0 Punch-Drunk Love (2002)

USA, 95 minutes
Director/writer: Paul Thomas Anderson
Photography: Robert Elswit
Music: Jon Brion
Editor: Leslie Jones
Cast: Adam Sandler, Emily Watson, Mary Lynn Rajskub, Karen Kilgariff, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Luis Guzmán

After Boogie Nights (155 minutes) and Magnolia (188 minutes), director and writer Paul Thomas Anderson was showing some signs of a tendency toward bloat. Anderson wanted to make a shorter movie and for some reason he wanted to work with Adam Sandler, who was then within range of the peak of his box office powers. I'm willing to give Anderson the benefit of the doubt that it wasn't commercial appeal he was after. More likely something along the lines of what Martin Scorsese managed with Jerry Lewis in The King of Comedy: putting an overfamiliar (and frequently tiresome) comedy icon in an utterly new context, which at the same time is profoundly appropriate.

Sandler plays Barry Egan, a self-styled businessman barely eking out a living. At the time of the movie he is operating out of office space in a warehouse somewhere in industrial Los Angeles, attempting to sell novelty products as some kind of B2B (business-to-business) enterprise evidently aimed at trade shows and/or Las Vegas casinos. He wears a ridiculous blue suit that many people ask him about but he never explains. On the side, he is at work on other schemes. They are all a little ridiculous. He has seven sisters who harass and belittle him, and a bad case of rage. A really bad case of rage. In case you were wondering, Punch-Drunk Love is a love story—and a wonderful one.



But very strange. Sandler's rage is only incidentally explained—frustrations with his sisters and more generally an inability to connect and fit in with others. Mostly it appears to be just an element of his personality and mostly it's played as comedy, with broadly exaggerated eruptions in which he destroys large windows, public bathrooms, attacks and beats people, etc., with an ominous threat back of that that he will suddenly break down into fits of weeping. Full disclosure: I have not seen many Adam Sandler movies and know him only by general reputation. The basic persona puts me off. (And I know this is a much darker version of the usual.) But his comic instincts here are undeniable—not only is he good at pulling laughs out of these scenes and situations, he's even better at modulating that into the image of a stalking lunatic who's barely in control of himself at all. It's much more often a much more frightening and worrisome movie than it is funny.

Lena Leonard, his love interest, is played by Emily Watson, who is sneaky-good and completely winning too. Anderson's screenplay is great at developing these characters but I think this is also one of Watson's best performances, and not an easy one. Lena is a coworker of one of Barry's sisters, Elizabeth (Mary Lynn Rajskub, better known as Chloe from 24). Elizabeth wants to set them up, which is fine with Lena because she has been interested in Barry ever since she saw his picture in a family portrait with his sisters. But Elizabeth has not been able to engineer getting them together, as Barry resists everything his sisters want, so one of the first scenes we see, before we even know who she is, is Lena taking the situation into her own hands to make a seemingly random introduction.

Another subplot involves a call that Barry makes to a phone sex line that goes badly wrong, as the woman on the other end decides she wants more money from him and attempts to blackmail him. Her boss (Philip Seymour Hoffman, predictably brilliant in a small role) sends four brothers to Los Angeles from his base in a mattress store in Utah to threaten and extort Barry. Is there a bible story about seven sisters and four brothers? With Anderson, one wonders.

Lena, meanwhile, travels a lot for her work. She and Barry have a troubled but generally successful first date but soon after she has to go to Hawaii for her job. Barry follows her, and at about this point—actually, at the end of their first date—the movie quite unexpectedly begins to go remarkable places as a romantic comedy. You find yourself absolutely rooting for this love affair to work, in spite of all misgivings about Barry, which are gnawing and never go away entirely.

In Hawaii, of all places, it shamelessly turns just beautiful, again in spite of everything. As Barry puts it, as he and Lena sit quietly at an outdoor patio with a view of the ocean and sunset over drinks and dinner, "It really looks like Hawaii here." Revelations about Lena come that make her seem a good match for Barry—personality flaws, in other words. But they only serve to make the match seem more inevitable, and right, in some irrational and deeply felt way. It is a movie about love, signaled indeed by use of the word "love" in the title, and it is convincing, touching, and heartening.

