The Tree of Life
★★★★★
(2011)
The arrival of a new Terrence Malick film always sets the pulses of a select few racing. Those not yet subjected to his thoughtful and philosophical approach to film making will quietly pass them or at least jibe them for their wistful, sparse questioning. Malick’s last film, the Pocahontas storied The New World, failed to perform at the box office and even the wonderful and rightfully lauded The Thin Red Line dropped short of the wide audiences it’s release was held up for. Coming out just a few weeks after Spielberg’s vastly different WWII epic, it’s lack of a mission to be accomplished and very little resolution to speak of, irritated the very same people who had commended Saving Private Ryan’s bullheaded plot and its technical power.
It certainly seems like good old Terry has always been at odds with a regular Sunday afternoon cinema goer. His field of vision has mostly focused on characters also at odds with the world they live in, but also how they mange to seep into the horror and the beauty surrounding them. A strange contradiction of connection and disconnection with nature, with authority or even the with very place the film is set has featured heavily in every work he has made, allowing for a kind of limbo which allows the viewer to slip into it all so slowly and hopefully and get a bit lost too. His latest film; The Tree of Life is turning out to be no exception, it’s already being fiercely defended and attacked and it’s very easy to see why.
In essence The Tree of Life could be described as a montage of nearly wordless childhood memories of a boy named Jack (Sean Penn) reminiscing over his lost brother and a nearly forgotten family. About life, death, birth and, in the films wildest and talked about sequence, the beginning of the universe.
This being Mailck, these flashbacks take place in jaw droppingly photographed Texan suburbia circa 1950, with the beautiful Jessica Chastain as Mother and a stern and powerful Brad Pitt as Father. New comer Hunter McCracken plays young Jack wonderfully. Increasingly at odds with his father and perhaps a little bit too in love with his mother we watch him grow through Emmanuel Lubezki’s ever wandering camera and the director’s sometimes far too Oedipal script. Along with the beauty of it all there are many moments of tension playing through the whole film, the relationship between Jack and his father strongly at the forefront.
The Tree of Life’s impulsive editing, epic score and almost prayer like voice over and pacing is strangely broken 20 minutes in by staggering images of the birth of the universe, the first signs of life and some rather placid dinosaurs. It’s almost as if Tree of Life feels bad about unfolding what, on the surface, seems like a fairly boring story with the inclusion of a short history of the entire cosmos. I guess he thought, like Sagan, in order to make an omelette first you have to invent the universe.
It would seem the reclusive director has again, made a film about his own recurring big questions. It certainly holds the familiar themes about nature, the spirit and our death, that his other films (most notably Thin Red Line) but it’s also far more up close and personal. Malick’s own classically trained guitarist brother committed suicide in Spain in the mid 60’s and although we never learn of Jack’s younger brother fate (the news is delivered by a courier), the autobiographical aspects of the film’s themes, music and setting can’t be ignored.
It’s a brazenly open unashamed poem of everything (yes some may say hymn) and massive film making which at first seems to be grasping and rambling to a fault, a film which on any given day you could love or hate. However, each image speaks for it’s self and even after a few days of letting it all sink in The Tree of Life remains one of the, most rewarding films of the year.
It’s difficult, yes, some may consider it preachy and overtly biblical in nature. It has its flaws but as an experience it certainly is like nothing else. It will be dispelled with a roll of the eyes as “pretentious” from those who never have anything beautiful to say themselves, but, Tree of Life, more than anything is a spectacular and fascinating leap for the film maker and one which I hope continues to confound, mesmerise and separate audiences.
That is surely what cinema is for.
