Pictureland

Terence Davies latest film, The Deep Blue Sea , is an adaptation of the Terence Rattigan play of the same name.  As I have contemplated Mr. Davies' film, both prior to and since attending a screening, I find myself thinking of yet another Terrence, America's great filmmaker of the same (if spelled slightly differently) first name.  This, of course, the redoubtable Mr. Malick.  Both filmmakers are visual poets, after a  fashion.  Both seem individualists, if not iconoclasts, uncompromising as to when and how they make films.  Most significantly, whatever each man might have to say about the human condition, he does so with stories very much removed from the present day. The settings for the films for which each man are best know are superficially quite different.  The natural world has always figured prominently in Malick's films, from Badlands  through The Tree of Life .  Davies most often has us in one English room or another.  A...

Life, the universe and everything.   It's tempting to appropriate the title of the third of Douglas Adams' "Hitchhiker" novels toward the end of finding something big enough to do justice to Terrence Malick's fifth feature, The Tree of Life .  Of course, Adams' titles and books were full of whimsy and irony.   Both the great strength and dragging limitation of The Tree of Life is its absolute sincerity.   Apparently first conceived as film called Q after his great Days of Heaven , this latest film from the writer/director is at least partially the fruition of that ambitious origins of life on Earth project.   For good and bad, The Tree of Life has the look and bursting at the seams feel of something that has been worked on and worked over for decades. There is here all one usually finds in Malick.  There is the spare dialog which occurs often in the form of whispery statements, an evolution from the relatively conventional female voice-overs in...