Of course, as a Paul Thomas Anderson exercise, Punch-Drunk Love remains open to any number of charges of excess. Jon Brion's soundtrack, for example, is too often merely pretentious, distracting and alienating. And I still don't much care for Adam Sandler—in fact, I suspect not liking him is part of what makes the movie work. And no, I'm not comfortable either with the admixture of casual mental derangement and comedy. But keeping it short may have been a worthwhile goal for Anderson as ultimately it is its brevity that saves it, I think. It brims with creative energy, it goes to numerous jaw-dropping crazy places, it grounds itself in love start to finish, and it's over, leaving a good taste. It's a good one—maybe even my favorite Anderson, after only Boogie Nights.

Detail: Punch-Drunk Love (2002)

0 Tropical Malady (2004)

Sud pralad, Thailand / France / Germany / Italy, 118 minutes
Director/writer: Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Photography: Jarin Pengpanitch, Vichit Tanapanitch, Jean-Louis Vialard
Music: Smallroom
Editors: Lee Chatametikool, Jacopo Quadri
Cast: Banlop Lomnoi, Sakda Kaewbuadee, Huai Dessom, Sirivech Jareonchon, Udom Promma

Tropical Malady yokes two unrelated stories into coequal halves so formally that it almost feels like an anthology. The second story even gets what appears to be a title ("A Spirit's Path"). Yet there are mysterious affinities between the two halves. Both involve soldiers and share the two acting leads (who look very different across the stories), both revolve around investigations by the military of unexplained deaths of villagers and livestock. Director and writer Apichatpong Weerasethakul is notably a comer on the list of 21st-century films at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?, splitting votes by the evidence, with Tropical Malady presently at #12 and, behind it, Blissfully Yours at #15, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives at #36, and Syndromes and a Century at #45.

Weerasethakul is Thai and might as well be approached as something of an Asian David Lynch. It's an easy comparison. He's weird enough and his sources feel deep enough. Weerasethakul's fundamental preoccupation are with the spirit world, though his appreciation for the beauties of the carnal, physical plane are undeniable. If nothing else—and sometimes I think it's not much more—Tropical Malady is extraordinarily beautiful, capturing the luminous qualities of life and its visible surfaces: the glowing green of the jungle, the evocative faces of animals and humans, the way light plays in darkness. It is also glancingly good with the tender dances of falling in love, raising a family, working, being alive and human. You won't know what you saw, I can guarantee that much, but you might want to keep looking. Tropical Malady nags with an air of muted yet repellent fascination, like a person of inscrutable beauty used to being stared at. Think of it maybe as externalized meditation.



The translation for the original title, Sud pralad, is roughly "strange animal" and altogether that provides a better frame for what follows—I'm not sure I see a "malady" anywhere here—though the truth is it's hard to know how to prepare for seeing this movie. A headnote offers this: "All of us are by nature wild beasts. Our duty as human beings is to become like trainers who keep their animals in check, and even teach them to perform tasks alien to their bestiality."

In many ways it is a movie about bifurcations, or maybe "duality," pitting apparent opposites against one another, or setting them up in parallel, or sequence: humanity vs. primal nature, science / technology vs. magic, the family vs. the individual, life vs. death, the carnal vs. the spiritual. In the first half we follow a loosely constructed romance between a soldier (Banlop Lomnoi) whose unit is passing through a rural region and a country boy (Sakda Kaewbuadee) living there. They see one another around. The soldier gives the boy a tape of Clash songs. The boy wonders how he knew he liked the Clash. The soldier says he did his research. They meet a magical woman who tells them strange stories and takes them to unusual, dangerous places. She is probably a spirit. The wall between the earthly plane and the spirit world is infinitely penetrable in Tropical Malady.

Thailand in 2004 was no more enlightened than anyplace else, so the romance is necessarily clandestine, a secret, though happily it is early in the affair and shame is not yet much a part of it. At almost exactly the halfway point of the picture, it shifts to a story of a soldier (Lomnoi again, though from lighting and setup I did not easily recognize him). He is on an isolated mission in the jungle. The details of that mission are explained late and appear to be unimportant as he has made his mission hunting a shape-shifting tiger spirit (Kaewbuadee again, though even more unrecognizable), which in turn also happens to be hunting him.

It's the second half that wins Tropical Malady all its characterizations as "experimental" and "avant-garde." It is a marked break from the first half, mostly silent, with almost no dialogue, though now and then intertitles provide helpful (and confusing) information. The soldier carries a radio which fascinates the tiger spirit. Monkeys and ghosts of cows offer the soldier oblique information. A tree briefly takes on qualities of immortality, before settling back again into the soft nightscape, where crickets saw away. The soldier continually underestimates the power of the tiger spirit. Ultimately the soldier knows fear.

