Zero Dark Thirty

Zero Dark Thirty is probably up for every award possible, but there is always that one movie that gets a lot of hype and probably doesn't deserve it. In my mind, that's this one. The film concerns the CIA, and the global manhunt for Osama Bin Laden. It takes place, roughly, over a decade, in which the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States happen, and the May 2nd, 2011 capture and execution of Bin Laden.

Now, ten years+ is a lot of time to cover in a movie, and most of the time a movie will cover the highlights of the events occurring on such a long timeline. In Zero Dark Thirty, it never feels like anything is much of a highlight. There's never too much intrigue here. It's more like someone is reading a report on what happened during that decade, and you're imagining it in your head to keep from being bored to death (and, somehow, you were able to edit the worst parts out). You never really get to know any of the characters that much, even the films supposed "lead" Jessica Chastain, who comes off as just being a secondary character who happened to have more lines and more screen time than anyone else.

Then again, I suppose, maybe that's the genius of Zero Dark Thirty. Here is a movie that is about the capture and killing of Osama Bin Laden, and you could almost say that Bin Laden is, in fact, the main character in the movie. It feels like you're waiting the entire movie to get to him, and then, just like the audiences relationship to the movie, You are allowed only brief glimpses of the man, and almost all moments are after he is dead. Zero Dark Thirty is one long trudge to the end, where you are allowed brief glimpses of something interesting, only to be over taken by the boring and tedious procedural aspects, and the barely there supporting cast. Why people feel this is somehow Bigelow's masterpiece is confusing. She's made much better films than this, and, hopefully, will continue to do so.

Take Shelter

Jeff Nichols feels like the David Gordon Green career we should have gotten after Snow Angels (instead of the decent into mediocrity that have been his follow ups). His debut feature, Shotgun Stories, was a slow burning, southern gothic, "family" film along the lines of Green's Undertow. His follow up, Take Shelter, reunites him with Shotgun Stories star Michael Shannon, and gives Nichols the chance to create something with all of the environment and feel of his debut, but to have a much more reserved and psychological approach to it.

Take Shelter stars Shannon as Curtis, a joe-average guy who begins to have apocalyptic visions, much to the concern of his wife, Samantha (played by Jessica Chastain), who begins to worry about him when he starts acting strange. Feeling a necessity to finish out an underground storm shelter in their backyard, Curtis devotes himself to the task, risking friendships, his job, and possibly his family. The big question, though, is this - Is Curtis crazy? or is he seeing something that no one else see's?

Take Shelter is, like Shotgun Stories, a bit of a slow burner, but once you start seeing what Curtis is seeing, the movie starts to find its steam. The film really draws you into the experience of this man, who feels so strongly about what he's experiencing, that he takes severe action to save his family. One can't help but see the biblical Noah story as a parallel. While God doesn't tell Curtis to do something (he is influenced by his dreams and visions), you see the effects of a man who has a singular, seemingly insane, mission that he undertakes.

Michael Shannon is awesome, as usual. You can't beat that dude. Chastain kills it too, with a subtlety and plainness that draws out the middle America in her. Shea Wigham, who plays Curtis's friend, has some really great moments too.

Take Shelter was really enjoyable, and I'm looking forward to seeing where Nichols career goes.

Tree of Life

You're average movie-goer probably doesn't have a clue who Terrence Malick is, but, to cineaste's, he is the closest thing to god many of them have (and as elusive). He barreled onto the scene in 1973 with his masterpiece debut, Badlands, followed only five years later by another masterpiece of 70's American cinema, Days of Heaven. It would be 20 years before we saw another film, 1998's The Thin Red Line, which would be followed by The New World, and now Tree of Life. While everyone can agree that it's fantastic to no longer have to wait twenty years to get a new film by Malick, Tree of Life has been gestating as a project since the Badlands/Days of Heaven era, a few more years and some quality input may have kept this one in line with Malicks previous works.

Tree of Life gives us a first hand view of a period of time in the lives of one Texas family. Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain play the father and mother. They have three young boys, the oldest, and the one that the film focuses on, is Jack, played by Hunter McCracken. We see Pitt be the traditional 1950's era father, trying to teach his boys how to be tough, while Chastain plays the traditional mother, gentle, loving and caring. Interspersed throughout their story is the very evolution of the universe and Earth itself, from the beginning of time back to the 1950's, and occasionally to the present, where we meet grown Jack, played by Sean Penn.

Tree of Life is a lot of what you would expect from a Malick film. The cinematography is epic and gorgeous, and the film is meditatively paced, and allows itself to unfold in front of you. The problem with Tree, though, is it is bloated. There are multiple scenes that don't really go anywhere, and edits within the scenes that feel contradictory, or are unnecessary. It's hard, though, because these things (and the sheer length of it), butts up against how beautiful and transcendent the film can be. While it doesn't seem to have a solid plot, Tree is more like a scrapbook of this family's life than anything else, and those little moments being strung together can really bring out an empathy in the audience, if they allow it too. Both Pitt and Chastain deliver fantastic performances, and the young boys playing their sons are pretty much perfect.

