Now on Screen: The Tree of Life, Super 8, Submarine

By John Semley

Because Toronto’s more movie obsessed than a Quentin Tarantino screenplay (yuk yuk), Torontoist brings you Now on Screen, a weekly roundup of new releases.
A few major releases this week, from both sides of the American cinema spectrum (hence, some meaty reviews). First up is Terrence Malick’s Palme d’Or–winning The Tree of Life, which Malick enthusiasts are bound to adore. Next is J.J. Abrams’ coming-out party, Super 8, which enthusiasts of summer blockbusters (and summer blockbuster nostalgia) are bound to adore. Then there’s Submarine, which is precocious and stupid.

The Tree of Life Directed by Terrence Malick

Super 8 Directed by J.J. Abrams

Submarine Directed by Richard Ayoade

The Tree of Life is an astonishing film. Chockablock with Malick’s trademarks (hushed voiceover, willowy fingers brushing over tall grass, cinematography that will leave you gasping), it’s a singular expression of its director’s sensibility. Loosed from the bonds of narrative that at least pretended to shackle his previous work, Tree’s roots touch everything from metaphysics to the existence of God to the poetics of loss, its branches rambling out in countless other directions. And its sheer sense of enormity makes it the most grandly ambitious American motion picture since the last Terrence Malick movie.
Tree opens first on a quote from the Book of Job, then bleeds to a quivering, kaleidoscopic light, then cuts to a modern, mid–20th century Texas home. Mrs. O’Brien (Jessica Chastain) answers the door to receive a telegram informing her that he son has died. Devastated, she stalks the neighbourhood streets tear-streaked, adrift in her own grief, while her square-jawed husband (Brad Pitt) tails close behind, keeping a stern vigil of consolation. Cut then again to Jack (Sean Penn), an architect who seems similarly unmoored amidst the looming glass and steel of the big city. Jack is the oldest son of Mr. and Mrs. O’Brien, now fully grown. It is the anniversary of his brother’s death. He lights a candle.
Tree bobs and weaves for an extended section through Jack’s memories and, indeed, the whole collective memory of all existence. Dwarfing the speedy “How did I get here?” montage from Spike Jonze’s Adaptation (“Hollywood, CA Four Billion and Forty Years Earlier”), Malick treats us to engulfing shots of the entire universe’s formation, of stars and planets taking shape, and even of an especially sympathetic dinosaur, before bringing us back to mid-century Texas and the birth of Jack. It’s here that Tree settles into a more-or-less straight-ahead procession of memories depicting Jack’s birth, the arrival of his brothers, his first inklings of competition, and the quarrelling presences of his kind, loving, ever-graceful mother and exacting, short-tempered father.
Anyone who would fault Malick for being more interested in the lives of trees or dinosaurs or whole galaxies than in human characters would have a tough time reconciling their grumbles with these wonderful bits. Not only is Pitt fiercely convincing in the role of Father-As-Rule-of-Nature, but the scenes of a young Jack (Hunter McCracken) being torn between his parental influences, exploring his own rebelliousness, and experiencing disgust at his bubbling sexuality (he breaks into a neighbour’s house to riffle through her unmentionables, only to ashamedly drown one of her stolen nighties in a nearby creek) betray a deep, resonant humanity. As ever, Malick proves himself incapable of framing an unremarkable shot. He tosses off instantly memorable vignettes (the kindly prehistoric predator, neighbourhood kids frolicking in the waft of a passing truck spraying DDT, the birth of the entire universe) with a kind of flippant humility that speaks to the vastness of his artistry. A flood of insects caught in an updraft above a cityscape seems almost to sneer at the comparative puniness of the famous locusts scene in Malick’s earlier Days of Heaven.
As grand and vast and ambitious and non-puny as it is, though, Tree of Life does nag. Even hardened admirers (and I’m one) of Malick’s delicately auteured narrative abandon may grow weary through the extended scenes of planets and life forming, which seem at points like an overlong screensaver. Without something stricter to hew to, Malick’s lyricism just kind of floats there. Like David Lynch’s no less sprawling INLAND EMPIRE from a few years ago, Tree of Life is all artistic quirk and conceit without any of the scaffolding. That said, for fans (or, maybe more appropriately, celebrants) of Malick’s idiosyncrasies, there’s plenty to savour.
Tree of Life opens Friday, June 10, in limited release. Click here for showtimes. It will open Friday, June 17, for a limited engagement at the TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West) as part of their Terrence Malick retrospective. For showtimes, and for our exhaustive debrief of Malick’s films, click here.