The most relevant question in all this is the usual WTF. Wikipedia tells stories of people streaming away from press screenings and those who stayed booing it at the end, and indeed, I have found myself growing impatient with it. It is opaque and slow to develop when it develops at all, which is not always. It's one you have to be in a mood for, and not helped by various evident problems in transfer to DVD (or not—hard to tell "mistakes" in this one).

Perhaps the most apt comparison to Lynch is Weerasethakul's use of pop music and dance music, which like everything else here is bewilderingly random, but sumptuous, breathtaking, and beautiful when it comes—sublime. I think this is also something that can redeem Harmony Korine projects, notably Mister Lonely. Pop music well placed can redeem almost anything for me, I confess. And so it is in Tropical Malady, which I can't exactly recommend but can certainly call your attention to.

Detail: Tropical Malady (2004)

0 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)

Wo hu cang long, Taiwan / Hong Kong / USA / China, 120 minutes
Director: Ang Lee
Writers: Du Lu Wang, Hui-Ling Wang, James Schamus, Kuo Jung Tsai
Photography: Peter Pau
Music: Dun Tan
Editor: Tim Squyres
Cast: Chow Yun-fat, Michelle Yeoh, Zhang Ziyi, Chang Chen, Lung Sihung, Cheng Pei-pei, Li Fazeng, Gao Xian, Hai Yan, Wang Deming, Li Li

Director Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon—a project of love if ever there was one—still sits comfortably high on the list of 21st-century films at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?, some 14 years on. But it seems every time I see this valentine to Lee's origins I like it a little less. Equal parts old-fashioned Hollywood potboiler, newfangled martial arts epic, overindulgent fairy tale, and great swooning romance (make that two great swooning romances), it shows among other things how deeply Lee had embraced the aesthetic of Oscar-bait even then, with its expensive color tones and crane shots, its impressive roster of Asian stars, and its clockwork alternations between ponderous exposition and gripping action scenes.

For balance, for fans, here is Richard Corliss of Time outlining the appeal: "The director convened stars of three movie eras—pioneer kung-femme Cheng Pei-pei from the 1960s, Chow Yun-fat and Michelle Yeoh from Hong Kong’s glorious ’80s and bright new lights Zhang Ziyi and Chang Chen—and set them to battling over a magical sword. When the actors aren’t flying across roofs and balancing on treetops, in fight scenes choreographed by the great Yuen Wo-ping, they are navigating the murkier regions of personal responsibility and unspoken love. Crouching Tiger is a movie of gravity and buoyancy, of high art and higher spirits. It’s contemplative, and it kicks ass."



Thus, caveats, folks. I don't know enough about Asian cinema, now or then, to judge the star impact. It still has almost none on me, though everyone is clearly good. It reminds me of a latter-day Star Wars entry, specifically Episode I: The Phantom Menace, overburdened with careerists eager to get the franchise on their resumes and so blinded by its own regard for itself it never seems to notice its own inertia—seems unlikely even to grasp that it could travel to such backwaters as boredom. Lee had earned the opportunity with a number of successful Hollywood productions, including Sense and Sensibility, and two others I like much more by him, The Wedding Banquet and The Ice Storm. And the American public was well primed for something like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, with a long-percolating underground interest in Hong Kong action movies dating to the '80s and a surprise hit in The Matrix in 1999.

Certainly there is no denying the soaring yet visceral appeal of the fights in Crouching Tiger, specifically the wire work of Yuen Wo-ping cited by Corliss. These flights of magic that have long populated Asian cinema have always been among my favorite parts of the pictures I've seen, such as A Chinese Ghost Story, and unquestionably they are arresting when they are on screen here. They are the best example of a fluid and lyrical style carried through on every level—camera movements, acting styles, the complicated fairy tale of the sword at the center of it, but most especially when it comes to weapons and combat. The motions are graceful, beautiful, skipping across roofs and treetops, running headlong up and down walls, and clanging and bashing steel on steel. They are wonderful dance scenes, energized by the combat that drives them.

