Part of Milestones of the Last Quarter Century
Sundays at the Belcourt can hold a special place, particularly for the spiritually minded whose approach to betterment might be more inclined toward touching the sublime through immersion of art. In the world of American cinema, one such filmmaker — though there are others — would find a home on the Lord’s day. As the Nashville Scene’s dearly departed editor and film critic Jim Ridley (we’ll come back to Jim) noted at the top of his review of THE TREE OF LIFE: “Nothing makes people hate Terrence Malick’s movies more than someone describing Terrence Malick’s movies, in the tone of a stranger trying to wedge a religious tract under your door.” Jim goes on to say, “So if I were to say something about how THE TREE OF LIFE, Malick’s fifth movie in a 38-year career, attempts nothing less than to fuse the individual and the universal while portraying the life force that binds man to the first cellular organisms on earth, what I really want to say is, ‘Why am I sitting here crying at a shot of a bug fogger?’”
At its core, THE TREE OF LIFE is the story of a family in Waco, TX circa mid-1950s. Among others, it stars Brad Pitt, Sean Penn, Jessica Chastain and Tye Sheridan in his feature debut. In the month leading up to its 2011 summer-long run, we preceded THE TREE OF LIFE with Malick’s prior filmography. Closing out his review, Jim wrote, “For people who’ve taken in Terrence Malick’s entire directorial career over the past month at the Belcourt, one shot emerges in film after film: the camera gazing into the treetops or through blades of grass at the sky beyond. It has an effect something like the spires on a Gothic cathedral — your eye follows from the earth to the heavens, until the earth vanishes completely. So if people who love Malick’s movies tend to talk about them in those heady terms, cut us some slack. After too many nights facing the dulled power of movies, we’re just happy again to be believers.”
“An eruption of a movie, something to live with, think, and talk about afterward.” —Nick Pinkerton, Village Voice (May 25, 2001) “It is like Wordsworth’s Intimations of Immortality transported into the world of “Leave It to Beaver,” an inadequate and perhaps absurd formulation but one that I hope conveys the full measure of my astonishment and admiration…. There are very few films I can think of that convey the changing interior weather of a child’s mind with such fidelity and sensitivity. Nor are there many that penetrate so deeply into the currents of feeling that bind and separate the members of a family.” —A.O. Scott, New York Times (May 26, 2011)
