Cinema 2011 #65: The Tree of Life

Don’t bring a large popcorn and coke in with you – it’s not that kind of movie.

With The Tree of Life, reclusive director Terrence Malick here presents his long awaited treatise on the nature of life, love, death, religion and the very origins of the universe. A series of interconnected and non-linear fragments of the innocence of childhood, and its loss in adulthood, the film is a singular work, a piece of art unlike anything else you’ve ever seen. A mosaic of short cut scenes, detailing the very minutiae of prehistoric cellular mitosis to the sharp glass architecture of contemporary cityscapes, and the transience of life in between, the film poses many questions, offering few answers. There are no big reveals and twists. There is no orderly plot nor rational conclusions to derive. What you do get for the price of your admission ticket is a representation of life on the screen, in its spiritual and twisted forms, and it is beautiful to behold. 

No one was expecting the jazz hands musical number halfway through

The film opens with a biblical quotation from the book of Job, “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation… while the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?”, while a delicate golden light grows and shifts across the screen. The O’Brien family, with Brad Pitt as the domineering patriarch and Jessica Chastain as his wife, and their sons’ childhood in 1950s Waco, Texas, drives the narrative thrust of the film. We follow Jack, the eldest, played with shades of light and darkness by Hunter McCracken in a brilliant debut, through to his middle-age career in the shape of Sean Penn, still wrestling with the existential angst his childhood brought about. But not before we learn of the death of one of his brothers, aged 19, and how the weight of his death echoes through lifelong grief, and stumble through the genesis of the universe in a series of vignettes that balances out the awesome power of evolution against the fragility of life.

As this is an artistic project, with the quality of the filmmaking as integral to its success as its plot, The Tree of Life lives and dies on its production values, and here they are in full bloom. Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography is a sumptuous eye to the beauty in the everyday. The ethereal quality of the images on display, many only for brief seconds, corresponds exactly to Malick’s mediation on the nature of time and memory, and the natural photography of billowing plants and swirling water is eerily graceful and dangerous all at once. Jack Fisk’s production design evokes perfectly a 1950s childhood of halcyon summer days, with BB guns and classic cars, and Alexandre Desplat’s score is a rich orchestral accompaniment to the weighty tones of the film on screen.

The performances from the cast are uniformly excellent. Brad Pitt’s stripped back Mr. O’Brien is a man of his era, overly strict and with his own sense of morality, but loving in his own way. When his seething anger, itself a reflection of his fading dreams, gives way to physical violence, it is genuinely uncomfortable to watch. Jessica Chastain gets less to work with, not really saying a lot, but is  Marian as Mrs. O’Brien, a symbol of perfect happiness in her virginal blue dresses. She depicts love and grace, instinctual and encouraging, but offers little protection when her domineering husband takes over. The three boys are also hypnotic, their idyllic childhood playing out in a dreamlike haze, but tinged with darker shades of menace.

There is no denying that this is self-indulgent filmmaking, however. Malick’s reserved career of only seven features in 42 years notwithstanding, this grandiose film has undoubtedly gained critical favour due to its director’s esteemed reputation. The patience, therefore, awarded The Tree of Life is perhaps unfairly generous, and few are those film critics who have come out opposing it. Had, for instance, a director like McG made a two and a half hour essay on the nature of existence like this one, all flipping camera angles and dinosaurs, certain critical circles would be bending over backwards to stick the knife in the juiciest roll of his mainstream back-fat.

And indeed, The Tree of Life is not without its flaws; the constant scattershot of images, while beautiful to watch in their questioning of the nature of eternity, occasionally feel like they’re part of a prolonged advert for Eternity, by Calvin Klein. And while the images may leave you agog, their constant flitting in slideshow sometimes feels like your laptop’s rolling through its selection of cosmic screensavers. Malick could learn a thing or two from Mssrs. Bay and Bruckheimer on how to render your CGI believably, and the ending, too, does not flow as well as the rest of the film, appearing more like a bunch of actors as part of performance art, rather than a bunch of performers as part of art.

But if you're willing to look past these flaws this is cinema that is pure creation, a brave elegy to the nature of everything and the beauty of the insignificancies of life.

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