The story is not without some nice moments along its arc. There's a wonderful long crazy love scene between a high official's daughter, Jen Yu (Ziyi Zhang), and an orphaned bandit, Dark Cloud (Chen Chang), inserted as a flashback and then brought seamlessly back to the main narrative. Jen Yu is the most unbelievable character of a bunch of unbelievable characters—with a secret identity no less, she brings the story right down to the comic book level—but she is also the most fascinating character, the most rewarding of the suspension of disbelief that is so necessary here, and Zhang's performance is impressive. The long flashback scene set in the desert offers up an alien landscape and turns the picture into a weird mix and match of Lawrence of Arabia and an American Western (I had to look up to confirm the whole thing was filmed in China). But somehow it works, perhaps as a function of the spectacular landscapes.

Still, the only things new about any of this were probably the money Lee was able to command for the project, and the mass American audience that came prepared to love it. I've seen enough Hong Kong cinema to know that for every element that works in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon there are movies that already did it, and better. Lee's achievement is a matter of synthesis (and the money). His movie never had to try that hard outside of the marketing department, and it shows, which as much as anything is why it reminds me of The Phantom Menace. But I don't bring a fan's enthusiasm to these judgments. To me Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon doesn't read like a great story so much as a rather mechanistic workup of fairy tale elements for the sake of providing context for brilliant fight scenes. Brilliant fight scenes, but isolated here as much as they would be if they were truncated from the narrative and scored with seething, churning, pumping pop music. In fact, I suspect they're even better that way, but I haven't been moved yet to look for examples on YouTube.

Detail: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)

0 Caché (2005)

Hidden, France / Austria / Germany / Italy / USA, 117 minutes
Director/writer: Michael Haneke
Photography: Christian Berger
Editors: Michael Hudecek, Nadine Muse
Cast: Daniel Auteuil, Juliette Binoche, Maurice Bénichou, Annie Girardot, Bernard Le Coq, Walid Afkir, Lester Makedonsky, Daniel Duval, Nathalie Richard, Denis Podalydès, Aïssa Maïga

Written and directed by Michael Haneke, released in the UK under the name Hidden, and formally taking on the qualities of a thriller, it can't come as much surprise that Caché is a bit of a puzzle-box movie. In fact, in its premise, it bears a remarkable resemblance to another puzzle-box movie of eight years earlier, David Lynch's Lost Highway. Georges and Anne Laurent (played by Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche) are an upper middle class Parisian couple with an adolescent son—smug bourgeoisie, not to put too fine a point on it. They begin to experience a subtle form of harassment. Someone is leaving videotapes accompanied by grotesque and cryptic drawings on their doorstep. The videotapes show hours of the exterior of their home, a static image shot from a stationary camera, with occasional traffic and pedestrians passing across the frame—even Georges himself at one point, who can't remember ever seeing a camera. The pictures show figures with blood.

The mystery is mostly irrelevant in the strategy of the movie, but I will register the usual point about spoilers. It doesn't take long before Georges figures out what it's about, and what really lies at the center of this story: relations between his family of origin and an Algerian couple they hired as servants. The couple disappeared in a historical atrocity now known as the "Paris massacre of 1961." In the backstory of Caché the result is that Georges's family is left with the couple's orphaned son, Majid, who is about Georges's age. At first they make plans to take custody of him but a 6-year-old Georges resents the intrusion on his place in the family and makes up stories about Majid that may or may not have resulted in Majid being "sent away," to an obviously inferior fate.



That is the specter haunting Georges now—or annoying him, more accurately, because he specifically refuses to take any responsibility for the events, which at any rate he argues are in the past. Haneke has said in interviews that he wanted to make a movie focused on individuals living with guilt, but that the historical events he landed on here remain so explosive they threatened to throw the focus more onto national and international politics rather than a single family, and man. The explanation is thus very brief, buried in passing at the center of the movie, even as the movie continues to fuel its charged air of mystery. Though it is dangled before us all through, the mystery of who is conducting the campaign of harassment remains a mystery to the end—indeed, the famous last shot only confuses the matter further, as intended. There is no answer to this mystery. That's the mystery, and that's the spoiler. Get ready for no good resolution—it's arguably the Haneke specialty anyway.

At some point, however, even as Georges is explicitly the victim in the distraction drama, the information parceled out to us about Georges and Majid, and Georges's behavior when the videotapes actually lead him to a confrontation with Majid decades since they have seen one another—and indeed, all of Georges's behavior—gradually reveal Georges as something of a casual monster. His wife is understandably a nervous wreck under the psychological assault, yet Georges only adds to her stress and torment, coming clean with her about his past very slowly and incompletely, even when it's obvious to both of them that he is hiding something.

