Another great luxury is going to the cinema on my own! I get to see whatever I want, without the guilt of forcing someone (i.e. Hannah) to sit beside me through some strange film. She still hasn't got over The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover. I therefore took the opportunity to see Tree of Life, a lamentation on human existence by Terrence Malick. It's only his fifth film in 40 years as a director. He's an artist.
Hannah aside, who wouldn't want to see a two-hour-plus, impressionistic, virtually dialogue free, microscopic examination of the tragedy of the human condition? Well, most people, it turns out. There was a literal handful of patrons in the auditorium. Accompanied by a packet of chocolate Hobnobs I took my seat. A couple of old ladies doddered in during the trailers, started chatting, and didn't stop when the film began! Thankfully these senile delinquents settled down a few minutes in, otherwise things could have become embarrassing when I was beaten up by two pensioners for asking them to be quiet.
So what was the film like? Well, it was a series of fairly unrelated images, then a bit following a family in the 1950s, then the boy from that family grown up (Sean Penn), then what seemed to be the beginning of the universe, life starting on earth, dinosaurs - which was cool - back to the family, and possibly everyone in the world dying and ending up on a beach, or maybe Sean Penn waking up and it was all a dream.
It's always fun when people walk out of films like this because, you know, it confirms how high-brow I am to have the stamina to make it through. The best film ever for that was Inland Empire that I saw with Mat and Andy back in the UK. Crowds left at the one-, two-, and three-hour marks. Andy suggested we should have a survivors photos at the end. Today one couple lasted for most of it, but left with about twenty minutes to go.
Which is a shame, because they might have enjoyed the old ladies starting up their conversation again, when an image of a field of sunflowers caused one to comment how she never really liked the flower when she was younger, but now finds herself buying them all the time, and would the other lady mind explaining what the whole thing had been about, did the older son die, what was it trying to say?
What it was trying to say, I would have answered had I deliberately tripped her on the way out, is that ultimately we are all alone as we try to impose order on a cruel and random universe. Or that we only find existential meaning and spiritual awakening through the family relationships we build in birth and death. Or simply that dinosaurs are cool.
I contemplated all this as I imposed order on my cruel and random apartment. Perhaps this was a comedy, the joke being that Malick can get me to wait six years since his last film, part with $7 for a ticket, spend over two hours sitting through it all, then ponder it for the rest of the day. Can we know anything in this universe for certain? Only that chocolate Hobnobs improve any situation, and that old people should be seen and not heard.
It has a really nice poster, mind you.
