years late, but i'm going to do a little review of the film of that title. it's an auteur flick: extremely stylized. like: let's just drop in a twenty-minute cgi vignette of the history of the universe. then we finally get to it: on the surface, a wholesome, typical american family. underneath, a million freudian tics. as that might indicate, the symbolism as a whole, which comes in a non-stop barrage, is as heavy-handed as could well be imagined: dead child? cut to an empty chair. cut to a dead butterfly. cut to a popping bubble. it would be surrealist poetry if it wasn't hackneyed dream-interpretation, or the smack of a two-bit psychic. it's the worst sort of pseudo-profound almost-meaningful claptrap, hammered home by the dismal, cliche-ridden soundtrack. also it is itself as a whole dismal: slow, bleak in an unearned kind of way. what are these people suffering from? distressingly, people whisper their depressive, fragmentary internal monologue to themselves.
there's no real occasion for acting, and so they mostly waste their cast: in any given scene, you get tiny wisps of dialogue, strange metaphoric images, and extreme close-ups: still lifes of brad pitt's face or whatever. the thing is far more visually sophisticated than religiously, philosophically, psychologically...all the elements it purports to put vaguely into play. ultimately, the message is nothing if not woolly. really, it's a barrage of stunning imagery. an interminable barrage.
