Here's a wonderful video essay written by Dipnot.tv film critic, Far-Flung Correspondent, House Next Door contributor, longtime Scanners commenter and International Man of Mystery Ali Arikan, and edited by writer/photographer and Press Play producer Ken Cancelosi. As far as I'm concerned, it makes the case -- and does so even without including my personal favorite scene from "Moneyball"! (I think he should have been nominated for supporting actor in "The Tree of Life," too.)

Ali writes:

There is real mystery to Pitt's take on Billy Beane. He loves the game, but knows the game is changing. He knows he has to get wins in order to keep his job, and is more than willing to modernize for that reason. But he also knows there is something you can't calculate about the game of baseball. The scenes of Pitt driving to work or sitting in the locker room show a man who is constantly trying to figure out the odds and knowing deep down that there are some things you can't figure out.

... He brings to the role an assured quality on overzealous, yet understated, lust for ultimate success that was forged in the fires of years and years of failure. He's charming and cheeky and funny, and very good looking (despite the hideous early naughties' haircut and lumbering fashion sense). Pitt brings a subtle comedic take to what could have been a rather boring central role; his various dealings with other managers, his scouts and players, betray genius-level timing and mimicry.

OK, I really wouldn't mind seeing Gary Oldman win for "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy," either -- but this was Pitt's year.

There, that wasn't so painful, was it? After all the hype coming out of Cannes (and especially since Harvey Weinstein got his mitts on it for U.S. distribution/Oscar promotion), I'd been kind of dreading "The Artist." Like "Hugo," it just sounded too "charming and delightful" -- and, to paraphrase Lou Grant, I hate "charming and delightful." (Usually because, for me, that ends up translating into "strained and unctuous.") But "The Artist" turns out to be a fairly benign, occasionally clever little musical/romantic comedy/melodrama. (I would not consider it, strictly speaking, a "silent," since it relies on synchronized Foley effects in some scenes -- to pointedly dramatize the Invasion of the Talkies -- and even a few words of recorded dialog.)*

I can understand why it appeals so much to Academy voters: It displays great affection for actors and a nostalgic love for the lost grandeur of the movies in general; it addresses anxieties about how new technologies are once again changing the movie business; it's the only Best Picture nominee shot entirely in Los Angeles (something TWC's Oscar campaign is playing up, big-time).

This has nothing to do with exalting the best films have to offer in a given year--and worse, it's unfair to a movie like "The Artist," which deserves better than to be batted around by oddsmakers or petty little twits like myself who are reacting more to its promotion than its substance.

Well, we all understand that. It's human nature to respond to aggressive publicity and hyperbole one way or another, and sometimes extraneous events make it difficult to experience a movie as just a movie (think "Twilight," "The Dark Knight," "Avatar," "Slumdog Millionaire," "The King's Speech"...). A picture that you might otherwise have recalled only occasionally or vaguely, if you ever thought about it again at all, becomes unavoidable when popularity and/or publicity boosts it into the larger, extended pop-culture conversation. It just keeps popping up in your face for weeks or months. That's when some people either attempt to restore perspective by (intentionally or not) exaggerating their initial reservations, or choose to dismiss it simply because they're so sick of hearing about it. Totally understandable.

So, OK, let me mention a few things that I genuinely liked about "The Artist" -- which, although it has already become a pariah in some circles, is not an actively evil movie like Paul Haggis's Oscar-winning "Crash." A year after Natalie Portman won an Oscar for "Black Swan," in which her face was digitally applied to a professional ballet dancer's body (how much was actually Portman has not been determined, but estimates range between 15 percent and 95 percent), it's nice to see two Oscar-nominated lead actors (Bérénice Bejo and Jean Dujardin) who can really dance, playing performers who would likely have had some dance training (because that was a basic skill many well-rounded actors were expected to possess in those days).

The story may be simple, but the theme -- about trying to hang on to the past -- is probably universal. And the scene in which movie star George Valentin falls for dance extra Peppy Miller on the set, over repeated takes of a long dolly shot, plays with the ability of film to repeat and replay pieces of time, with variations -- as in "Groundhog Day" or "Run Lola Run" or "Source Code." (Later, Peppy will re-create this treasured memory-scene by holding a ribbon of film in her hands...)

"The Artist" has some lovely gags:

... the bit where Peppy, in a private reverie, makes out with George's empty jacket while it hangs on a coatrack (I like the placement of the mirror, too; you keep expecting something or someone to appear in it)...

... the scene on the stairs in the atrium of the unmistakable Bradbury Building, with Peppy ascending, George descending, and others busily going up and down, this way and that, as if this were not a dream factory but the one from Chaplin's "Modern Times" -- anothernon-silent, synchronized-sound "silent" ...