Georges is a wretched person, the worst by far in the whole picture (with the possible exception of the phantom conducting the campaign, call it "Haneke"), and he only becomes more reprehensible as it goes along. This is another recommended wrap-up job for Wikipedia because the 1961 Paris massacre at the center of the story is remarkably brutal and callous, with bodies disposed of in the Seine River, conducted by someone later convicted for Vichy war crimes. "For several weeks, unidentified corpses were discovered along the banks of the river," one report notes. It's estimated that over 200 died in one day. If movies by Michael Haneke can be reduced to a message, and I think surprisingly often they can, the message here is that colonialism is dehumanizing to everyone involved.

Georges's tricky complicity is thus nicely limned by Haneke. Of course you can't hold a 6-year-old responsible for telling the kinds of lies that 6-year-olds tell. It's never clear here that Georges's lies had anything to do with Majid being sent away anyway. But what can you say about a 46-year-old man, comfortably ensconced in a life where he is the host of a public television book review show, who can't show compassion for Majid's situation? It's repulsive, and when Haneke insists in interviews that this is universal human behavior, not behavior specific to circumstances such as culture or nation, I don't think he's far wrong. After all, what can you say about grown men and women in the United States who travel to Texas to protest the humane treatment of children? What can you say about Michael Brown and Ferguson?

Detail: Caché (2005)

0 Russian Ark (2002)

Russkiy kovcheg, Russia / Germany / Japan / Canada / Finland / Denmark, 99 minutes
Director: Aleksandr Sokurov
Writers: Boris Khaimsky, Anatoli Nikiforov, Svetlana Proskurina, Aleksandr Sokurov
Photography: Tilman Buttner
Music: Sergei Yevtushenko
Editors: Stefan Ciupek, Sergey Ivanov, Betina Kuntzsch
Cast: Aleksandr Sokurov, Sergei Dreiden, Maria Kuznetsova, Leonid Mozgovoy, David Giorgobiani, Alexander Chaban, Maxim Sergeyev

As much as anything it is doubtless the technical achievement of Russian Ark that has pushed it so high on the list of 21st-century films at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?, so that's as good a place to start as any. It's impressive—one continuous single take on a steadicam, lasting over 90 minutes, and on top of that an epic costume drama with a cast of thousands. Think of all the famous long takes you know—in Touch of Evil, Goodfellas, The Player, and/or Gravity—and multiply exponentially. As a mathematical formula, it may be expressed as [Touch of Evil x 9] to the power of Barry Lyndon. I wouldn't have believed it possible myself if I hadn't spent a month one week looking it over carefully.

Russian Ark is no easy breeze of a picture, and falls easily and quickly into the look and feel of the most pretentious and aimless art film. That technical achievement is remarkably subtle, at least for someone like me who often has to have long takes pointed out, and otherwise the movie features not one but two central characters who appear to be time travelers or perhaps shape shifters of some kind, or perhaps ghosts (one is never seen—he is represented by the camera point of view), who spend the movie prowling the corridors and galleries of the magnificent Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, swapping barbs and a general air of sadness as scenes from some 300 years of Russian history materialize and play around them. Put it this way. You're unlikely to get much out of this if you don't know at least something about Russian history and probably if you aren't willing to look at it more than once. I know that's a damning review so I hasten to add: It is worth your energies. But anyone can understand why a body might not be inclined that way.



Indeed, I'm not always sure the grand experiment proves out. By going so far to one extreme of cinema, it incidentally ratchets up the theatricality. Occasional mistakes in timing or inappropriate awareness of the camera on the faces of some of the players, for example, would normally call for another take to iron out. That luxury was not afforded director, co-writer, and co-star Aleksandr Sokurov with such self-imposed constraints as this, and so in many moments Russian Ark has more the quivering live feel of a stage production, which diminishes it some. Add to that the dense literary overlay with the narrative high concept of a kind of science fiction ghost story about the eternal husbanding of Russian culture, and you have a project that is insanely ambitious (and potentially doomed in countless ways).

But the fact is its many small flaws come to seem minor as the picture unfolds its many, many impressive treasures—literal and figurative. The artwork and interiors of the Hermitage carry the day when nothing else does. In the end I think the single take is appropriate enough, if only for the counterpoint and symmetry it provides to one of Soviet Russia's acknowledged masters of cinema, Sergei Eisenstein—the pioneer of montage and other cinematic arts of the cut. There is not a single cut in Russian Ark, of course. I don't read that as a rejection of Eisenstein's aesthetic, however, but more another element to add to what is really this picture's central preoccupation: the vastness of Russian culture, which in turn is a reflection of the vastness of Russia itself.

