Tree of Life or Will It Never End?

Sorry for anyone who was blown away by Tree of Life. I though it was boooooorrrrrrring! Roger Ebert gave it four stars, which usually means a lot to me, but this time I just think he's waxing nostalgic on his own childhood. He loves the realness of the scenes of the kids playing. I see this realness every day in an unlocked house and a big lawn not too different than the movie. I can watch this in real life from my porch. But watching kids get into mischief for 139 minutes is not my idea of a good time.

To be fair, the A/C in the theatre was set to freeze, and two women sat down in front of me just as the movie started, in a packed house, smothered in perfume. That coupled with the jerky camera movements, and I wasn't feeling great to begin with. But I actually considered leaving at the 90 minute mark. From 90 to 139, I was checking my watch compulsively. Every time the screen went still or dark for a second, I whispered, "Please let it be over," under my breath. BUT IT NEVER WAS!

Okay, it was eventually, but geesh!

If you're going to see it, and you're thinking of leaving half way through, I'm here to tell you, you won't miss anything. Go ahead. Just stand up and walk out.

Here's the gist of it: A family in the 50s has three boys. One dies likely in Vietnam, and we don't know which one until the end, but I didn't really care by then. We get to watch how the mother resigns herself to this tragedy. She's very religious and the film starts out with a quote from Job, and there's a sermon in the middle about Job in case you didn't catch the parallels to the movie yet. (Job's the dude that God is a jerk to just to see if he'd still be faithful to him. Well, Christians would say God isn't a jerk to him, He just allows the devil to mess with him. Same difference.) Anyway, there's flashes back and forth between this family, and a son 40 years later or so - I didn't catch which one it was as I watched, so I'll leave that out even though IMDB has his name listed - who is still trying to get his head around the death of his brother decades earlier.

But here and there throughout the movie there are montages of the birth of the world and evolution complete with dinosaurs and video footage of cells moving in a body. We are to be reminded that we're part of everything, or we're just specks in the grand scheme of things, or that how we look at a flock of birds flying in the wind - as a single unit - may be how God looks at us or how we should look at ourselves. We are everything and nothing. Dying sucks, but it's part of life.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: If you want to see a really good movie about the grief that hangs over a family after the death of a child, watch Rabbit Hole. If you like the whole we are nothing and everything bit, then watch Mr. Nobody, or this (the relevant bit starts at 3:42)....

Chaos Theory

I watched two movies that fit together quite nicely, and both really spoke to me: The Butterfly Effect (strongly advocated by my brother or I never would have gone there) and Rabbit Hole directed by John Cameron Mitchell of my favourite film of all time: Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

There's a part in Rabbit Hole where Kidman is given a comic book created by the guy who killed her kid, and I was so afraid her husband would destroy it. I didn't care nearly as much about the kid as I did about that piece of artwork. Make a copy dammit!! He worked so hard on that. These people are not to be trusted - they're too angry and broken to be rational! Get it out of that house! Spoiler alert: the comic book was safe.

Okay, real spoiler alerts from here on in:

The Butterfly Effect is about a guy who blacks out from time to time, and realizes that he can go back to these blackout sections of time to alter the future. But what he discovers is that no matter what he does, it never makes the future perfect. He can get close, but there's always someone damaged or suffering. He decides it's best if it's him. An honourable gesture, and it all works out in the end, I guess, except he and his girl aren't together - and she was pretty happy with him.

But the take-home message is that it will never be perfect. There will always be some suffering. Deal with it. And we can never really be in control of it all. Even if you can go back to the past to save the world, you can't know how your actions there will affect everyone. Marty McFly's parents got sporty. Who knew?

Rabbit Hole is about a couple who lost their child to a car accident - hit by a teenage driver right in front of their house. The teen writes a comic book about parallel universes. After Kidman rails against the God-lovers who thinks children die because God needs more angels, her mom (Dianne Wiest - I wish she was my mom) tells her everyone needs a form of comfort. Something. For some people it's God. Give them a break already.

Kidman reads more about this parallel universe stuff, and it's clear she gets some comfort from the idea that it's possible there's a different version of her, and her family, somewhere else, and in that version they're all happy and safe. This is just the sad version here. That really helps her cope with it all.  (It reminds me a lot of the Chaos episode of Community.)

Neither of those work for me, but I feel really good when I walk about outside and look at the trees and the moon. It's the same moon that you see too. It hangs out there for the whole world to see. It's constant - more or less. Nature reminds me of how small and insignificant I really am - but I mean that in the best possible way. My problems are petty little blips in the grand scheme of things. Nothing compares with eternity. And I'm part of this eternity - this galaxy. I'm larger than it all. And smaller too.

And that's okay.