... George's drunken hallucination of his tiny jungle-safari self with a cadre of native warriors from his final silent flop, "Tears of Love" (the tilted picture on the wall accents his drunkenness)...

What's missing, though, is much sense of the actual aesthetics of Hollywood silents in the teens and '20s -- or how the technological limitations of sound contributed to the staginess of many early talkies. (Leave that to "Singin' In the Rain," I guess...)

"The Artist" doesn't add up to much but a mildly amusing matinee (and I detest the wholesale appropriation of about eight minutes of Bernard Herrmann's "Vertigo" score) -- but I give director Michel Hazanavicius some credit for exhibiting a little more visual imagination than some of today's vaunted "visionary" filmmakers -- the ones I refer to as the "one-thing-at-a-time" directors, who conceptualize in flat visual planes, with very little interplay between foreground and background and a single point of visual interest per moment, per shot. That makes for some very dull "motion" pictures.

Look at the climactic moment from the movie-within-the-movie that starts the picture: George's character is being tortured with twin Tesla coil by a pair of evil scientists -- and the shot plays out on multiple levels with more 3D effects than you'll see in the latest digital 3D movies: George strapped to the chair in the chamber, the reflections of his torturers flanking him in the glass, and their shoulders in the foreground. It ain't rocket science, folks -- just a clever way of packing visual information and depth into the shot, making it more satisfying to behold.

The action in this opening scene moves from the movie on the screen to the auditorium (LA's Orpheum Theater) to backstage, behind the screen. This shot from the movie-within-the-movie is from inside the hall (recalling Buster Keaton's "Sherlock Jr."). The perspective adds extra depth and dimension to the image. Onscreen, George's character lies unconscious on the floor of a prison cell. The shadow of a ground-level barred window reinforce the feeling of captivity. And then the silhouette of a Jack Russell Terrier (Jack, played by Uggie) appears in the illuminated rectangle.

The dog's shadow slips through the bars at frame left, and then he himself enters the picture from frame right. Such a simple thing -- possibly even cost-saving, since an actual barred window would not be required for the set. And yet it makes a routine piece of action a little more fun to watch.

Makes you wonder why more of today's filmmakers don't put just a little more effort and imagination into their compositions...

_ _ _ _ _

* You might ask, as I did, why nobody even tries to get George Valentin to make a sound picture. At the end, we discover he has an accent -- but, hell, so did a lot of silent actors who made the transition. Garbo and Dietrich didn't do too bad for themselves, and Maurice Chevalier was a bigger hit in early talkies than he ever was in silents.

I would never want to read a screenplay before seeing the movie based on it. As a critic, in fact, it would be a violation of my responsibilities (and ethics) to do that. The film has to be seen on its own, as a completed work; a critic shouldn't rummage through the drafts before experiencing the finished piece -- whether it's a movie or a painting or a symphony. I'm even ambivalent about reading certain books before seeing the movie versions, too, and for the same reason that I don't like to see trailers, particularly of films I'm likely to write about: I don't want to harbor preconceived ideas (even unconscious impressions) when I watch the picture. As we all know, it's hard enough to get a clean look at a movie after all the advertising and interviews and seasonal previews and reviews...

But if you want to gain some understanding of how movies are actually made (movies in general and any movie in particular) it's often enlightening to go back and take look at how the screenplay (or various drafts, re-writes, polishes) evolved into the movie that eventually wound up on the screen. Some filmmakers like Clint Eastwood often claim to simply shoot a script "as written" (though he and Dustin Lance Black did some re-working, including adding a voiceover, on the "J. Edgar" screenplay). But it can be fascinating to see how the writer(s), director(s) and editor(s) shape the material throughout the entire process -- and how moving (or removing) images and lines from one context and placing them in another changes their meaning. This is now easier to do than ever before, because so many screenplays are available online -- legitimately (For Your Consideration at studio sites) and otherwise.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

The opening scene in the script is partially intercut with another scene in the movie itself. If you've seen the movie, you'll recognize it:

1 EXT. HUNGARY - BUDAPEST - 1973 - DAY 1 Budapest skyline, looking towards the Parliament building. From here the world looks serene, peaceful. Then, as we begin to PULL BACK, we hear a faint whine, increasing in volume, until it's the roar of two MiG jet fighters, cutting across the skyline. The PULL BACK reveals a YOUNG BOY watching the jets, exclaiming excitedly in Hungarian.

2 EXT. BUDAPEST STREET - DAY 2 LATERALLY TRACKING down a bustling street, as the jets scream by overhead. Pedestrians look up. All except one man who continues walking. This is JIM PRIDEAUX.

ACROSS THE STREET: More pedestrians. We're not sure who we're supposed to be looking at - the short stocky man? The girl in the mini skirt? The man in the checked jacket?

