Arts & Events

The Better Angels
Opens November 21 at the Landmark Shattuck in Berkeley

Gar Smith
Friday November 21, 2014 - 02:43:00 PM

Shot in luminous black-and-white, the cinematography in The Better Angels pulls viewers into the boyhood world of a young Abe Lincoln, revealing the early forces—including two strong women—that forged his character. The film—by Terrence Malick's longtime protégé, A.J. Edwards‑regales the senses with haunting images of a raw, half-tamed world—in this case, rural Indiana in the year 1817—that recall the stark clarity of Civil War photographer Matthew Brady and the magnificence of landscape artist Ansel Adams. 

 

The images of the Natural-World-before-asphalt—dominated by tall curtains of hardwood forests, vast carpets of fallen leaves, cricket-filled thickets, ice-capped boulders and the raging Ohio River, drunk on spring melt—are quietly breathtaking. 

The Better Angels is also breathtakingly quiet. This is not a film that talks to you and tells you what to feel. Most of the words spoken in the film are taken straight from 19th century interviews with surviving members of the Lincoln family. These recollections float through the film in the form of voice-overs. Because not many words are spoken, the few complete sentences that do appear the screenplay standout all the more. For example, this recollection of an exchange with the older Abe: "I asked him where he got so many blamed lies. He told me, 'When a story learns you a good lesson, it ain't no lie. God tells truth in parables." 

For most of the film, however, Young Abe (Kentucky-born Braydon Denney) hardly speaks a word. 

"You're like this corn," his hard-edged father (Jason Clarke) tells him. "You're all closed up. You won't break free. You won't come out. You can't stay in the ground forever, son. One has to grow. And give." 

With a father like Tom Lincoln (always ready to enforce discipline with a hickory switch), you can understand why a boy might hesitate to speak up. But it is clear from the light in young Abe's troubled, watchful eyes that he is fiercely alive and blessed with a mind that is already dealing with issues others haven't learned to ask. Abe's mother, Nancy (Brit Marling), sees what the father can't. "He asks me questions I can't answer," she says. "He's got a gift." 

The Better Angels is nearly wordless and, as a consequence, it becomes richly emotional. Without the sensory overload of typical Hollywood fare, the audience's senses come alive. Viewers become as watchful as young Abe, always alert to shifts in body language and every halfway glance in a largely nonverbal world. The experience pulls you in, dares you not to look away, allows your soul to spill into the crisp imagery of a lost landscape. The daily chores of frontier survival, the hard axe-wielding labor, the privation, all become personal and felt. This is stunning, soulful cinema that can make you gasp, leave you smiling broadly with deep amazement and, in the next minute, find yourself brushing tears from your eyes. 

The camerawork is illuminating, even when the scenes are drenched in shadows. From the glory of wild landscapes to the intimacy of family life in a log cabin lit with the nubs of candles, The Better Angels, lifts the bar on what cinema can achieve. In one early scene, a tear wells up in a woman's eye. Most directors would have allowed the tear to spill down the check. Not here. Edwards' restraint only accentuates the impact as we are left to imagine the tear's fall. This is what poetry is to vocabulary. 

In some of the most gripping close ups, the camera seems to dance about the bodies of Abe and his family. The camera becomes a close companion as Abe runs, rambles and fights his way through the seasons. In an extended scene where young Abe playfully wrestles with his siblings in a field and then has to wrestle his taunting father, the camera appears to be part of the combat, first framing the trajectories of the colliding bodies and then getting in between the slamming impact of muscles and skin. 

There's another memorable scene that may become enshrined in the annals of beloved cinematic moments. It involves a wary stroll in the woods between Abe and his new stepmother Sarah (Diane Kruger) that leads to a shared walk on a fallen tree and magically becomes the touching, elegant courtship of a mother and her stepchild. 

(I had only one problem with this beautiful film. I won't spell it out, but it has something to do with sunshine.)