I'm way over "Tree of Life" not getting best picture. Sure I am. I'm overly mature. But it has been frustrating that most of my friends hated it, my kids, and I have had only one person willing to talk about the film. Nobody seems to know what it is about, there is a lot of whispering and silence (What about "The Artist" - talk about silent) and they don't get the dinosaurs. I admit it's not a perfect film, but what it is saying is that the primodial forest and the modern skyscrapered city are not so far apart. Life is still a struggle, and we move between our reptilian brains and violence and insensitivity to complex consciousness and back again. The struggle is within ourselves. Mallick is also attempting to dissolve time, so that there is a sense of life all happening at once, rather than on a continnum. And there is so much compassion in the movie for all of us human beings: for parents, for children, for the cruel things we do, the impulsive hurts we inflict, the ways we mean to show love but instead reveal our wounds. His compassion is for all equally.
I'm sure, over time, people will come back to this movie, and it will be discussed and shown and kept alive. After all, "2001" didn't win the Oscar either.
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