A car driving beside Prideaux accelerates out of the frame. Across the street the girl in the mini-skirt peels off into a shop. The stocky man turns and waves to us. But it isn't Prideaux he's greeting but another passerby, who walks over, shakes hands.

Now we're left with Prideaux and the Magyar in the checked shirt, neither paying any attention to each other.

Just as we are wondering if there is any connection, the two reach a corner and the Magyar, pausing to cross the road, collides with another passerby. He looks over and sees Prideaux has caught the moment of slight clumsiness and gives the smallest of rueful smiles. A tiny moment of contact between the two. Then both men walk on around the corner, just two strangers headed in the same direction...

3 EXT. SUBWAY EXIT - DAY 3 Shooting up the steps of the exit to the imposing GALERIA building on the corner ahead. Prideaux and the Magyar walk up the steps, still paying no attention to each other, and head towards...

4 INT. BUDAPEST - GALERIA - DAY 4 A formerly grand arcade. Many of the shops are now closed, the one's that are open don't have much to sell. A CAFE occupies the middle space under the high vaulted ceiling. A JAZZ ROCK band rehearses in one of the nearby disused shops, incongruous in the window, music muffled by the glass. Customers sit around tables playing chess, drinking coffee, a mother breast-feeding, the hum of chatter. The ordinary world.

This isn't exactly the movie (which cuts between these Budapest images and Control [John Hurt] asking Prideaux [Mark Strong] to undertake this mission), but it's thrilling to read because it captures how you do actually feel while you're watching the film -- the questions you ask yourself, the feelings you have about what's happening from moment to moment. "Tinker Tailor" is so engrossing precisely because it requires your attention; this isn't a movie that lets you just sit back while it "washes over" you.

One of the key observations in this sequence is that Prideaux doesn't react to the MiG flyover. It doesn't quite play that way in the film itself, but the principle is highlighted much later when Prideaux points out George to a kid (who shares the name "Bill" with his best friend) and asks why he doesn't appear to be paying attention to the schoolboys' antics. (It's the same visual principle as the tennis match in Hitchcock's "Strangers on a Train.")

The script has George Smiley (Gary Oldman) speaking relatively early on -- but in the film he doesn't utter his first words until roughly 18 minutes in. Also, Ricky Tarr (Tom Hardy) is identified when he first contacts Oliver Lacon (Simon McBurney). In the film, we don't seen Ricky's/Hardy's full-lipped, deliberately obscured face until much later. We hear him (a figure in a phone booth) quite early, but, fittingly, he only reluctantly emerges from the shadows well into the film.

Moneyball

A few weeks ago, I used "Moneyball" as an example of how critics and reporters often misrepresent the ways movies are actually made -- by assuming, in this case, that the credited writers worked together on the screenplay, even though there's no ampersand between their names in the official screen credits. (Entertainment Weekly: "... the film's not-so-secret weapon is its screenplay, written by the powerhouse team of Steven Zaillian ["Schindler's List"] and Aaron Sorkin ["The Social Network"].) I've found five "Moneyball" screenplays on the web: A July 13, 2007 third draft by Stan Chervin (who has a "Story by" credit on the finished picture); a December 1, 2008 second draft by Steve Zaillian; a June 22, 2009 version by Stan Chervin, with revisions by Stephen Rivele, Christopher Wilkinson, Stan Chervin and Steven Zaillian; what appears to be the same script (dated June 22, 2009) credited to Zaillian and revised by Steven Soderbergh; and a March 6, 2010 version by "Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin." "Moneyball" finally began shooting in July, with director Bennett Miller replacing Soderbergh.

I mention the movie's convoluted pre-production history not because it's all that unusual, but because the writing and re-writing continued all the way through production and post-production. I wrote about the moment I fell in love with "Moneyball", and wondered if this early scene (a conversation between Brad Pitt's general manager and the team owner) had been improvised. It certainly didn't sound like snappy, self-aware Sorkin dialogue. As it turns out, the only script that contained the scene was the Zaillian/Sorkin draft -- but it's not much like what's in the movie.

It starts on page 10, and includes this:

SCHOTT Take your wife and go to Hawaii.

BILLY
When I come back from Hawaii I'll need more money.

SCHOTT
I'm saying just relax for a minute.

BILLY
I appreciate that but none of this calamitous week is going to melt away
with the spirit of mahalo. I'm trying to beat the Yankees and the Red Sox with a third of their payroll. I need more money, Steve.

SCHOTT
Siddown.

BILLY sits.

SCHOTT (CONT'D)
I'm building some middle-income houses along Jane St.

BILLY
Steve--

SCHOTT
They're nice houses. For what they are, they're nice houses. You know what the faucets cost? It doesn't matter. You turn them on and water comes out. The same water that comes on at my house. It costs a hundred dollars but works just like the one that costs two-thousand.

BILLY
I understand.

