Paw-Paw Scratching Up The Tree Of Life

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There's an interesting piece in The New Yorker that compares Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life (a film I did not like) and Miranda July's The Future (a film I liked very much).

"Miranda July’s film “The Future” opened only last Friday, and it has already become a commonplace to praise the relationship scenes but to deride the ones that feature a talking cat, Paw Paw (voiced by July). Similarly, I’ve heard lots of people enthuse over the family scenes in Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” but dismiss the director’s more visionary images. It’s remarkable that two of the best films of the year to date offer a metaphysical element that viewers and critics alike stumble on."

In terms of Malick's "more visionary images" I loved all the creation imagery more than I loved anything going on with that blank slate of a Pitt family, while I hated all the Sean Penn  is on a beach in heaven "visionary images" more than my sanity could bear. So there's an hierarchy slightly at odds with that comment, for me. I guess I'm good when your abstraction stays based in chemical reactions and leaves the god stuff out of it?

But not for The Future - I've been thinking about July's film a lot this past week since it came out and we've been hearing people's pro and con impressions, and my feelings have only deepened towards it with time. It's turning out to be a film that touched me deeply with its askew thoughts on relationships and... well, time itself. There's a nice passage in Anthony Lane's review of the film:

"The movie, which Miranda July wrote and directed, is pretty sharp, not to say acidic, on the silliness of good intentions, but she also takes care to slant the best lines toward the subject of time, and its terrible crawl. “I always want to follow the news, but then I’m so far behind, and now it’s just, like, what’s the point?” Sophie says.

... Such moments are as bleak as those marshes of inertia through which characters flail in an Antonioni film; like his heroines, Sophie tends to be stylishly dressed, with a buttoned coat or a shimmering ruff, the better to intone her despair. (How she can afford the outfits is another matter.) There was something a little forced in July’s previous work, “Me and You and Everyone We Know” (2005), and hints of archness linger in “The Future”; now and then, we hear from Paw Paw himself, who addresses us in what must, regrettably, be called a mew-over... What she is doing throughout the film, I think, and what allows it to pounce ahead of its predecessor, is to slide a serious tale of disconnection and distress under the cover of whimsy."

I suppose it's this air of soured whimsy that keeps me from bashing my skull against the wall when some of these same queries are raised that Malick's getting at in a way I found profoundly more annoying. Say what you will, Paw Paw the narrating cat is a vital strand of the story July's spinning and the whole monstrously sad and profound thing would unravel without it.

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