The Tree of Life is a rare film – so ambitious and so directly concerned with the meaning of our existence. The last film I saw to attempt so much was Synecdoche, New York, and the scale of that was smaller, because The Tree of Life places our puny lives against the scale of aeons, of the earth forming and life evolving.

We learn early in the film that Jack O’Brien’s brother died at 19 and Jack has never got over it. Grief, then is the frame through which we watch the rest of a film centred on the experience of being a child and the meaning of life.

Most of the film is a series of fragments of the childhood of the O’Brien boys. Significance, perspective, scale is all through the eyes of the children. The film reminded me of what it was like to be a child, surely one of the most incredible things a work of art could do. (The only other piece of art which has done this for me is Randolph Stow’s The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea; perhaps also the beginning of James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.)

The boys love their parents. The stories their mother tells them have the same dreamy truth of all of life, the fascination of light and objects, and the unsettled laws of the universe. Their mother reads them Peter Rabbit and then they see a rabbit running through their garden. The gap between the story world and their world is still thin.The boys ask their mother to tell them a story from before they can remember. She tells them about the time she got to fly in a plane as a graduation present. It has the magical quality of all stories. And it also echoes our own imagined request of the film-maker: he tells us stories from before we can remember, the primordial history of our planet, to set our lives against and give us the right scale.

The boys mimic a crippled man in the street and feel guilty when he notices. They live in fear and admiration of their father and his tough love which can so easily turn to anger. They torture and admire frogs. Jack looks longingly at a girl in his class when he should be doing a spelling test. He follows her on his way home; it comes to nothing, and yet he felt something so strongly at that moment that it should have come to something.

And that is the experience of life shown in the film: intense moments of fear or love or insight not necessarily coming to anything so grand as the movies we watch might make us expect, but instead being followed by another day and another, much the same.

The film starts with a quote from Job – “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation…while the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” One of the narrators echoes this through the primordial sequence – ‘Where were you?’, ‘Where were you?’. It is a theological vision of the world similar to Job’s – who are we to complain about our suffering, measured against the infinity, the scale of God?

It is not an easy film to watch, nor a necessarily enjoyable one, but it will be talked about for decades and decades and rightly so.

Further reading – a great post on the religious dimensions of the film.

The Concert, a French-Russian production, opened at Paradiso this week. It will probably become a minor middlebrow hit for cinema goers who don’t like multiplexes, don’t mind subtitles but aren’t overly critical in their watching – generous filmgoers, rather than demanding ones. It’s a feel-good film about music and redemption, set in Moscow and Paris; what more could you ask?

The problem is, it feels like two rather different films messily welded together. The first film is a madcap comedy, the sort that I never love but done well enough, as a Russian conductor demoted to a cleaner twenty-nine years ago for harbouring Jews in his orchestra steals a fax and pretends to be back in charge of the orchestra for a major show in Paris. He and his oddball friends have to patch together an entire orchestra in a couple of weeks and face various obstacles and some funny moments.

The full back-story is hinted at in the first half but takes over the film in the last half, centring on a beautiful French violinist who is twenty-nine years old and who the conductor insists on having as his soloist for the concert. The film becomes a drama of redemption, an inferior As It Is In Heaven. The uneasy meld of comedy and drama is shown in the final sequence, the actual concert, as ‘comic’ images like the no-good cellist having been bound and gagged and two Frenchmen deciding to kiss each other passionately play next to emotional flashbacks from the conductor’s past. Laugh or cry? I can’t do both! My wife was insulted at the idea that a ragtag orchestra who don’t even rehearse once can come together at the last minute with a violinist who has never before performed Tchaikovsky and produce stunning music designed to bring tears to our eyes.

Having said all this, it is an entertaining film with quite a number of funny scenes, interesting characters and amusing dialogue. Many people will love it.

6/10

Alice is now 19 and can’t quite remember Wonderland – was it just a recurring dream, or something more? Tim Burton’s new film doesn’t take the idea anywhere, but it has an uncanny resonance with my own viewing of the film. I can’t remember if I ever read Lewis Carroll’s books as a child properly or not. I suspect not; I think I may have seen the cartoon, and bits of the cartoon and read the Golden Books or Disney book of it. Yet, of course, so much is nearly familiar, as Burton gives us a sequel or a mash-up or something.

I think the film’s major failing is its uninspired and confused plot. Once we get to Wonderland, we get stuck in a cliche: the bad queen versus the good queen, with forces on each side, and no exploration of why.  There just has to be a good side and a bad side in any fantasy narrative. Don’t kids (and the adults taking them) deserve something a little more sophisticated? The pangs of betrayal? The nuances of the failings of any political system?

We get a couple of mentions of the Jabberwocky through the film, but no set up for the climax in which, of course, Alice must fight the creature. It makes it seem rather pointless, a video game with the big monster at the end.

The film’s strengths are its relentless zany visual interest and an enchanting performance by Mia Wasikowska as Alice.

I had the pleasure of seeing it at the Cygnet in Como, the first time I’ve ever been to this elegant one-screen cinema.

5/10

Ewan McGregor convincingly plays an awkward reporter in Iraq who stumbles into George Clooney, who used to be a part of the New Earth Army, an attempt to turn New Age/hippie practices into psychic warfare during the Cold War. The New Earth Army was founded by Jeff Bridges’ character, another great performance reminiscent – from a different angle of his character in The Big Lebowski. It’s a rather physical comedy, along with a number of funny lines, as we learn in flashback of the rise and fall of the New Age Army.

The scriptwriter doesn’t know how to finish it, and the climax isn’t anticipated well enough, but instead comes rather randomly, as so much of the film does. (It’s a universe of coincidence, but not quite enough is made of all the coincidence to convince.)

Showing at the Luna.

6.5/10

For me, it was worth seeing Jeff Bridges’ new film Crazy Heart just to watch him return to the bowling alley, the setting of much of his performance as the Dude in The Big Lebowski. His character in this new film, Bad Blake, is even more washed up than the Dude, an alcoholic fading country star who doesn’t look after himself, reduced to playing at bowling alleys and no longer given a bar tab.

It’s a film that starts out with a few laughs, but these soon dry up, as it settles in as a conventional redemptive drama. A young reporter/ single mother played by Maggie Gyllenhaal offers Bad Blake new hope, but she is wary of his drinking. Can Bad Blake get himself together, come up with some new songs and keep the woman he loves?

I like the setting, the open desert roads, small bars and bowling alleys of the southern states. I like Jeff Bridges, a lot, also. And Gyllenhaal plays her part just right. It’s too familiar as a film and the narrative is a little clunky (the trajectory doesn’t seem right, it seems to slow right down in the middle and get lost) but overall it’s… almost good.

6/10

This film has been very well-reviewed, scoring 91% favourable ratings on Rotten Tomatoes, and an average score of 8.1/10. I have to present a minority report. I was a little bored.

George Clooney plays a consultant who jets around the country firing people. His lifestyle is threatened by a fresh uni graduate’s scheme for firing by teleconference.

It dragged for me; the dialogue was good without being brilliant and the narrative didn’t hang together well. Predictably, he learns some hard lessons about commitment, but thankfully in a somewhat unpredictable manner.

Everyone else loved it, so you probably will too.

5.5/10