SCHOTT
I care what it costs because it's a cost to me.

According to a story by Alex Ben Block in the Hollywood Reporter, when Sorkin was approached to work on the film, he first called Zaillian, who was on vacation in Rome:

"I was standing on a side street just around the corner from the Pantheon," says Zaillian, recalling that Sorkin said "he was being asked to write some new scenes. And I said: 'That's better than dismantling the script. Try not to do that, if you can.' What I remembered most about the conversation was when I asked him what he'd do if I was calling to tell him what he was telling me. Without much hesitation, he said, 'I'd burn the studio down.' "

So how did my favorite scene come to be? I still don't know. According to Block's article, Pitt would go over to Sorkin's house in L.A. ("I wanted Brad to do most of the talking. He'd speak generally about his love of character-driven movies from the '70s," Sorkin said.) In an unconventional method, Zaillian and Sorkin continued to send pages, separately, to new director Bennett Miller ("Capote") who would edit and incorporate them:

"Passing a script back and forth, obviously, isn't the most enjoyable way to work and is usually a recipe for disaster," Zaillian says of their tag-team approach. "Important things can get lost in the shuffle. But at the end of the day, difficult as it was, it worked."

"Steve and I were now working at the same time," says Sorkin, "concentrating on different runs of scenes. It wasn't an ideal situation, but the point was, 'Whatever it takes to cross the finish line.' We were both courting the same girl, but we'd both invested way too much at that point to let ego stop us."

Or, as Miller told Variety:

I worked with both of the writers after I came on. They were many incarnations along the way. Stan Chervis did a draft. Zaillian came on. (Previous director Steven) Soderbergh did his version. Sorkin came on, and when I came on, I had all of these versions and the (Michael Lewis) book to look at. I took a few weeks with it all, and came back and pitched a final version. I should make a point: it's not like Zaillian did a draft and then Sorkin came on. It wasn't like that at all. Zaillian and Sorkin continued to work on it, and I continued to work on it right until the last day of the edit.

So, who knows who wrote what, or how much was improvised or re-written during shooting or even post-production? (Remember, Howard Hawks used to re-write on the set all the time, just to keep things fresh.) But no matter who's doing it, the writing isn't done until the picture is locked.

Coming in Part 2: Kenneth Lonergan's "Margaret."

"Would you believe in a love at first sight?"
"Yes, I'm certain that it happens all the time."
"What do you see when you turn out the light?"
"I can't tell you but I know it's mine."
-- Billy Shears, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

Sometimes I can pinpoint the very moment I first fall in love with a movie. It may happen in the first shot (Bong Joon-ho's "Mother"; Michael Haneke's "Caché"), or may be clinched in at the very end (the terminal instant of Rahmin Bahrani's "Man Push Cart"), but in many cases there is an identifiable point at which I know that I am in love, even while the movie is unspooling, and by that time it's not likely there's any going back, unless the movie simply implodes.

Here are a few of those times from 2011 when I realized I was falling hard...

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

There's not so much snow as in director Tomas Alfredson's previous feature, "Let the Right One In," but it gets plenty chilly here, in Cold War London, Budapest and Istanbul. The emotional iciness sneaks up on you: by the end, as the strands of loyalty and betrayal unravel, leaving characters exposed to some very cold realities, I found it uncommonly moving. (Yes, I cried -- more than once.) Not unrelatedly, "Tinker Tailor" (no commas in this title) is one of the most hauntingly and imaginatively composed movies (both in terms of framings and shot sequences) that I've seen since... maybe the last Coen brothers picture. Early on, it catches you a little off-guard when, in the midst of a hushed, paranoid conversation in a musty apartment, there's a cut to a monochromatic, neo-Gothic Eastern European skyline (punctuating John Hurt's use of the word "Budapest" -- a word that will become code for loss, failure, disgrace).

Suddenly, a pair of MiG fighters roars out of the distance and passes overhead as the camera glides backwards, with uncanny smoothness, in a perfect, vertiginous motion. This cooly executed dolly shot brings schoolchildren into the foreground, excitedly gawking and pointing and yelling, while framing the original view with pillars and archways -- but the Hungarian Parliament building at the center of the cityscape, on the far side of the gray Danube, somehow remains exactly the same size and in precisely the same position in the frame. The vista and the camera movement are most likely separate composited images, but however it was done, it's dazzling and it made me sit up and pay attention. (The screenplay, which varies significantly in structure from the finished film, begins with this shot.)

