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IAR Cannes Wrap Up: On Day 6, 'Tree of Life' Premieres and Dwayne Johnson is a ...

Over the weekend, all the talk at the Cannes Film Festival apparently shifted from Meryl Streep, We Need to Talk About Kevin , and The Wettest Country in the World to the impending premiere of The Tree of Life , the latest existential opus from reclusive auteur Terrence Malick .  The film was initially set to debut at last year's festival, but Malick, ever the fine-tuner, did not have a cut ready to screen.  So it was with great anticipation that Tree of Life had its first screening with the big-name cast in attendance.  The reaction was almost exactly what you'd expect.  Meanwhile, in the acquisitions department, a lucky distributor now has Wettest Country and Summit Entertainment nabbed the rights to Snitch , starring erstwhile The Rock Dwayne Johnson .

When you think of glamorous movie premieres, you generally think of flashbulbs and giant lights ostentatiously heralding to the universe at large that something really cool is happening here , but The Tree of Life screened bright and early at 8:30 am.  That doesn't mean there was any shortage of glamour, however, as International Movie Stars and Professional Good Looking Couple Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie strutted down the red carpet together.  Pitt's costars Sean Penn and Jessica Chastain were also on hand, though Terrence Malick was notably absent, on account of shyness.  Festival President Giles Jacob made an appearance, as did Rob Lowe , Rupert Murdoch , and jury member Jude Law .

Discussion about the film set expectations ridiculously high, with ecstatic fest-goers already talking about Oscar inevitability and redefinitions of cinema itself, prior to having seen the movie itself.  The massive Lumiere Theatre was completely packed by 8:30, but when the credits rolled some 138 minutes later, the audience was divided.  Some booed, while others applauded in response.  Many reviews have been positive, but plenty of complaints have emerged that the film is digressive, which makes me wonder if these folks have ever seen a Terrence Malick film before.

Cannes reactions are notoriously hyperbolic and often not in keeping with the eventual critical and wide audience response, but the polarized Cannes crowd actually increases my interest in the film, and will temper the hopes of those waiting for a transcendence of the entire medium.

The Tree of Life Reviews: 'Visionary Cinema, Shockingly Banal ...

“It also serves as a reminder of how few contemporary filmmakers engage questions of life and death, God and soul, and risk such questioning without the crutch of an obvious story. It isn’t that these life questions aren’t asked in our movies; they are, if sometimes obliquely. Rather it’s the directness of Mr. Malick’s engagement with them that feels so surprising at this moment, and that goes against the mainstream filmmaking grain.”

“there will be other people warning you not to waste your time. Those people are wrong. This is a film that actually manages to be about all of life: the triumphs, the tragedies, the tiniest moments, the mistakes that define us and therefore must be embraced. Leaving the theater today, we felt compelled to pause and look around, marveling at the choices and happenstance — both good and bad over 30 years — that had led us to the incredible luck of being here in Cannes, standing on the steps of the Palais, exiting a Terrence Malick movie. Point well made, Mr. Malick. Point well made.”

“The Tree of Life has plenty of incident but, despite Pitt’s memorably bullying performance, very little human interest. (The best bit has a bunch of boys launching a frog in a bottle rocket.) Malick’s craftsmanship may be everywhere evident but, however flashy and intermittently beautiful, his filmmaking can be shockingly banal.”

“a massively ambitious work of allegorical and almost experimental cinema that seeks to recapture the lived experience of a 1950s family, after the fashion of a Texas Proust, and connect it to the life of the universe, the nature and/or existence of God, the evolution of life on earth and even the microscopic chemistry and biology of life.”

“Tree of Life represents the greatest expression of heady Malickian concepts, which usually involve humanity adrift in the chaos of the universe and the meaning of everything (or lack thereof)…Few other filmmakers can work on this scale without some compromises, but Malick manages to deviate from his cross-generational family drama with cosmically endowed CGI visuals recounting the beginning and end of time. The movie’s very existence means he got away with it, even if audiences expecting something familiar throw up their hands. Others (myself included) will find Malick’s spectacular vision as mesmerizing and provocative as he undoubtedly intends.”

“If we are, as Woody Allen recently suggested (and Nietzsche a century before), no more than ‘specks of light in an eternal void,’ in Tree of Life you feel Malick grasping at those flickering particles, turning them to and fro, examining their elemental structure. You don’t watch this movie so much as you surrender to it.

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