfamilias of Terrence Malick's "The Tree of Life," although that helped too. I mostly mean his even better performance as the world's sexiest movie star attending the world's most glamorous film festival, which struck a perfect balance between irony and sincerity.

When I encountered Pitt at a press conference, he was dressed positively to the nines, in an outfit that seemed to radiate quotation marks: white silk T-shirt under white linen jacket, enormous gold-frame sunglasses, piles of gold chains, a delicious tan and four days' worth of carefully groomed stubble. But instead of the monosyllabic, Bob Dylan-style too-cool-for-school attitude you might expect to go along with that, Pitt was unfailingly polite and forthcoming, at least as far as the nutso surroundings would permit. He answered questions about his religious beliefs (slim to none); his family life both growing up in small-town Missouri and today, as a globetrotting and immensely famous dad; his relationships with his own father and own children, and almost anything else people came up with.

Nostalgic for everything

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 01:00:00 +0000

"Nostalgia is denial -- denial of the painful present," says a philosopher (Michael Sheen) in Woody Allen's surprise hit "Midnight in Paris." "The name for this denial is Golden Age thinking: the erroneous notion that a different time period is better than the one [that] one's living in. It's a flaw in the romantic imagination of those people who find it difficult to cope with the present."

If nostalgia is indeed a flaw, it's one that many 2011 films and TV programs shared. Some of the year's most talked-about movies and shows gave themselves over to some form of nostalgia -- unabashedly reveling in, and idealizing, not just an earlier time, but the artists and artistic styles that we associate with that time, and the rush of emotion that accompanies our fantasies of same. Allen's "Midnight in Paris" -- his top grossing movie ever -- is Exhibit A. It's an immensely likable reworking of his short story "A Twenties Memory" in which an Allen stand-in, screenwriter Gil (Owen Wilson), magically gets to travel back to the time of Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. But it's merely the keynote address in a year of budget-busting, production-design-showcasing, time-tripping cinema and television, a year that invited viewers not merely to experience stories from another time but to slip into them with deep pleasure and savor their restorative power.

Jessica Chastain: The dazzling redhead who's suddenly everywhere

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 21:28:00 +0000

Jessica Chastain may not yet qualify as a movie star, but within seconds of meeting her you completely understand why every casting agent in Hollywood is convinced she will become one. To put it bluntly, she is dazzling -- and I'm talking more about her manner and presence than her beauty, although she's exceptionally pretty, with flaming red hair and pale, translucent skin. She's vivacious and charming, seemingly without effort, and has the kind of spectacular smile that uplifts everyone's spirits within a 50-foot radius.

It makes you wonder where all those casting directors and filmmakers who so desperately want Chastain in their movies now were a few years ago, when she was a little-known television actress whose biggest part had been a four-episode role on "Law & Order: Trial by Jury." There are no answers beyond the usual clichés: Showbiz is full of pretty faces, and sometimes all it takes is one little break. Chastain's break was pretty big, and came when Terrence Malick cast her opposite Brad Pitt in "The Tree of Life," where her shimmering, ethereal presence created a thematic and visual balance to Pitt's intense, compulsive, authoritarian father-figure.

Your guide to Terrence Malick’s “Tree of Life”

Sat, 02 Jul 2011 16:54:00 +0000

How does one watch Terrence Malick's "The Tree of Life"?

That is the question. Malick's domestic epic is the most talked-about movie of the summer, and surely the most divisive -- a two-hour-and-18-minute sound-and-light show that doubles as a nostalgia piece. Avoiding a strict linear plot, it instead offers a rush of images, sounds and sensations. It consists of fragments of a life remembered (and in a few cases, imagined) by its hero, an architect named Jack (Sean Penn), with special attention paid to Jack's boyhood in 1950s Waco, Texas, where he was torn between the old-line machismo of his father (Brad Pitt) and the angelic, almost childlike openness of his mother (Jessica Chastain).