I was certainly intrigued by this point, but I didn't fall head-over-heels until a bit later. It's approximately 18 minutes into the film before George Smiley (Gary Oldman) says his first lines: "I'm retired, Oliver. You fired me." Shortly thereafter, he and his junior associate Peter Guillam (Benedict Cumberbatch) visit a retired Special Branch man, Mendel (Roger Lloyd-Pack), who is a beekeeping hobbyist. The visit itself is just one brief shot, with Mendel mumbling over his bees in back of his house, while George and Peter approach him from behind. The next shot is this rear view of a Citroën DS (we do a lot of "following" the backs of people's heads in this movie -- they're no more difficult to read than faces), which is interesting enough, given the aerodynamic contours of the vehicle. Yet, there are all kinds of other things going on here, too.

The colors, for one, are extraordinary: grey, white, beige and amber/yellow. The camera seems to be locked onto the car, but not quite. (A process shot of some kind, I guess.) A stowaway bee is buzzing around the interior. Peter, in the front passenger seat, tries to swat it away. George, in his patient, unassuming way, observes it, opens his window a bit at the opportune moment, the bee flies out, and he rolls up the window again. A shing-shot (16-second?) character scene, with no faces and containing one line of expository dialog (Mendel: "There's a place I know, sir. Little hotel near Liverpool Street.") What more do you want to know about George's personality and methods? Some have described "Tinker Tailor" as elliptical, but it's more than that: It's breathtakingly economical.

Moneyball

The first conversation in the Oakland A's owner's office -- basically the second scene in the film -- after they've lost the division series to the New York Yankees. In the flat, grey, morning-after daylight, the air seems to have been let out of the room. In deflated, gently stoic voices, Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) and Steve Schott talk about what a great year it was, how much they and the team have to be proud of, how close they came (Billy gestures, as if grabbing at the brass ring, only to come up empty). It's a marvel of a scene, in which the characters say the things you would expect them to say under the circumstances, and in which you sense their personal ambitions and frustrations bubbling up (as David Lynch likes to express it) from below the cordial surface.

The function of the scene is purely expositional, spelling out the story's premise -- Oakland doesn't have the payroll budget to compete with the big teams -- but it doesn't feel like it was written for us in the audience. It feels like you're there, in the room, a fly on the wall. Perhaps it's a vestige of the approach Steven Soderbergh had planned, in which much of the film would be improvised, and shot documentary-style, with some of the principals playing themselves in direct interviews and "re-enactments." Whatever it is, it works like a charm. But it doesn't feel like a "documentary," either; there's no phony, hand-held shakiness to remind you that there's a camera crew in the room.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

It begins with a bovid (water buffalo?) tied to a tree on a deep blue-green night. Because of the title, and my familiarity with previous Apichatpong Weerasethakul film-worlds, I assume that this is a former incarnation of Uncle Boonmee, who we haven't otherwise met yet. We spend a few seconds getting to know him, his snorts and grunts. He pulls on the rope and gets loose, trotting -- then galloping -- toward the forest. From across the field we see him gliding fleetly through the tall grass, like a silent speedboat. I am in love. And I will follow him anywhere.

Meek's Cutoff

The mule- and horse-drawn wagons are rolling unsteadily across the hot, dry land of the Oregon Territory. The women, in their pastel frocks (pink, yellow, green), walk alongside them. Between their bonnets and the men's wide-brimmed hats, it's hard to see the travelers' shadowed faces in the harsh sunlight. From a distance (through unfocused blades of dry grass) we see two women crossing a small river, one holding a basket on her shoulder and another raising an inhabited birdcage above her head. The effect is reminiscent of the opening of Werner Herzog's "Aguirre, the Wrath of God" -- these tiny, fragile reminders of Western civilization, painstakingly transported, piece by piece, over a wild, rugged, inhospitable landscape.

Near sunset, cloud formations lay across the horizon like hills, and (during a slow, almost imperceptible dissolve), men on horses appear to walk across them, ghost riders in the sky.

"Meek's Cutoff" is like looking at the very DNA of the pioneer Western ("Wagon Master," "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon") -- just as last year's "Sweetgrass" was the essence of the cattle drive Western ("Red River," "The Far Country"). It's a good thing I was watching this on a nice big HDTV at home, because I couldn't help but exclaim at the screen: "Holy shit! That's fantastic!" The adrenaline and dopamine kept flowing for the rest of the picture, and (spoiler alert) by the end, I was yelling and pointing at the location of the Columbia River. (Being somewhat familiar with the border between Oregon and Washington, I swear it's there, just out of sight, between the brown and grayish rises in the final shot.)

"Meek's Cutoff," "Uncle Boonmee" and "Tinker Tailor" are the kinds of movies that big screens and Blu-ray were made for.

Did somebody say "ambiguity"? I'm a big fan. Generally speaking, I much prefer movies with a little uncertainty, or a little emotional ambivalence, to those that spell everything out and tell me exactly how I should feel about it. Most of my favorite movies of 2011 thrive on ambiguity, open-endedness, a sense of the fluidity (or "slipperiness" as I like to call it) of time and space: "Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives," "Certified Copy," "Margaret," "Meek's Cutoff"... But sometimes resonant inconclusiveness slips into deliberate laziness, substituting opacity for meaning. And when that happens, it's a shame.

