Including glimpses of Sleeping Beauty in her glass coffin, the rings of Saturn, and a roadside Texas BBQ, Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life bears forth a variety of forms — and invites as many reactions. You may feel amazed or muddled, softly spoken to or simply abandoned while watching it; in any case, you shouldn't wait for the DVD. Better than a masterpiece — whatever that is — The Tree of Life is an eruption of a movie, something to live with, to think and talk about afterward.
The film begins with the O'Briens (Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain) receiving news of their teenage son's death, their grief echoing through perplexing shot sequences and sparse dialogue. It's enough to confirm the scuttlebutt that The Tree of Life will be the most unorthodox Hollywood drama in many moons — and then the film's perspective switches to Hubble for a vision of the birth of the universe. From a nebulous In the Beginning ... to the first articulations of life on Earth and the reign and extinction of the dinosaurs, this silent, self-contained sequence was conceived in collaboration with pre–CGI effects legend Douglas Trumbull, fresh out of retirement. The image of a beached plesiosaur craning its neck to contemplate the fatal wound raked across its side lingers on, symbol of a wounding and disorienting work. It's the big-budget experimental film George Lucas never had the stones to make.
Snap forward to the 1950s, the middle-class suburbs of Waco, Texas, and the O'Brien family in an earlier, happier moment. Jack (Hunter McCracken), the eldest of three preadolescent brothers, emerges as the film's axis, the process of his education and acculturation to the edge of puberty documented in a headlong style that lifts sometimes to singing montage. (Usually the crediting of five editors would be reason to panic; Mr. Malick’s film has very little truck with what’s usual.)
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Ben Affleck in Terrence Malick's To The Wonder at the Toronto Film FestivalScenes occur as if bobbing on the surface of a family's collective consciousness. We're transported intermittently to a future where the boy Jack has grown up into a crabby Sean Penn, daydreaming from a glass rectangle in downtown Houston, a contemporary America to make Thomas Jefferson pack it in. In large part, the film can be read as occurring in the mind of adult Jack returning to his birthright of memories: the indivisible combination of Mom, Dad, God and backyard.
Chastain's mother is transparent with virtue, the idealized home-front sweetheart dreamed in Malick's The Thin Red Line but now stretched gauzy over feature length. A less worshipfully written part gives Pitt more to do. Though more fondling and affectionate than our revised image of the flat-top Eisenhower-era patriarch, Mr. O'Brien badgers his sons with lessons in Looking Out For No. 1 and backyard boxing. Venting a bellyful of frustrated ambition, he talks covetously about the folks on the hill, brags about his worthless patents and finds an outlet for unrealized musical aspirations by playing the church organ. This provides some of the classical music that fills Tree of Life, much of it liturgical, fitting Jack's growing, paralleled disillusion with his father and the Father — "Why should I be good if you aren't?" he's asking both.
Though markedly faithful to Darwin, Malick's film begins with a quotation from the Book of Job, imagines heaven and features Mother pointing to the sky to deliver the lesson: "God lives there." Like anything ambitious, Tree of Life will be called "pretentious," but its characters address the gauche subject of the eternal, naturally, through the Judeo-Christian lingua franca instead of via a vague, enervated "spirituality." In this, it is quite direct and accessible.
With his cosmic realism, Malick vividly remembers youth's intimate yet huge idea of God, and Tree of Life's Genesis overture recalls the viewer to a child's awed first conception of the vastness beyond his proscribed world. Thus prepared, you have fresh eyes to see suburbia as, yes, a miracle. Throughout Tree of Life, the close touch of director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki's Steadicam brings forgotten childhood rites near: roughhousing, betrayals of confidence, the clandestine thrill of being alone in a strange house, a child's frank curiosity toward the diversity of off-limits human types, including town drunks, cripples and the black boys at that BBQ.
In his evocation of lost-Eden childhood, Malick shows the wisdom of C.S. Lewis’ An Experiment in Criticism: “If we are to use the words ‘childish’ and ‘infantile’ as terms of disapproval, we must make sure that they refer only to those characteristics of childhood, which we become better and happier by outgrowing,” Lewis wrote. “Who in his sense would not keep, if he could, that tireless curiosity, that intensity of imagination, that facility of suspending disbelief, that unspoiled appetite, that readiness to wonder, to pity, and to admire?” It is because the 67-year-old director can get so much of that on-screen, and much more besides, that he's one of the few American filmmakers operating on the multiplex scale who makes movies feel like undiscovered country.
THE TREE OF LIFE | Written and directed by TERRENCE MALICK | Fox Searchlight | ArcLight Hollywood, Landmark
Malick is NOT a disciple of Kubrick. Stanley was an intellectual and his films don't really go beyond that (and they're decidedly cold). Malick is a philosopher and poet. And to think that there's only one way to tell a story, shows some of you know nothing about the art of creating. If you want paint-by-numbers, see a Ron Howard movie.
You can see my review at: http://tinyurl.com/3qu4nx8
I'll have to agree with Nick on this one. But I will disagree with the poster who said "Terrence Malick is known to be a disciple of Stanley Kubrick's vision." Kubrick was an intellectual and his all his films have that bent with little soul. Malick is a philosopher and poet, and when I see his work, I feel it on the inside.
For those who say it's a "jumbled mess," and Malick "doesn't know how to direct story," I would suggest you stay away from museums, they are not for you. Jumbo's Clown Room is more appropriate for your artistic sympathies.
Uncle Curmy,www.cinemacurmudgeon.com
Not a masterpeice a tedious example of a director who doesn't know how to direct story and can only omage other films like Koyanisquatsi and 2001 and doesn't know what to do with it. It's a mess. I think any goodness you find in the film you bring with you. Good for you I guess but I thought the film was a plotless jumbled mess. Just because it's different doesn't mean it's meaningful.
Since when did all movies have to follow a regulated plot? Movies are a work of art opened to interpretation, which is formed by everyone's individual perspective and experiences. I thought the movie was beyond amazing. You did not. It seems like this was your first Malick film? Because if you saw The New World, Thin Red Line, Days of Heaven and Badlands you'd know the man can direct a story, none of his films are really plot driven. Maybe your experiences have formed a perspective that can't appreciate his art. If he was copying Kubrick...his movies would have a more regulated plot/story. Malick is simply making a Malick film.
I guess the man-is-God tone of the review matches the tone of the movie. So tired of the HW ego. Tripe like this may resonate with a room full of self-congratulatory HW elites and wannabes, but it certainly holds no wide-spread appeal for the rest of us.
No fan of Penn's politics, but I can't deny he is one of the best actors to ever be on the screen. I look forward to seeing the movie.
ANYTHING that has that rat-faced cretin, seanpenn, is NO masterpiece. In fact, that renders it UNWATCHABLE.
Terrence Malick is known to be a disciple of Stanley Kubrick's vision for its rigor, but also for his thin film library that staked three decades of work and research. The icing on the cake, it is equally stingy with media appearances. His latest opus is an indisputable masterpiece, where the Palme d'Or at Cannes 2011.
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