The imagery of Terrence Malick's 2011 masterpiece has borne plentiful fruit – for better or for worse.
Any music theatre practitioner worth their salt will tell you that, in a musical, the characters sing when they can no longer talk, and dance when they can no longer sing. The idea being that when a certain form of expression fails to adequately express a feeling, another picks up the task. In the Best Picture nominated film Train Dreams, Adolpho Veloso’s camera expresses what its subject, the reclusive Robert Grainer played by Joel Edgerton, cannot. It moves when the action no longer speaks for itself. But the ends of Veloso’s virtuosic camera and Grainer’s tormented psyche rarely seem to meet.
A similar practice took place 15 years ago in Terence Malick’s long-awaited The Tree of Life. In it, the tormented psyche of our protagonist Jack (Sean Penn) is displaced onto Emmanuel Lubezki’s camera, which dances when Jack can no longer sing, so to speak. Malick’s film was divisive for its experimental qualities during its theatrical run. Yet it has maintained a tight grasp on the aesthetic sensibilities of both narrative and commercial production for over a decade. So tight that my friend Kevan, a Canadian filmmaker, often quips that nearly every dramatic commercial made since 2011 is influenced by The Tree of Life.
Train Dreams is arguably the most down to earth of this year’s Oscar runup, and likely the cheapest Best Picture nominee after The Secret Agent, made for $5 million. It was made on a comparatively minuscule budget (below $10 million), and tells the story of a man who lives with humility in a world that grows large around him. In director Clint Bentley’s words, the goal of adapting Denis Johnson’s novella, was “Taking a little life that would otherwise be forgotten, and showing all the depth and beauty of it.” Among the directors Bentley cited as his inspiration for the project, the person who comes up most often is Malick and, watching Train Dreams, it’s undeniable that his influence looms large.
The Tree of Life centres on Jack’s childhood in 1950s’ Texas under the rule of his authoritarian father (Brad Pitt) and doting but passive mother (Jessica Chastain) in the years leading up to the premature death of his younger, more assimilable brother. Jumping between this and an adult Jack still grappling with this loss, the film takes daring detours (some stretching to 17 minutes in length) into the gaseous multicoloured origins of earth, meteorites, and babbling brooks populated by dinosaurs. While so unconventional as to apparently necessitate warnings from theatre managers when it first came out, Malick diverts our attention from the small drama of Jack’s life to rub together the concepts of birth and death. He juxtaposes the galactic with the mundane to explore the dialectically minute and grand character of human existence.
Malick, a graduate of Harvard’s philosophy department, featured similarly philosophical conventions and naturalistic cinematography in his earlier works like Badlands and Days of Heaven. But The Tree of Life manifests these devices in a more experiential capacity by infiltrating the senses of the viewer. Lubezki’s camera takes an almost POV angle to its surroundings, and places just as much importance on leaves or curtains blowing into the home or the sun webbing through the treetops as it does to its human subjects. The film simulates memory, forgoing narrative structure and instead jolting between various associative images. The Tree of Life has been described as kaleidoscopic, a ‘tone poem’, and a work of neo-expressionism that defies categorization altogether. Even the New Yorker’s David Denby, who called the film “insufferable” in his review, admitted that, years after its release, “the movie will be remembered as a freshening, even a reinvention, of film language.”
The Tree of Life was so singular in its vision that it established a legacy which is infinitely repeatable, yet impossible to exact. Even Malick himself has struggled to recreate its glory. The film has such an essence that, once you move past the alleged solipsism and surrender to its majesty, you experience a brush with the sublime. Even so, its once-innovative style, so choppy and expressionistic, can be easily divorced from the sublimity it wishes to evoke.
Recently, I pushed Kevan on his claim about the film’s stranglehold over commercials. Surely he was exaggerating. To my surprise, however, he tells me that in his own extensive experience with directing commercials, the influence is very literal. Commercials are a limited medium – they’re restricted by the needs of corporate clients, time constraints, and minimal dialogue. It’s thus, by necessity, a heavily visual medium. So commercial directors often work with visualists, people who pull images from all over the place and create visual decks from which to build upon, often on softwares like Shot Deck and Frame Set. And Kevan laments that, “Especially within the decade after the movie, it got to a point where you’d actually have to tell [these visualists] ‘I don't want anything from Tree of Life.”
It’s commonplace in the making of dramatic commercials, Kevan tells me, for clients to ask for a style known as “elevated documentary.” This gives the commercials a look of cinematic prestige while still being able to shoot with real people, which is why The Tree of Life, with its associative imagery and natural lighting, appears frequently in the decks. As a consequence of these limitations, its visual language becomes an easy shorthand for profundity.
This visual language can be seen in a vast range of advertising: a Barossa Valley tourism campaign, a four-minute film to promote Volvo’s “Made in Sweden” campaign, a star-studded ad for Gucci Bloom, or even an uncharacteristically sentimental Walmart commercial. Jump to any dramatic commercial made in the past decade or so, and it's likely you will find The Tree of Life in there, from whispers to direct imitation. Kevan himself has directed some of his own.
Kevan’s view of the commercial advertising industry is a rather cynical one: “Commercial advertising doesn’t push culture forward. It follows it.” Aided by advances in digital technology, it’s easier than ever for directors to mimic profundity without clocking in the years it took Malick to make his masterpiece. The utter volume of the style alone has proven that it’s a rather profitable venture.