Or, as Ignatiy Vishnevetsky writes, sometimes it's "Shame," the movie by Steve McQueen starring Michael Fassbender and Carrie Mulligan:

... McQueen... opts to shroud the movie in vagueness. This goes beyond the characters--Fassbender as the barely-sketched lead, Mulligan as the generic broken woman (tellingly, her sex life is played as comedy while Fassbender's is played as grand tragedy), Beharie as the foil whose attraction to Fassbender is never explained--and their relationships; Shame is a Choose Your Own Meaning movie, full of blank spaces that a sympathetic viewer can fill with their own interpretations (this culminates in a lengthy sex scene between Fassbender and two women, with Fassbender's facial expression serving as a sort of Rorschach blot).

It's smart filmmaking--and also totally duplicitous and self-serving, the arthouse craftsmanship nearly hiding the film's middle-brow triteness (see also: I Am Love), every scene ladled with big dollops of cinema's most respectable cop-out: ambiguity. When McQueen isn't marking time with exercises in post-slow-cinema aesthetics (as in the long tracking shot of Fassbender sternly jogging to his bitchin' Glenn Gould playlist), he elides and defers. Shame wears its emptiness like a badge of honor; McQueen is trying for banal blankness, and though he succeeds in that respect, you kind of wish that a filmmaker (and one with a background as an artist at that) would aspire to do more than just say nothing.

"The Tree of Life" is arranged into movements, the significance of which is only occasionally obvious (as in the "birth of the universe" movement), but for the most part is so obscure that it borders on arbitrariness. And yet the one thing that is always clear is that these parts are definitely arranged according to some logic; the film resembles an ancient artifact whose purpose can never be fully understood. [...]

...The disunity of "Tree"'s individual parts--which oscillate between slick kitsch and disarming intimacy--is the film's point, not its problem. Underneath it all, it expresses nothing universal except the filmmaker's own need to see life--probably his own--on a universal scale.

And that impulse is in and of itself profound. It stands somewhere between selfishness and selflessness, caprice and confession. There's simply no other American filmmaker in recent decades who has had such ambition.

In "Your guide to Terrence Malick's 'Tree of Life'," Matt Zoller Seitz writes that the film

... is designed to elicit unique, personal responses in viewers, as unique and personal as what Malick is putting onscreen. Nobody gets points for liking or not liking the film. It's not a litmus test.

And in his brief essay about "Tree of Life" in the MSN Movies contributors' "Top 10 Movies of 2011, Glenn Whipp writes:

There's beauty, poetry, tyranny, death. There's the birth of the universe. There are dinosaurs! Why dinosaurs? Short answer: (Again) Why not? Long answer: Perhaps Malick is reminding us that the creatures that once held dominion over the Earth no longer exist. Could the same fate befall their successors? Or maybe that little moment of grace where the big lizard spares its sickly cousin shows a way of avoiding that destiny. Again, it's all about the questions, and Malick gives you enough to chew on here that you could return repeatedly to "Tree" for years to come, knowing (and savoring) that your experience will be different each time you watch it.

I had raised some issues of interpretation about that moment between the big dinosaur and the little dinosaur in the riverbed when I first wrote about "Tree of Life" -- in my original post ("What is going on when that large creature puts its foot on the smaller creature and then almost seems to stroke it?") and later in comments:

... I wasn't sure how to read the long pause and the foot movement. From a reptile? That's what I found hard to accept. It seemed like sentimental anthropomorphism to me, perhaps because of the direction of the [CGI] "actors." I think it needed to be quicker: Stomp. "You're weak. I've got you down. You're no threat. I'm outta here." Perhaps if it had involved a different (warm-blooded) species.

That led to a debate in the comments thread about how the moment should be read -- as the first display of mercy (among reptiles?) or as a display of simple dominance.

The subject came up again last Thursday at the seventh annual "Critics Wrap discussion at Seattle's Frye Art Museum, with Robert Horton, Kathleen Murphy, Andrew Wright and me. Robert and Kathleen saw the moment differently, but were both sure they were seeing what Malick put there on the screen. Robert didn't feel it was a matter of interpretation, but simply seeing what's there: It's not ambiguous; if anything, it's overly literal, and that's the problem with it. Kathleen thought it was echoing the relationship between the boy Jack and his father, who was always trying to keep his son under his foot, as it were. I expressed my reservations about the material with the adult Jack (Sean Penn) at the beginning and ending, and particularly the visually unimaginative white-light-by-the-seashore ending, which I felt was a disappointing cliché -- even more so on second viewing. (But there'll be a third...) And, in a post-panel e-mail exchange, I rather unhelpfully said of the dino-foot moment: "I thought it was overly literal in intent and execution, too -- but that was my interpretation!"

