The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011)

Watching this for only the second time (I originally saw it in the cinema when it first came out), I thought I might like it better this time around, but I'm afraid I think I liked it less. Certainly, it's a work of great skill, but its philosophical, theological, and psychological content seems to me entirely banal. Of course, this is true of some great films - profundity of that kind is far from the only thing film has to offer - but it's highly problematic in a film that clearly dedicates itself to a kind of profundity. It surprises me how undialectical Malick's conception of beauty seems to be, by which I mean simply that he seems to think that making a film entirely out of beautiful images will necessarily make a beautiful film, rather than something rather oppressive and stultifying. Things are a little better with the music, because of the way the father's dedication to classical music comes to render that music oppressive to his son, reflecting the father's own oppressiveness, but even here this insight seems to apply only to the diegetic music and not to the nondiegetic music that Malick plasters over everything. (The scenes of domestic threat seem to me the best thing about the film, but also probably one of the easiest things to achieve.) Clearly the film reflects some very deep-felt emotional territory for Malick, but that doesn't prevent the resulting film being highly sentimental. Again, not that this in itself is a barrier to greatness (many great films are indeed sentimental) but the combination of the sentimental and the portentous is pretty hard to swallow.