Commercial advertising is not the only medium to be smitten with The Tree of Life. Its influence appears in narrative filmmaking as well. Before Train Dreams, there was Beasts of the Southern Wild, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Waves, Nickel Boys, and most recently Hamnet among others – all of which speak Malick’s language, to varying extent and effect.
Like The Tree of Life, Train Dreams is a similar meditation on grief that is both minute and grand in scale. Grainer is an introverted railworker who is briefly taken from his solitude when he starts a family with his freespirited wife, Gladys (Felicity Jones), but is quickly shoved back into the dark when she and their young daughter Kate are killed in a wildfire. His devastation keeps him chained, for better or worse, to a life of hermitude at a time where societal change was moving at an unprecedented pace.
Train Dreams is a sweet film. You come to genuinely like Grainer, you want to help him, maybe reach through the screen and hug him. But watching it I was struck by two things. First, by its palpable reverence for The Tree of Life. Second, for the rather dispassionate response it evoked in me, when compared to my experience watching Malick’s film. There are techniques shared by both films that once left Robert De Niro’s Cannes jury so dumbfounded they awarded The Tree of Life the Palme d’Or for the simple fact that it “ultimately fit the bill.” But I was not at a loss for words watching Train Dreams, and instead felt that the film’s meditative and expressionistic cinematography actually kept me at a distance from the psyche of this already opaque character.
The Tree of Life comes through not only in Train Dreams’ ruminations on a little life, but also, as mentioned, its cinematography. It opens with that classic Malickian tracking shot. It’s filmed predominantly amidst nature, following behind characters as they move through the bush or lingering on tall grass being prodded by the wind. The POV shots are there too, fisheyeing onto a falling tree; on a woman sitting with her back to us at the front of a wagon. Almost everything is touched only by natural light. Associative imagery appears mostly in sequences where (like Jack) Grainer is grieving. The disembodied voice of his wife (like Jack’s mother) echoing around him as we cut to non-diegetic glimpses of their time together, sutured together like memory. Veloso confirmed in a chat with the American Society of Cinematographers that this was all in service of a documentary-esque, naturalistic feel. But the effect is detached.
Sometimes that detachment is intentional. Bentley shoots all of the violence from a literal distance, whether it's a Chinese railworker being hurled to his death from atop a bridge, a logger being shot by a vigilante, or a tree branch falling on someone’s head. These moments are always filmed at a wide, static angle. And Train Dreams has different goals than The Tree of Life – it follows a cohesive narrative and it’s less galactic in scale. But it possesses a desire for spiritual inquiry that requires an affected response from the audience. The film’s final shot of Grainer flying in a plane is clearly intended to pull at heartstrings – my heartstrings were pulled, but I did not feel embodied in that feeling. The Tree of Life also embarks on this spiritual inquiry, but it’s sensorial. Its images are somatic.
Train Dreams’ images, however, live only in the mind. Bentley is at his most Malick-y when he wants to bring us closer to the action, but whenever he does so, my thoughts drift elsewhere. Now trained in the visual language of commercials – half a life’s worth of it – I can’t help but see Train Dreams hitting all the same beats of Barossa or Volvo in extended succession. The ennui and wistfulness and introspection of images meant to tell a legible story are shortchanged whenever they evoke the corporate montage of commercials with which I’ve become all too familiar. When the camera pushes in as Rainer embraces Gladys after returning from work, the mind goes to an airline promising to bring loved ones home for the holidays. When it focuses upon their hands as they touch, I think of SSRIs. I go from a shot of a logger on his lunch break to thinking of sustainably sourced eggs; from a pan towards the face of Grainer’s cherubic daughter to thoughts of Huggies. From Gladys’ finger tracing her husband’s naked spine to perfume; from Grainer chopping wood on the wreckage of his home to an athlete in training for the winter Olympics.
Bentley has made the least commercially viable film of this year’s Best Picture nominees – his movie is quaint, quiet, and made on a tiny budget. Purchased by Netflix at Sundance, it stands in stark opposition to the characteristically shiny look of its distributor’s typical fare (del Toro’s backlit Frankenstein is the latest victim of ‘the Netflix sheen’). Train Dreams look should signal genuine prestige among a too-smooth film vernacular. But in moments where the film attempts to signify rawness and intimacy, the viewer is driven away. What was once a powerfully felt image is now polished over, laminated with a corporate gloss.
It’s difficult to tell if this is a shortcoming of Bentley’s, or if Malick’s style has become so devalued and worn down by overuse that it’s now completely abstracted from meaning. In a time where AI has left the Image more disempowered than ever, vomiting up an endless stream of pseudo-realist “content” designed to be disposed of mere moments after consumption, it’s difficult not to question the consequences of mimicry. Already co-opted for commercial gain, perhaps there will even come a time where The Tree of Life’s sublime images will be bastardized by the machine, for the simple fact of their ubiquity in our visual vernacular. It’s probably happened already.
Since Malick’s evocative imagery has made the rounds through a medium where the meaning of images is always redirected to the goal of buying things, when it finally makes its way back into narrative film its value is diminished. It's a depreciating image. So watching Train Dreams, a pure-hearted reference to The Tree of Life, those images lose their power before they ever have time to sink in. Perhaps a narrative film that sows upon well-trodden ground is, like commercials, only following culture rather than pushing it. It would be reductive to suggest that a filmmaker could never be influenced by Malick without sacrificing the profundity of their film, or that any commercial which uses a certain style will inherently diminish its effect. But one can’t help but question the lineage of images, and the ways they are dropped or mangled every so often by the hands that pass them down.
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