With this piece, I was aiming to write an "explainer" similar to this checklist of Spielbergian elements in J.J. Abrams' early-Spielberg-eseque sci-fi adventure "Super 8," but Malick is working in a different mode, or on a different intellectual plane, and is after different things. And he has over the years become a director that one cannot "explain" or otherwise pin down. Although Malick's filmography has recurring themes and images and situations just like any other director's, those aspects are not self-contained enough to be excavated like artifacts, labeled and put on display. One element tends to bleed into, or overlap with, others, in a way that makes the individual parts inseparable from the whole. More so than most directors' movies, Malick's films are all of a piece.

All things shining: The films of Terrence Malick

Thu, 02 Jun 2011 00:32:00 +0000

Filmmaker Terrence Malick's Palme d'Or-winning, critically divisive epic "The Tree of Life" opened in limited release last Friday and will gradually expand to other cities throughout the summer. Over the years I've written quite a few pieces about his work, including a series of articles for the House Next Door and a recent slide show for Salon. Over the past couple of weeks I've also written, narrated and edited a series of video essays about Malick's first four movies: "Badlands," "Days of Heaven," "The Thin Red Line" and "The New World."

The five-part series "All Things Shining: The Films of Terrence Malick" is compiled below. I've also included links to accompanying articles at Moving Image Source, the online magazine of the Museum of the Moving Image, where these pieces originally appeared.

Pick of the week: Malick’s gorgeous, crazy “Tree of Life”

Fri, 27 May 2011 00:30:00 +0000

At least until Lars von Trier stole the spotlight by proclaiming his addled sympathy for Adolf Hitler -- and although we should've heard the last about that, we probably haven't -- Terrence Malick's long-awaited and long-delayed new film "The Tree of Life" was Topic A at Cannes this year. Frequently beautiful and even more frequently baffling, Malick's would-be masterpiece premiered to a confused chorus of boos and cheers and ended up by winning the Palme d'Or, Cannes' trademark prize. As jury president Robert De Niro put it, it was a movie with "the size, the importance, the intention -- whatever you want to call it."

Cannes: Malick’s “Tree of Life” wins Palme d’Or

Sun, 22 May 2011 21:45:00 +0000

CANNES, France -- In a strong and wide-ranging year for world cinema at its biggest annual trade show, the Cannes Film Festival concluded with a major American triumph. Terrence Malick's "The Tree of Life," a long-gestating epic starring Brad Pitt as a 1950s Texas dad, which sought to summarize its auteur's view of not just movies but human life and the universe, won the Palme d'Or. It's the first American movie to capture the film world's biggest non-Oscar prize since Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" in 2004.

At least Moore's film was a hit; the last American narrative feature to win the Palme was Gus Van Sant's "Elephant" a year earlier, a minimal and dark Columbine-inspired drama that found very little audience in the United States. Fox Searchlight will release Malick's film in American theaters this week, and couldn't have asked for a bigger or better publicity push. "Tree of Life" will presumably now be discussed as a factor in the Academy Awards race, but no film has won both the Palme d'Or and the best-picture Oscar since Delbert Mann's "Marty" in 1955.

“Tree of Life” wins top Cannes fest honor

Sun, 22 May 2011 18:48:00 +0000

Terrence Malick's expansive drama "The Tree of Life" has won the top honor at the Cannes Film Festival, while Kirsten Dunst took the best-actress prize for the apocalyptic saga "Melancholia."

The prize was accepted Sunday by two "Tree of Life" producers for the press-shy Malick, who skipped all public events at the glamorous Cannes festival.

Dunst won for her role in the end-of-the-world tale "Melancholia," whose director, Denmark's Lars von Trier, was banned from the festival after sympathetic remarks for Adolf Hitler at a press conference.

Jean Dujardin claimed the best-actor prize for the silent film "The Artist," in which he plays a 1920s Hollywood star whose career crumbles as talking pictures gain.