In a blog post at "The Crop Duster" last summer, Robert wrote:

Somewhere in Andrei Tarkovsky's book Sculpting in Time, the Russian director approvingly quotes an anecdote about Picasso responding to an interviewer's question by offering a definitive statement of self-possession. The questioner asks about an artist's "search," to which Picasso snaps, "I don't seek. I find."

Terrence Malick would have to be categorized among the searchers. It's funny that in talking about Malick's new film, "The Tree of Life," writers have frequently mentioned the names of Tarkovsky and Stanley Kubrick as measuring sticks for this head-trippy movie, because those directors (whether you care for their films or not) are surely finders, while Malick's work looks like the struggle of a very serious person to figure out how he wants to say what he wants to say.

I appreciate that take, but the more I think about it the more I think it's not so much that Malick doesn't know what he wants to say, but he is searching for how best to express it. And, sure, that's what artists do -- and is the expression itself profound and resonant, or trite and reductive, or somewhere in that range?

The dinosaur stomp/caress aside, most of my problems with the film had to do with the stuff with the adult Jack (Sean Penn) at the beginning and the end, which I didn't think was sufficiently developed to add anything significant to the magnificent memory-material of the Waco passages. (The white-light-by-the-shore conclusion struck me as particularly unimaginative in conception and visualization.) You'll recall that Penn, too, expressed disappointment in what was left of his contribution to the released film:

"The screenplay is the most magnificent one that I've ever read but I couldn't find that same emotion on screen," he said. "A clearer and more conventional narrative would have helped the film without, in my opinion, lessening its beauty and its impact. Frankly, I'm still trying to figure out what I'm doing there and what I was supposed to add in that context! What's more, Terry himself never managed to explain it to me clearly."

I did some research and found a 2007 draft of Malick's "Tree of Life" script that perhaps offers some indications of what he was "searching" to express. (Note: A screenplay is not a movie, but these were Malick's own notes that he was working from when he began, at least, making "Tree of Life.") I'm not so sure it offers a clearer or more linear narrative than the movie does, but Malick's intentions are spelled out explicitly. At the bottom of page 16 and top of page 17, from the section of the film exploring the Creation:

Is nature mere weather, doing and undoing without end? What does it work toward? What purpose does it have in view? [...]

From time to time, lest we forget that we are sharing our hero's perspective, we cut back to Jack in the city, going through the motions of his everyday life.

The first fishes with amphibian traits gain the shore. Swamp and marshland have replaced the wide, windy plains of the preceding agers. The forms of vegetation are simple, few. There are no reeds or grasses. No flower breaks the gloom. The earth is a vast, wet Eden. Except near the poles, there are no seasons. Each year is like the last.

Reptiles emerge from the amphibians, and dinosaurs in turn from the reptiles. Among the dinosaurs we discover the first signs of maternal love, as the creatures learn to care for each other.

Is not love, too, a work of the creation? What should we have been without it? How had things been then?

Silent as a shadow, consciousness has slipped into the world.

This view of nature, of evolution, as a force with an intelligence and a purpose, is more deterministic that I was willing to take away from the film the first time.* (From a few paragraphs later: "Nature seems everywhere to be leading toward something. Why this delay in arriving at its ends?") But I think the evidence here indicates that the Dinosaur Incident is indeed presented as an early moment of mercy or compassion (if not necessarily "maternal love" -- though the voice of the boys' mother is heard over the end of it: "Light of my life. I searched for you." and images of Saturn and Jupiter: "My hope. My child.").

These are intriguing critical dilemmas: When does provocative ambiguity become mere sloppiness or willful obscurity? Can a movie be both vague and obvious, ambitious and simplistic? And when does open-endedness simply become emptiness, a failure to communicate?

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* John P. McCarthy of the Catholic News Service found "Tree of Life" both vague and schematic:

Ultimately, however, the ambitious effort proves vague and unsatisfying because of its overly schematic premise -- the juxtaposition of nature and grace -- and glancing endorsement of New Age spirituality rather than belief in God.

While not attempting to definitively explain the mystery of existence, Malick is trying to be comprehensive and so hedges his bets by proffering a message of love consistent with Christianity (and many other worldviews) as well as a theologically suspect paean to nature. [...]

From a theological standpoint, "The Tree of Life" is best described as deeply spiritual but not religious. Although there are numerous references to God -- in fact, the characters often address him directly in voice-over narration -- Malick's agnosticism appears to win out. He leaves the door open to God, yet seems equally willing to endorse a form of pantheism or animism that puts the natural world and mankind on equal footing.