Russia is not just the place where montage was invented, Sokurov's decision implies—it is a culture capable of embracing all of cinema. And art. And life. And death and time too. The not-so-friendly ghost that we see, a Frenchman played masterfully by Sergei Dreiden, credited as "The Stranger" but known by our ghost of the camera as "The European," is caustic about Russia, dismissing it with withering arrogance as a country of European copycats and wannabes. Our ghost of the camera, a Russian credited at IMDb.com as "The Time Traveller" (Sokurov, who is not credited in the picture for this role), glumly attempts to rebut him. In the terms of this narrative, the other is all that each of these two ghosts has, and the Time Traveller is the first to recognize the wisdom in not alienating his only companion.

Meanwhile, the costume drama, the great artwork on every wall, and various historical scenes play out and swirl around us continually, moving through some 33 or more chambers of the museum complex, including a grand finish in the Winter Palace. There are other ghosts too. There is the cruel Peter the Great. There is the great patron Catherine II, and there she is again, later, running away from the camera in an extraordinarily beautiful outdoor scene. (It is the cold gray weather of an afternoon in late December. The footsteps of people crunch in the snow.) There is the pomp and bluster of a diplomatic function involving a Persian envoy. There are soldiers performing formal marching maneuvers. And there is the spectacular ballroom scene in the Winter Palace at the end, complete with full orchestra and hundreds of graceful dancing couples.

It's not hard—and it's somewhat tempting, certainly on first view—to dismiss Russian Ark as a stunt, a kind of documentary in real time of production design and a bit of a showoff at that. But there's actually so much to this. The first distinct sound we hear is a ship's horn and the last image we see is of the sea. The "ark" conceit, a vessel that is alive and vital with a cargo of essential Russian culture and sailing the oceans of time, is worked out meticulously and carried off well. The formidable Hermitage Museum and its vast collection—only a fraction of which is glimpsed here—provide a setting that is nigh perfect. And cinematographer Tilman Buttner deserves mention for pulling off such a physically demanding task and keeping it remarkably beautiful.

Detail: Russian Ark (2002)

0 The Tree of Life (2011)

USA, 139 minutes
Director/writer: Terrence Malick
Photography: Emmanuel Lubezki
Music: Alexandre Desplat
Editors: Hank Corwin, Jay Rabinowitz, Daniel Rezende, Billy Weber, Mark Yoshikawa
Cast: Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain, Sean Penn, Hunter McCracken, Laramie Eppler, Fiona Shaw, Tye Sheridan

The Tree of Life is not a very old movie but it has already won an outsize following among critics and other cineastes, whose open-throated clamor for it (encountered everywhere in the second half of 2011) helped enable it to enter at #6 on the list of 21st-century films at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? In fact, the biggest surprise for me about the update to that list which came earlier this year was that The Tree of Life did not push on even higher from there. I still think it could be the one to knock off In the Mood for Love, Mulholland Dr., and/or Yi Yi, which have owned the 1-2-3 since I've been aware of the list.

But that's horserace talk and beside the point, of course. On many levels it's easy to see how contemporary critics could isolate The Tree of Life for high praise: it's written and directed by the redoubtable Terrence Malick, it's quite stunningly beautiful, and it traffics in a kind of gauzy, ineffable spirituality with Christian overlay that really seems to get people where they live, uplifting like a Sunday service.



I don't want to invoke the "emperor's new clothes" story but I keep seeing telltale indications about The Tree of Life, Malick's fifth of six films since 1973 (at least two of them, Badlands and The Thin Red Line, are personal favorites). In the theater where I saw it in downtown Olympia a hand-printed sign taped to the door informed to the effect that The Tree of Life is long and symbolic, with a story not necessarily intended for straightforward interpretation. "No refunds." I saw another sign like it in a Tacoma art-house when I was there to see something else. I have read many high-handed comments from critics and bloggers equating rejection of The Tree of Life with nothing less than rejection of cinema itself. As the sign implies, you are not looking at it right. It did not help that Roger Ebert gave it a very strong stamp of his imprimatur shortly before he died by putting it on his last submission to the Sight & Sound poll. Somehow, and perhaps yet temporarily, The Tree of Life became one of those things that does not fail. It can only be failed.

