I watched it tonight and I can say I probably have never seen a movie get so staunchly rejected by its audience. Of course there was the infamous free screening of Only God Forgives that saw literally half the theater get up and leave before the end, but since I had seen the movie beforehand, I knew it would fall completely wrong with those casual plebs. Here we had the liberal "cultural" elite watch a movie by the man who might as well have been their god and hate it. I could feel it in the air too as soon as five minutes into the movie, the movie's narrative being structured in such alienating fashion I knew it would sit well even with the most hardcore Tree Of Life huggers in the room. Fifteen minutes in the man next to me declared in a whisper to the woman he was with that this was a 'fukking shyt movie', and spent the rest of the movie passive-aggressively trying to convince her to leave, in between the occasional deliberate heavy sighs and staring at the floor, presumably contemplating his choices in life. An hour in the girl sitting one seat away from me also declared to the girl she was with that it was a 'shyt movie', and occasionally peaked over to the man beside me in an attempt to bond with him in their misery. By this time five people had already left, and ten minutes before the end another two decided to give up. Before that there was the infamous moment when the chapter titled 'Death' popped up on screen, and the man beside me almost victoriously declared that this shyt must be almost over. You can imagine my joyful happiness when fifteen minutes later, another chapter title popped up, and a collective groan filled the room. It was here that I started contemplating the idea of giving a standing ovation to the movie, for the sole purpose of trolling them of course. I didn't, but I kind of regretted not doing so hearing the uncomfortable laughter across the room as the movie finally ended, they all realized they sat through two hours of incomprehensible thought-imagery with no closure, and one woman declared to her friend that they just sat through pure suffering. The man beside me had already made his way to the aisle, where he found himself staring back at the woman he had come with, who sat rebelliously in her seat watching the credits roll by, and I kinda wanted to shake her hand. It was an all-around joyous affair.
But what about the movie, you may wonder? Is it truly that bad? Of course not, it is actually quite fascinating. To sum up the movie's "plot", it's a slow, pondering mosaic (more of a voice-over montage actually) of a screenwriter lost in the shallow vapidness of the Hollywood lifestyle, while dealing with his love for different women and the struggling relationship with his younger brother and his father. Anyone who's seen Tree Of Life will instantly recognize the connection to Malick's personal life, but it's almost undecipherable what Malick wants to say, and the entire experience is as alienating as it can get. And yet despite this, and maybe because the rest of the audience rejected it so much, it fascinated me. What the hell is Malick attempting to do with these latest movies? Something incredibly brave in fact, the man is no longer making movies for an audience, he's making movies for himself. This mosaic of images is formed from Malick's own thoughts, memories and experiences, and as one look at our own thoughts and memories can tell you, they hold a value and meaning to us that nobody else holds. It's probably the only way the famously reclusive director can deal with his feelings, which is the only correct way to describe the movie, Malick dealing with feelings that he can't deal with in any other way. The man has become a poet, whose stray thoughts and feelings form cinematic poetry, and like most poetry, you'll be lucky to make any sense of it, assuming that you can muster up the interest to actually try and care about it (after all, what's the last time you sat down and thought about poetry, not counting that one Simpsons Treehouse Of Horror episode sparking a minor interest in Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven of course). You have to be willing to sit there and try to understand another man's feelings to gain anything from this movie, because if you can't, even the Lubezki cinematography won't manage to make you get through this. But if you can, and devote your time to it, you might learn something from it. If that is something you want from a movie.
Two hours of Christian Bale walking around LA and swimming with a suit on