PG-13, 139 min.
Director/Writer: Terrence
Malick
Starring: Brad Pitt, Sean
Penn, Jessica Chastain, Hunter McCracken, Laramie Eppler, Tye Sheridan, Fiona
Shaw
With the Summer Solstice
upon us, my thoughts have drifted back to Terrence Malick’s 2011 film “The Tree
of Life”. While certainly encompassing a larger scope than just the season in
which many of its events are set, the film is a remarkably summer movie. When
it was set for a summer release date, I questioned it. Malick hardly makes summer
blockbusters. Even though it most certainly wasn’t a blockbuster, summer was
most definitely the right time to release the movie.
With most of its scenes set
during those laconic summer days of childhood in a small Texas town, Malick has
perhaps captured the essence of summer here better than any other filmmaker has
before. Following the daily wanderings of the O’Brien boys, the film—like so
many of Malick’s works—is highly impressionistic. That perhaps is the key to
Malick’s success in conjuring that essence of summer that saturates his images.
My own childhood is really just a series of impressions of memories, and it’s
those summer memories that are somehow the most dreamlike.
I wonder what it is about
childhood summer that does that. Surely the fragmented memories play a role,
but my memories from other seasons seem more concrete, less fantasized. It’s
those summer months where the child exists purely on imagination. There is no
structure of school, no need to engage the brain logically. Our only purpose in
those summer months is to play. It must’ve been the closest thing to dreams any
of us will ever experience in our real world. Malick remembered that from his
own childhood, and put it into his movie. The result may be incomprehensible to
some, but the experience of it must connect with all our childhood summers to
some degree.
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