I feel incredibly mixed about this film. I like it and I don't. I think if you are already a Malick fan, you definitely should see it and make up your own mind. If you don't really know who the guy is, but you've heard good things, go rent Badlands or Days of Heaven instead.

Roger Ebert's review/meditation on Malick's "Tree of Life"

A Prayer Beneath The Tree Of Life

By

Roger Ebert

Terrence Malick's new film is a form of prayer. It created within me a spiritual awareness, and made me more alert to the awe of existence. I believe it stands free from conventional theologies, although at its end it has images that will evoke them for some people. It functions to pull us back from the distractions of the moment, and focus us on mystery and gratitude.

Not long after its beginning we apparently see the singularity of the Big Bang, when the universe came into existence. It hurtles through space and time, until it comes gently to a halt in a small Texas town in the 1950s. Here we will gradually learn who some of the people were as the film first opened.

In Texas we meet the O'Brien family. Bad news comes in the form of a telegram, as it always did in those days. Mrs. O'Brien (Jessica Chastain) reads it in her home, and gives vent to grief. Mr. O'Brien (Brad Pitt) gets the news at work. We gather a child has died. It is after that when we see the universe coming into being, and Hubble photographs of the far reaches.

This had an uncanny effect on me, because Malick sees the time spans of the universe and a human life a lot like I always have. As a child I lay awake obsessed with the idea of infinity and the idea of God, who we were told had no beginning and no end. How could that be? And if you traveled and traveled and traveled through the stars, would you ever get to the last one? Wouldn't there always be one more?

In my mind there has always been this conceptual time travel, in which the universe has been in existence for untold aeons, and then a speck appeared that was Earth, and on that speck evolved life, and among those specks of life were you and me. In the span of the universe, we inhabit an unimaginably small space and time, and yet we think we are so important. It is restful sometimes to pull back and change the scale, to be grateful that we have minds that can begin to understand who we are, and where are in the vastness.

Many films diminish us. They cheapen us, masturbate our senses, hammer us with shabby thrills, diminish the value of life. Some few films evoke the wonderment of life's experience, and those I consider a form of prayer. Not prayer "to" anyone or anything, but prayer "about" everyone and everything. I believe prayer that makes requests is pointless. What will be, will be. But I value the kind of prayer when you stand at the edge of the sea, or beneath a tree, or smell a flower, or love someone, or do a good thing. Those prayers validate existence and snatch it away from meaningless routine.

We all occupy our own box of space and time. We have our memories and no one else's. We live one life, accumulating it in our minds as we go along. Terrence Malick was born in Waco, Texas, and has filmed much of "Tree of Life" in small Texas towns; the house of the O'Brien family is in Smithville. I felt like I knew this house and this town. Malick and I were born within a year of one another, and grew up in small towns in the midlands. Someone else, without my memories to be stirred, might be less affected by its scenes of the O'Briens raising their three boys.

I know unpaved alleys with grass growing down the center,. I know big lawns with a swing hanging from a tree. I know windows that stand open all day in the summer. I know houses that are never locked. I know front porches, and font porch swings, and aluminum drinking glasses covered with beads of sweat from the ice tea and lemonade inside.I know picnic tables. I know the cars of the early 1950s, and the kitchens, and the limitless energy of kids running around the neighborhood.

And I know the imperfect family life Malick evokes. I know how even good parents sometimes lose their tempers. How children resent what seems to be the unforgivable cruelty of one parent, and the refuge seemingly offered by the other. I know what it is to see your parents having a argument, while you stand invisible on the lawn at dusk and half-hear the words drifting through the open windows. I know the feeling of dread, because when your parents fight, the foundation of your world shakes. I had no siblings, but I know how play can get out of hand and turn into hurt, and how hatred can flare up between two kids, and as quickly evaporate. I know above all how time moves slowly in a time before TV and computers and video games, a time when what you did was go outside every morning and play and dare each other, and mess around with firecrackers or throw bricks at the windows of an empty building, and run away giggling with guilt.

Those days and years create the fundament. Then time shifts and passes more quickly, and in some sense will never seem as real again. In the movie, we rejoin one of the O'Brien boys (now played by Sean Penn) when he grows to about the age his father was. We see him in a wilderness of skyscrapers, looking out high windows at a world of glass and steel. Here are not the scenes of the lawn through the dining room windows. These windows never open. He will never again run outside and play.

What Malick does in "Tree of Life" is create the span of lives. Of birth, childhood, the flush of triumph, the anger of belittlement, the poison of resentment, the warmth of forgiving. And he shows that he feels what I feel, that it was all most real when we were first setting out, and that it will never be real in that way again. In the face of Hunter McCracken, who plays Jack as a boy, we see the face of Sean Penn, who plays him as a man. We see fierceness and pain. We see that he hates his father and loves him. When his father has a talk with him and says, "I was a little hard on you sometimes," he says, "It's your house. You can do what you want to." And we realize how those are not words of anger but actually words of forgiveness. Someday he will be the father. It will not be so easy.