Compare with, for example, Alejandro Adams' view ("Old Time Religion in The Tree of Life") that " I don't know how you can like Tree of Life without embracing its Christianity..." in response to Mike S. Ryan's post at Hammer to Nail, in which he said:

"The Tree of Life" is an American masterwork, despite its simplistic, cowardly embrace of Christian meaning as an answer to the inciting incident /question: "How do we justify the death of a child? What meaning is there in death and loss?" The easy answers offered still don't negate the fact that the film renders the quite specific dynamic between a father/son and family in a physical visual manner that is, quite simply, pure cinema.

Here's the segment in question:

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See also these earlier Scanners posts:

What does a movie mean? (Nov. 15, 2007)

Arthouse suspense: My month with Abbas and Joe (April 14, 2011) -- in which I argue that the ending of "Through the Olive Trees" is absolutely wonderful, but not in the least ambiguous.

"Related to this, and common in the comments sections of blogs, is the position that because some random person on the internet is unable to defend a position well, that the position is therefore false. All that has really been demonstrated is that the one person in question cannot adequately defend their position."
-- "Top 20 Logical Fallacies," The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe*

This week my mother went to pay her cable bill. It's a long story, but the cable company said she couldn't keep the account in my late father's name (two years after the fact), so they closed the old account, opened up a new one for her, and then proceeded to apply her payments (made to the new account number) to the deactivated account, resulting in claims that she was past due. Nobody can figure out how they did this. They offered to issue her a refund check in a few weeks, but in the meantime she needed to pay the same amount (again) to her existing account. She did that and they credited it to the wrong account again. In the meantime, the first refund check had arrived. So, she deposited that and, this time, she decided to go to their office in person, pay in cash, and get a printed receipt in her hand. Because that's the kind of gal she is.

She "owed" them $114.25, so she gave the young man at the counter $120, fresh from the ATM. He said he didn't have any coins to give her the 75 cents change. That's OK, she said, here's a quarter. But I don't have any coins, he said. That's why I'm giving you the 25 cents, so you won't need to give me 75 cents; you can just give me six dollars back, she said. But I don't have 75 cents, he said....

As mom was telling me this story (which, in my experience, isn't all that rare), I couldn't help thinking of certain web comments I've read and marveled at. Not so much at Scanners, of course (except when certain filmmakers are concerned), but elsewhere. I've written about these elemental failures of logic -- lapses in critical thinking that one wouldn't expect from a 14-year-old -- extensively, but the idiocy of the (under-)average web commenter is a worldwide joke, and an old one, like airline food or bad drivers. Let's just say I'm troubled by the levels of incompetence I encounter both out in the world and on the Internet. Even though it can sometimes be kind of funny as well as exasperating. (You've seen the debates. "Idiocracy" is here, people.)

Among my favorite bonehead arguments are infantile generalizations based on personal taste. You know: If somebody does not like a movie, then they insist the only valid quality it possesses is its defining, innate badness! And, what's more, it cannot contain or even suggest anything that is not bad -- because it is bad! And if you compare something in a "good" movie to something in a "bad" movie -- then you are saying that good movies are the same as bad movies! And that means you have bad taste and are therefore an idiot not worth listening to!

This kind of thing, and many more, can be found in the timely, hilarious NPR Monkey See feature, "The 20 Unhappiest People You Meet In the Comments Sections of Year-End Lists," by Linda Holmes, which covers movies, music and TV. A few of the highlights for me:

1. The Poisoned. "The fact that you included Adele on this list of 100 things you like makes it a total joke."

3. The Person Who Is Exactly Right. "It really seems like this list of things you thought were good is just your opinion."

9. The Person With The Imperfect Grasp Of Obscurity. "These are all completely obscure picks nobody has ever heard of. 'The Girl With A Dragon Tattoo' sounds like a Dr. Seuss book."

10. Harry The Hipster-Hater, Who Really, Really Hates Hipsters. "This is all hipster music. I guess it's okay for hipsters, but I'm not enough of a hipster to like hipster picks like this. Too bad I'm not hipster enough. Maybe I'd like it better if I were more of a hipster." [His username: "notahipstersorry."]

11. The Person Who Thinks You Were So Close. "I like all these picks, but you ranked 'The Descendants' as your #4 and 'Martha Marcy May Marlene' as your #5, and they should be the other way around. FAIL."

18. The Person Who Wanted To Be Surprised. "Uh, way to go out on a limb. These are the same things you've been talking about all year and saying were the best things when they came out in the first place."

OK, you know you have some of your own favorites that didn't make this Top 20 list. Please share 'em in comments.

* Please note the relationship of this quotation to the one at the upper right from Daniel Dennett. Sometimes people may have points to make, whether you or I agree with them or not. But if they're too thick to articulate them, then it doesn't matter. The position may be right or wrong, but that doesn't matter unless someone can demonstrate it by making a valid case either way.