Comparisons between J.J. Abrams’ ostensible coming-out film—the first he’s directed from his own screenplay, and his first not based on an existing property—and the films of Steven Spielberg will abound. And not only because Spielberg, who executive produced Super 8, shares the marquee with Abrams. And not because Super 8 plays out like E.T. if E.T. was a prequel to Cloverfield. More pointedly, what Super 8 capably accomplishes is that wide-eyed sense of little-kid wonder that defines the scope of many of Spielberg’s better blockbusters. What Abrams lacks, though, is that masterful sense of story-telling that Spielberg has adroitly managed, in all his better efforts, to pair off productively with all the razzle and dazzle. Because Abrams is essentially a master of misdirection: part carnival barker, part con artist—an exceptionally skilled grifter working a cinematic Three-card Monte game.
Set in the summer of 1979 in a podunk Pennsylvania steel town, Abrams brings the full weight of early blockbuster filmmaking into frame. Super 8 opens on a gaggle of Goonies-ish friends (some late-game spelunking justifies the comparison) trying to finish their cheapie zombie movie in time for a local film festival. There’s the stout, autocratic director (Riley Griffiths) struggling to shoehorn some stuff about love into his screenplay (“Because that makes it a story”), the pint-sized pyromaniac FX expert (Ryan Lee), and our main heroes, makeup and model-building whiz Joe (Joel Courtney) and leading-lady love interest Alice (Elle Fanning).
While shooting one night near the local railroad tracks, the gang witnesses a massive train derailment, which leaves the hillside scattered with debris and mysterious Rubik’s Cube–looking silver blocks, one of which Joel pockets. The train-wreck sequence is masterful, evoking (like a later scene of our plucky heroes ducking and weaving through an ad hoc warzone) Alex Poryas’s crackerjack single-take plane crash in Know1ng. The U.S. Air Force—armed with guns, flamethrowers, and secret CB radio frequencies—arrive to clean up the accident, just as people around the town start disappearing.
To say too much about Super 8 is to betray the air of secrecy its director has worked so diligently to craft. Abrams excels in his the first two acts, when he can revel in slowly pulling back on his curtain. Super 8 gives all kinds of gleeful hints: a missing microwave here, an unfurling tentacle seen through a rear-view mirror there. And it’s all perfectly sweet and funny and somehow quintessentially American in a way that is thoroughly Spielbergian. Abrams, though, trades more in bewilderment than wonder. When he’s pulled the rug back as far as it can go and must get down to the business of tying up the many dangling threads he’s laid out, Super 8 feels rushed. The motivations get sloppy (bad blood between two fathers is settled just because the script says so) and the characterization of the man-eating monster seems confused. There’s no doubt that Abrams is eminently capable of goading an audience to the edge of their seats. But, as with his Star Trek (which lapsed into lazy time-travel paradoxes and new colours of matter and two whole Spocks as it raced towards resolution), he still seems either incapable or plain disinterested in bringing them through to climax.
Super 8 opens Friday, June 10, in wide release. Click here for showtimes.

Look up the word “twee” in the dictionary and, next to a picture of me puking, you’ll find a picture of Oliver Tate, the oh-so-precious adolescent hero of Submarine. The feature-length debut of Richard Ayoade, known for the overrated Channel 4 sitcom The IT Crowd, Submarine is a desperately quirky coming-of-age film crammed with flat emotions, precocious adolescents, painstakingly esoteric production design, and all the other worst forms of Wes Anderson tack.
Our protagonist, Oliver (Craig Roberts), is a 15-year-old social misfit living in Wales. After reluctantly taking part in a bullying incident, he earns the affections of outcast it-girl Jordana (Yasmin Paige) and the two spend their days doing cutesy bullshit like holding hands and running around with sparklers and watching the sun set behind the well-manicured post-industrial wastes. When he’s not being adorable with Jordana, or carefully curating his own personal affectations, Oliver frets over the schism between his parents (Noah Taylor and Sally Hawkins), which has been exacerbated by his mother’s ex-lover, mullet-haired mystic Graham (Paddy Considine), moving in next door.
Like Anderson, and Noah Baumbach, Ayoade treats characters like cardboard cut-outs in some hollow diorama version of real life. When emotions do intrude on the film (as when it’s revealed that Jordana’s mother is terminally ill), they’re treated with a kind of unsettling coolness, as if they’re just that: interruptions. The film is boosted considerably by both Taylor and Considine (again proving himself Brit film’s MVP, ravenously chewing up any role he’s awarded). But even their strong comic moments won’t stall the eye-rolling. Maybe, though, if you’ve ever run through a junkyard at twilight with a sparkler, or are otherwise insufferable, you may find something redeeming in Submarine. Something like the dead-eyed reflection of the self-styled smug estimation of your own intellect and uniqueness.
Submarine opens Friday, June 10 in limited release. for showtimes.