To see something in this film, it took
me a while. The knowledge that this film is not only co-produced by
Malick but also that Edwards was a close co-worker for the last three
masterpieces by Malick trapped me several times. Treetops filmed from
below, the movements of the camera and the protagonists (here mostly
the two mythic women in the life of Abraham Lincoln: his mother who
died young and his stepmother). The innocence in which I discovered
Malick for myself seemed to be impossible at the beginning.
The Better Angels is filmed in Black
and White. The film focuses on three years from the childhood of Abraham
Lincoln, especially on his relationship with his mother, stepmother
and his father. The lack of colours makes this American landscape
even more barren. Depending on farm work and being over dependent by
nature and threatened by diseases. Human life and traces of human civilisation seems very
fragile here.
The film begins with monuments of
Lincoln, cold lifeless stone and than turns into scenes from the
childhood of the man who became one of the most famous president of
the United States.
One of the central conflict is the
young boy Abe Lincoln who is a thinker and dreamer which is not right
helpful for a family who has to struggle for surviving. The
wilderness,the thicket begins right here, a few minutes walk
from the shabby and dirty wooden cabin. The wild beast America is not yet tamed.
There is also the conflict between
physical strength (the father) and the intellectual and dreaming boy.
Another aspect which overshadows the
fragments of Lincolns childhood is our knowledge of Lincolns biography.
The film emphasizes at the beginning and the end the inevitable death
of Lincoln and that everything we see is already history. And yes
there is a kind of distance which is more Mizuguchi-like or in
western cinema terms – more like in Kubrick´s Barry Lyndon.
That means we are more kept on distance like for example in Malick´s
The New World.
I almost ran into
another trap: I could not get rid of the comparison between Abe Lincolns and the young Jack´s relationship in The Tree of
Life to their parents which can be as well the result of my clumsily try to find orientation in this film.
But another thought
came into my mind, a slight trace to put the film for myself in another context.. The young actor Braydon Denney looks almost like
I imagine Henry Fonda as a boy. That brings me to another trace –
John Fords masterpiece Young Mr. Lincoln from 1939. That
relativizes a bit this invading comparison between the the family
constellation sin The Better Angels and Malick´s The Tree of
Life. As Edwards´Lincoln is influenced by these two women
(mother and stepmother, Ford´s Lincoln is leaded as well by a woman, by his early love who
passed away at a very young age.
The film has one of
its most impressing moments when the boy Abe sees for the first time
in his life a group of African slaves chained and silenced. You can
really see that this encounter made a big impression on this child.
This moment will never be mentioned verbally in this film, but it
remains as a big question for this young boy until the end of this
film. We do not really know about Lincolns encounter with one of the
most barbaric aspects of American history, but it is enough that we
sense that something is working in his mind. It is almost an ozu-esque moment. Despite we know today, the
abolishment of slavery was in the American Civil War only a part of
the strategy of the American Union, Edwards tells like Ford first of
all about an American mythic figure. But this mythic figure is very
grounded in the barren shabby wooden hut in the middle of the American wilderness where
the young American civilisation had to struggle to survive. Where
Edwards is working with this wild almost untouched natural landscape,
Ford is working with this young and brilliant Henry Fonda who enriches a mythic figure with a soul.
Even though I am
from this generation who is grown up with American Cinema, the more I
am thinking about this country, especially about this tension between
classical Holly wood and the renewals in the 1960s, I am realising
how very few we really know about this very complex culture.
Donald Ritchie, one
of the first western authors who discovered the glory of Japanese
Cinema, established especially concerning Ozu the term
“Japaneseness” And yes there is probably something like
“Americaness” in American Cinema – not only in the films of two
of its greatest masters John Ford and Terrence Malick, but also in
the films by Jeff Nichols, John Sayles, Martin Scorsese, Clint Eastwood, A. J. Edwards and a lot more
others which reminds us how much more we still to have learn about
this country which we believed misleadingly to know better than our own.
I am not yet
finished with A.J.Edwards´The Better Angels. But I suggest to
consider this very interesting film through the relationship between
classical Hollywood and New Hollywood and American Independent
Cinema. Of course – and here we can´t hardly avoid a John Ford or
a Terrence Malick, both key figures of their time.
Rüdiger Tomczak
Screenings:
February, 11,
Cinemaxx 7 10.00
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