I had such high hopes for Terrence Malick’s new film, The Tree of Life. And part of me still does, thinking that maybe something will click in and I will realize that it’s as profound as I want it to be. Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened yet. The Malick films I’ve seen are both beautiful to look at and emotionally taut. The man knows how to engage via dramatic tension. I’m thinking of Badlands and Days of Heaven. Gorgeous, unforgettable cinematography with a very edgy core. This one is no exception.
I had read numerous reviews, seen the trailer, and thought the theme sounded fascinating. Malick has directed only 5 films in 38 years, and this one had been many years in the making… Cannes both awarded him the Palme d’Or and he was booed by its audiences... I was ready for a ride.
The Tree of Life is a film largely about faith, specifically faith in God. Among its themes is how one can believe in God as “loving father,” when one’s relationship with his human father is frequently difficult. I find this a compelling question, as I do believe that our notions about a “higher power” derive from our experiences with our earliest caretakers.
Brad Pitt plays Mr. O’Brien, a father raising three boys in 1950s Texas. His oldest son, Jack, struggles with his dad’s strictness, arguments with his mom, authoritarian stance, and repressed creativity. Dad is chasing some demons, and in his quest to exert neverending control over the boys and command their respect, he has made them walk around with the hunched shoulders and hushed voices of those living in fear. Mom (Jessica Chastain), ethereal and angelic, is a pre-Raphaelite nymph spouting unconditional positive regard, almost a Madonna figure.
Some of the film explores what this strong-willed, self-absorbed father and far more graceful, freespirited mother teach their children about the nature of life. As an adult, Jack (Sean Penn) states how his mother and father still “wrestle” inside him. Yet the tension generated from that wrestling is all that seems to happen in this film, leaving it feel, for all its content, ultimately unfinished.
Throughout the film, the characters whisper many questions and assertions about faith in God, enough to make a nonbeliever woozy ("Where are you? What do you want from us?"). This can feel overearnest or New Agey (“The only way to be happy is to love. Unless you love, your life will flash by.”), and the philosophical inquiries behind these questions, which usually burn when we are in our teens or twenties, feel rather young for a man of Malick’s age to be plumbing as if they were new discoveries. Voice-overs are tricky; whispered voice-overs, trickier; whispered God-questioning voiceovers, almost impossible to pull off.
To sum up the entire experience, one adjective I keep returning to is “overwrought.” Another: “overreaching.” And then there’s: “trying hard to be profound.” I can't fault him for attempting what he does, but I prefer being engaged in a narrative versus feeling so manipulated that I shut down.
In the beginning (as it were), Malick strings together a lengthy string of Emmanuel Lubezki’s luscious images of the heavens and Earth in all its beauty and pulsating drama. It is sort of a Koyaanisqatsi-like moment, when we are simply asked to awe the natural world—perhaps in Malick’s view, what God has created. It’s a lovely montage that goes on far too long, accompanied by crescendo-ing choral music, to the point that even though I generally enjoy pretty pictures, I began to fidget in discomfort. Because these images are random and undefined, they must be taken abstractly, and that can be fine for a short time. However, because the sequence is so lengthy, it comes across as gratuitous and not well integrated into the storyline. And a few shots are simply ridiculous, like two dinosaurs clomping around like refugees from Jurassic Park. Certainly there’s visual homage here to 2001: A Space Odyssey, but why it exists is beyond me.
In the beginning (as it were), Malick strings together a lengthy string of Emmanuel Lubezki’s luscious images of the heavens and Earth in all its beauty and pulsating drama. It is sort of a Koyaanisqatsi-like moment, when we are simply asked to awe the natural world—perhaps in Malick’s view, what God has created. It’s a lovely montage that goes on far too long, accompanied by crescendo-ing choral music, to the point that even though I generally enjoy pretty pictures, I began to fidget in discomfort. Because these images are random and undefined, they must be taken abstractly, and that can be fine for a short time. However, because the sequence is so lengthy, it comes across as gratuitous and not well integrated into the storyline. And a few shots are simply ridiculous, like two dinosaurs clomping around like refugees from Jurassic Park. Certainly there’s visual homage here to 2001: A Space Odyssey, but why it exists is beyond me.
A similarly overwrought sequence occurs at the end. I suppose some would call it dreamy or theatrical, but frankly, it felt like a clip from a very different movie, unrelated to the 1.5 unsettling hours of Brad Pitt and the boys we’d just endured. I was somewhat embarrassed for Malick, who seemed to have plunked his faithful audience squarely in airy-fairy land. I suppose there is, somewhere, a New Age universe in which mothers give up their children to death in a whirlwind of choreographed ballet on the beach, but… I don’t want to live there, or even buy a day pass.
And this is, in a nutshell, one of the film’s biggest flaws: Malick is trying to slam together two very different beasts: intense, dark, psychological realism and symbolic, out-there, gauzy art-filmy metaphor. Perhaps this was the director’s way of alluding to the very different characters of mom and dad, but to me it felt disjointed and, as my screenwriting teachers were fond of saying, “unearned.”
Somewhere in all of this, there’s a good and possibly even profound piece of art. But this is a big, bushy Afro of a movie that desperately needs Brad Pitt’s Waco barber to give it a trim. Unfortunately Malick was not working with an editor skilled enough to rein him in, to find the meat of the story and leave the other parts in another basket, for another day.
And yet, I’ve read many reviews in respectable publications like the New York Times that simply adore the film, find it loaded with extreme Meaning, etc. Lots of gushing from these folks, who were apparently not the ones doing the boo-ing at Cannes. The only one that didn't feel feel obsequious was Rex Reed’s thorough trouncing in the NY Observer, which concluded with, “The whole thing reminds me of what Pausanias, the skeptical second century Greek historian and travel agent, said about the hysteria surrounding the relic in the alleged tomb of Orpheus: ‘Those who have not seen a miracle, have at least seen a big pine cone.’ ”