So I must admit that, by and large, I have probably failed it. The first time I saw it I loved the explosion of scientific photography in the first 30 or 40 minutes, was occasionally touched by the middle-American story of the Waco family, and wondered why Sean Penn was wandering around muttering to himself. More recently (watching it at home on TV) I thought the scientific photography was more of an empty conceit, was again occasionally moved by the Waco family, and still wondered what Sean Penn was doing. I just don't connect much with this movie. Roger Ebert saw all of his childhood written into it. I recognized evocative elements from growing up, but I kept waiting for something that more or less mattered—on this plane—or a point, or momentum, or some reason to keep watching other than a sign in the lobby that says I can't get a refund.

Am I being obtuse or fatuous here? Probably. That's my first thought whenever I hear someone complain about missing points from movies. Fair enough. For some relief, let me interrupt briefly with words you might find more appropriate, from Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian:

Malick's mad and magnificent film descends slowly, like some sort of prototypical spaceship: it's a cosmic-interior epic of vainglorious proportions, a rebuke to realism, a disavowal of irony and comedy, a meditation on memory, and a gasp of horror and awe at the mysterious inevitability of loving, and losing those we love… This film is not for everyone, and I will admit I am agnostic about the final sequence, which suggests a closure and a redemption nothing else in the film has prepared us for. But this is visionary cinema on an unashamedly huge scale: cinema that's thinking big. Malick makes an awful lot of other film-makers look timid and negligible by comparison.

Life is a mad, swirling, beautiful, heart-breaking, confusing, unknowable thing that must be taken on its own terms. There is more to this world than mere material sensation. Stop and smell the roses. Enjoy what you have instead of thinking about what you don't have. God will provide. More will be revealed. It's not for us to know all the answers now. We that abideth shall inherit the earth. Now I'm getting it.

On the niggling level, here are specific things I don't like: The incoherent voiceovers, usually whispered. The Christianity compressed into it (and from the start, as the tired old false dichotomy of "the way of nature versus the way of grace" is one of the first things we hear about). Alexandre Desplat's suffocating awful new-age celestial music and its thudding emotional cues. Jessica Chastain as Mrs. O'Brien waving at the cloud-scudded sky and telling her boys, "That's where God lives." The view of treetops from the ground looking up (also heavily featured in Malick's previous film The New World, along with tall grass). Sean Penn spinning around and/or the camera spinning around him. In fact, the camera moves altogether too much for me, which has the effect of making the movie feel slippery and distracted. The Oedipal strains are trite. The sound design is so overdone that a title card at the beginning of the DVD advises it should be played loud—and no, that's not in the rock 'n' roll sense. Playing it loud helps you catch all the muttering and bird calls.

It raises the question: Is The Tree of Life so good that it's bad?

Detail: The Tree of Life (2011)

0 Werckmeister Harmonies (2000)

Werckmeister harmóniák, Hungary/Italy/Germany/France, 145 minutes
Directors: Bela Tarr, Agnes Hranitzky
Writers: Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Bela Tarr, Peter Dobai, Gyuri Dosa Kiss, Gyorgy Feher
Photography: Patrick de Ranter, Miklos Gurban, Erwin Lanzensberger, Gabor Medvigy, Emil Novak, Rob Tregenza
Music: Mihaly Vig
Editor: Agnes Hranitzky
Cast: Lars Rudolph, Peter Fitz, Hanna Schygulla, Janos Derzsi, Djoko Rosic, Peter Dobai

Werckmeister Harmonies is the usual study in contradictions for a long and difficult art film, or at least for one that grows better with familiarity—bewildering but mesmerizing, confusing but lucid, slow and ponderous yet frequently nimble-witted. It opens on a strange and elaborately staged barroom demonstration of an eclipse, with drunkards standing in as the heavenly bodies. It finds its narrative focus (around which it stalks sideways fashion) in the arrival of a traveling circus, so called, to a small city. The circus features a whale exhibit and "The Prince," some sort of charismatic cult figure. The town, seen mostly through the eyes of its overnight newspaper delivery person and would-be litterateur Janos (Lars Rudolph and his haunting, fearful face), is in fragile condition, wracked by unknown forces politically, emotionally, existentially.

