And The Loser Is... #10- Past Lives

The 2012 Academy Awards nominees were announced last week, and, while I'm yet to see the majority of the films up for awards, the announcement did present some intriguing battles. Not least of which is the battle for the best director Oscar, which, amongst its five nominees, includes three of America's finest living directors; Woody Allen, Terrence Malick, and Martin Scorsese.

It is the former two who are the focus of this edition of ATLI..., as Allen's Midnight In Paris, and Malick's The Tree of Life are the only two films from the list of nominees that I've seen. Now, as well as being amongst the finest of American directors (in fact, they are amongst the finest of directors worldwide), Allen and Malick are also two of my personal favourite filmmakers. This despite being polar opposites in a lot of ways. Allen, for example, is a prolific filmmaker who has averaged just about a film every year since he began his directing career proper in 1969 (I generally discount 1966's What's Up, Tiger Lily?). On the other hand, Malick, famously reclusive, has directed just five films in his 39 year career (amazingly, and excitingly, he has four projects currently in the works, so maybe he's making up for lost time).

The differences don't stop at work ethic; Allen's films are generally intimate, simplistic affairs, whereas Malick deals in the epic; Allen is very much an urban director, Malick's films focus on the great outdoors, nature and landscape; Allen's films are verbose, most of the dialogue in Malick's films is featured on a narrative track. Still, they are both key American filmmakers, with a unique vision of the place they call home.

I will start then, with Woody Allen's Midnight In Paris, the latest in Allen's recent odes to the great cities of the Europe (London in Match Point, Barcelona in Vicky Cristina Barcelona). This time it is the French capital, of course, which gets the treatment, and I will start by saying this is possibly Allen's most romantic film since 1979's Manhattan.

Owen Wilson was dreaming of the past.

The film stars Owen Wilson (the best in a long line of Woody surrogates, surprisingly likeable and charming) as Gil, a young writer who, along with his fiancee, Inez (Rachel McAdams) and her family, is in Paris on business. Gil is disappointed with his career as a hack-y, but successful, Hollywood writer, and dreams of writing a novel; Inez appears supportive, but doesn't shy away from telling Gil that he is a hopeless romantic, who should be happy with the success he has. This difference in outlook is magnified when Gil begins to fall in love with the city, and expresses his desire to move there and write, like many great American artists of the 1920s.

This is when the film takes a magical turn, as, one night while taking a midnight stroll, Gil discovers that he has indeed been transported back to the 20s, a time of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Cole Porter, and Gertrude Stein. In this time period he gets writing advice from Ernest Hemingway, and becomes besotted with Adriana, the lover of Pablo Picasso (played by a radiant Marion Cotillard).

Cotillard: that obscure object of desire.

The scenes of 20s Paris are some of the most beautiful that Allen has ever filmed, and he truly captures the romanticism of the era. It's also fun to look out for the familiar names who crop up at the various parties that Gil attends (in one stand out scene, he is accosted in a coffee shop by Man Ray, Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel). It is clear that Allen has a genuine soft spot for the era, and that comes through on the screen, aided by the cinematography of Johanne Debas and Darius Khonji, as well as the art and costume team.

While Gil falls more and more in love with old Paris, and more and more infatuated with Adriana, so too he grows further away from Inez. Their relationship represents a typical theme of Allen's films, the battle between the cold and intellectual (here represented by Inez, her family, and her know-it-all friend, played by Michael Sheen) and the magical and romantic (of course, represented by Gil). I mentioned in ATLI... #4, the first part of my look at Allen's Oscar successes, that for a director who is often cited as being intellectual, he shows a lot of disdain for that lifestyle, and actually exalts the fanciful, and even simple-mindedness.

Another favourite Allen theme is the preoccupation with magic, and fantasy, which we can see in his work going back to '82's A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy. I often find that to be the element of Allen's work that I least enjoy, but here he fully pulls it off, crafting a real sense of wonder and romance where it would have been easy to appear insincere, or even hokey.

This film is also up for best picture, has been widely critically acclaimed, and is Allen's most profitable film ever. I think it's his best work since at least Sweet and Lowdown (1998), possibly going back even further. In short, it's wonderful; a light and funny ode to love, art and the importance of having a dream. 4 stars.

The Tree of Life, also up for best picture on top of Malick's nomination, is anything but light, and virtually impossible to summarise. It focuses, in vignette form, on a Texas family in the 1950s, while jumping forward to reveal the fate of the eldest son, and also jumping back in time to the origin of the life. Yes, you read that right; this film shows the creation of the life on Earth. In many ways, this is the spiritual brother of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, another film that splits opinions, but is so wide in scope and imagination that it is hard not to admire.

For those unfamiliar with Malick's work, he is a filmmaker who has a very particular way of telling stories. His films are very poetic. They have a mythical quality to them, that allows Malick to indulge in his obvious reverence for the beauty of nature. It would be wrong to say that his films are challenging in the narrative sense; despite the odd rhythm that his films exhibit, slowly down to focus on small details, and then jumping ahead in time, they all follow a linear structure. This film is different though. This is challenging. At times it's hard to get a foothold in the film, to get a sense of what we are seeing and what its importance is. We might jump from a scene of the family patriarch trying to teach his children how to fight on their front lawn, to a scene of a Jurassic-era rainforest, where we linger, taking in the sights and sounds. In one scene (for me, the most captivating and beautiful of the whole film, and possibly of any film) we linger for several moments on a dinosaur, lying alone on a beach. It's hard to know what this represents, why Malick chose to include it, but watching it you feel a strange affinity to this lone creature, long extinct, and it does draw up questions of where we came from, and what are we doing here.

Brad Pitt exhibits tough love.

The more straightforward and conventional sequences in the film focus on the relationship between the three children, their free-spirited mother (played by Jessica Chastain), and their often cruel father (Brad Pitt). In the modern day, the eldest boy is portrayed by Sean Penn, and is struggling to come to terms with the way he was raised. Even in these scenes, events take on a dreamlike quality. There is a sparsity of dialogue, and we jump from one sequence to the next. The Pitt character is the most interesting; a man who you feel has a genuine love for his boys, but often finds that the best way to express it is in teaching them about the hardships of life. It is a character, and performance, which resonates, beyond any other in the film.

It is safe to say that this is not for everybody, evident by the number of walk-outs during its first weeks of exhibition in the USA, but I believe it will stand the test of time as a fine achievement in cinema, and in art. It's a film that has the power to provoke serious thought as to what it means to be human, to love and to hate. The cinematography is stunning, thanks to the Oscar-nominated work of Emmanuel Lubezki, who also worked with Malick on The New World in 2005. I give this film 4 stars, but I could easily see going with 5 after a repeat viewing.

I'm extremely pleased that both of these films, and directors, have been recognised this year. I can't see either winning, but if I had my way, I would like Allen to pick up the best director award, and The Tree of Life to be named best picture, just because it would be a completely out-of-character pick for the Academy.

I should have a new film to review for ATLI... #11, but until then, here's looking at you.