2011 in Review, Part II: Challenges

Earlier this month we offered a review of the seismic shifts in exhibition that characterized the last year. This week we offer a personal assessment of the films themselves.

Moviegoing is most exasperating at the end of the year. The anointed awards contenders trickle out and carry with them a sense of obligation. I wind up seeing things not because I want to see them, exactly, but because I can’t bring myself to concede the conversation, however trumped-up and market-driven that conversation may be. Nevertheless, everyone has to draw the line somewhere. I can’t summon anything but apathy for The Iron Lady or Albert Nobbs. And if my understanding of cinema is impoverished by skipping Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, I can live with that, too. (I wouldn’t want any part in a cinema where Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close was axiomatic.) Criticism, in general, would be better if we dropped the mantle of objectivity and laid out these prejudices up front.

VOLATILE OBJECTS
Expectations are pernicious things. The first time I saw The Tree of Life, I came in with sky-high expectations and left bewildered, actively irritated by its structure, its implicit claims to importance, its unexamined masculinity, its daffy spirituality. I couldn’t imagine sitting through it again (I wouldn’t want any part in a cinema where …), but I did just that the next week with a friend, who had more or less the same reaction I did the first time. But my own experience with it changed considerably: the jangled bits and pieces began to reveal larger structures, flash-forwards registered as such, the arbitrary became deliberate and deeply felt. And, more importantly, the major thing it describes—slowly outgrowing pre-digested notions of family and recognizing the profound injustice of an inherited order—emerged with painful clarity. That Malick records this acid disenchantment while simultaneously positing this very straight model of a mid-century Texas family as a plausible epicenter of the universe (or, more democratically, just as capable of unraveling its cosmic mysteries as anyone else) makes The Tree of Life a maddening, infinitely volatile object. (I’m afraid to see it a third time; in any case, I’ve come to prefer The Future, in which Miranda July deals with many similar issues on a more modest scale. It also describes a specific generational listlessness about the current recession with great acuteness.)