These elements are as carefully chosen as everything else in this movie, which is nearly as deliberate as it is possible to be. Whales carry portent that stretches back to the bible, revived again in the advent of the New World. "The Prince"—who is likely the strangest and most mysterious character in a movie stuffed with them—grounds it deeply in European experience, bearing the colossal burden of everything from Machiavelli and Saint-Exupery to the feudal estate itself. In many ways the opening scene works as prologue, because the narrative arc, such as it is, most closely resembles an eclipse, the single most cinematic natural event that occurs (aside from perhaps only tornadoes), ending at that moment Janos himself describes in his barroom exposition: "Everything that lives is still. Are the hills going to march off? Will heaven fall upon us? Will the earth open under us? We don't know. We don't know, for a total eclipse has come upon us... But... but no need to fear. It's not over. For across the sun's glowing sphere, slowly, the moon swims away...."



And so we proceed, across a night, a day, another night, and dawn. Evidently set in the post-Soviet aftermath, shot in a dour yet evocative black and white, it feels modern and ancient at the same time. Roger Ebert famously pointed out that Werckmeister Harmonies consists of 39 tracking shots, chained into a movie that runs 145 minutes. Indeed, this is much of what makes it work. It goes from place to place, it is always moving, probing, if slowly, and strange things happen and are seen all around it—bonfires raging on the town square, a mad police chief and his madder children, "The Prince," seen only as shadow and understood only via a translator, and the moments of sudden aggression that well up continually.

The experience of it is something like riding a subway and observing dramatic scenes at each station—a sensation of hurtling forward into light, followed by slowing and a stop and color and action, and then moving forward into darkness again. If occasionally impatient with how slow and random the journey feels, one also feels in the hands of forces that know what they are about, a firm sense there's a destination and it will be reached.

Director Bela Tarr is so coherent and yet so organic about the way he conceives his scenes that, as with Andrei Tarkovsky, an obvious antecedent, it is often fascinating just to watch the way it moves, even if the movements don't necessarily appear to have immediate point. It is somehow always insanely compelling. Tarr is remarkably good at using people walking to ground the pace in human dimensions, here and in his other pictures too (on this, he has an obvious heir in Darren Aronofsky, among others). There are many long shots of people walking, shot from cranes overhead, shot in profile tracking, shot from immediately behind, from further behind, from way far behind, from in front, in and out of darkness and shadow. But it is taken to a whole new level here with a nighttime shot of a very scary, very silent mob moving to attack—walking, walking, walking, staged much in the way of mobs in Metropolis. It is a scene of tremendous power.

Similarly, when Werckmeister Harmonies strains for notes of chaos, as in the hours before the riot, which eventually must be put down by the military, it can hit and sustain them quite well. Much of this element revolves specifically around the police chief (Peter Dobai), whose mistress Tunde (Hanna Schygulla, who is about perfect) is significant in Janos's life. We first see the police chief drunk and ranting at Tunde's, followed immediately by the scene at his home, where his two preteen boys are left without minders. They are jumping on a bed, playing a marching record at top volume (in fact, the same one the police chief plays at his mistress's), pounding on drums, screaming into a fan for the effect on their voices—dismayingly out of control. Janos, who has been sent there to put them to bed, finally just leaves.

More on notes strained for: Andreas Werckmeister is a real historical figure, a music theorist of the baroque era whose writing on counterpoint influenced Bach. He invented a tuning system, the "Werckmeister temperament," which makes some appearance here via a scholar in town whom Janos knows and admires and may even be related to, "Uncle Gyuri" (Peter Fitz, whose craggy impassive face balances Lars Rudolph's anxiety nicely). It is music theory well over my head, based on planetary movements, underlining again the eclipse theme. There is some element in the way music is used here that works constantly to blur the line between music and natural objects. Mihaly Vig's score is often poignant and swelling but even the sound effects, as in industrial interiors, have a musical quality.

Ebert also makes a point about the reveries produced by long movies, which of course Werckmeister Harmonies is also playing to, again very deliberately. At two and a half hours, it's not as long as Tarr's Satantango, but it's long. And watching it very much becomes a hypnotic experience, particularly as one comes to know it better. Each scene is practically like a short film itself, with beginning, middle, and (of course) ambiguous end, some of them quite remarkable: the arrival of the whale in town at night, that marching mob and riot, one outrageously long (and very funny) shot of Janos and his Uncle Gyuri walking side by side in profile. Like an eclipse, Werckmeister Harmonies feels momentous and yet without adequate explanation but still, somehow, tremendously satisfying too.

Detail: Werckmeister Harmonies (2000)