The Tree of Life Reviews (2011)

• Add

Whether you love him, hate him, or simply don’t understand his films, you can’t claim that Terrence Malick doesn’t have a unique directorial voice. He has an intensely personal vision, one that results in movies that seem more akin to pieces of music or tone poetry than narrative film; his recent films like The Thin Red Line and The New World have been as concerned with aesthetic beauty and making philosophical statements as they have been with plot. That balance is perhaps even more skewed in The Tree Of Life, an esoteric look at the strained adolescence of a young man. It’s also about the life and death of the entire universe. It’s also magnificently and compellingly weird.

All the trademarks of Malick are here: the lengthy shots of birds and nature and billowing curtains, the whispered, yearning voiceovers, the desire to use a camera not to tell a story so much as to reveal what lies beneath the surface of life. It’s that last aspect that Tree Of Life emphasizes more than any other; there is a narrative here, but it exists as a vehicle for Malick’s philosophical inquiries, more so even than in his previous films. It begins with a biblical quotation, where God castigates Job for daring to question him: “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?” This is a story about struggle, between nature and grace, the divine impulse and the belief in what you can see and touch, between childhood and maturation. This is a film that’s more about presenting the questions than it is about supplying answers, and in that sense it will no doubt puzzle, if not infuriate, some viewers.

That puzzling sensation is most acutely felt in a rapturous first act; we begin with a short look at the birth of Jack, the first of three sons delivered to characters only identified as Mr. (Brad Pitt) and Mrs. O’Brien (Jessica Chastain), contrasted with images of Jack in middle age (Sean Penn), who broods over his life and the loss of his brother, who died when he was 19. It’s a death that seems to haunt Jack, perhaps even define him; he’s a success, but seems deeply unhappy, staring out of windows in the glass skyscrapers that he apparently designs. You get the sense that he’s created his own prison, urban monoliths that separate him from both grace and nature; he gazes longingly at a tree being planted in a courtyard, but touching it seems impossible. It’s a contrast with his childhood, when all was seemingly idyllic: his mother loved him, his father was a godlike figure, their suburban yard a playground of infinite delights.

Every character in the film questions God, entreats him to explain himself, wonders what his intentions are. As if to answer the question posed by the film’s opening quotation, Malick embarks on a surreal, 20-minute long, wordless exploration of the creation of the universe, ranging from primordial fire, to the coalescence of the solar system, to the cooling of the earth, to the abiogenesis of single-celled organisms, and finally to the evolution of thinking beings. I can’t think of any other director who would attempt such a sequence, and it feels both separate from and intrinsically tied to the rest of the film; it relates the creation of a single life to the creation of a universe, and dances around questions of predestination. Did God always intend to create this family, even as the universe was beginning? Were these souls destined to meet?

The bulk of the subsequent film follows Jack as he struggles into maturation; we’re not given a simple journey from point A to point B, though. Instead, we seem to be looking into adult Jack’s memories of a portion of his life that meant the most to the creation of his adult self. We all have moments that shine more brightly in our minds than others, sometimes without much reason for them, and that’s what we see here: there are the requisite parental fights and first stirrings of sexuality, but also smaller moments that are passed over in sometimes just a few seconds. Mrs. O’Brien walks Jack back into the house as his father attempts to aid a man having a seizure; she gives a man being led into a police car a glass of water. Jack could explain the context of these scenes if he wished, but this isn’t a story he’s telling us; we’re simply witnessing what made him him.

That process of self-creation never occurs in a vacuum, and indeed even the adult Jack doesn’t seem to quite know where he begins and where his parents end. (“Mother, father: always you wrestle inside me.”) The struggle of the younger Jack is even more confused. It’s easy to separate the parents as the tyrannical father and the saintly mother, but I don’t think that’s necessarily what Malick intended; Mr. O’Brien begins as a man who’s plainly proud of his offspring, but grows increasingly bitter over his inability to move ahead in the world, and thus becomes something of a martinet with his sons, intending for them to be tougher and “trickier” than he was. He walks Jack around with a manly grip on his arm, condemns him to perform yardwork in silence, refuses or is unable to understand why his child resents him. Resentment might be the wrong word, here: Jack comes to actually wish death on his father, asks God to strike him down, and, in one memorable scene, realizes that he could kill him and get away with it. Everything boils inside Jack: the Oedipal urge to solely possess his mother, jealousy at the musical gifts of his brother, a desire to assert himself as the oldest son, a confusion as to why his father asks him to be a good person when he himself doesn’t seem to be.

That relationship lies in contrast with Jack’s friendship with his mother, who loves him unconditionally but also can’t provide the discipline he seems to need, if not desire. She’s almost angelic in many of the scenes, providing her children with the grace that Mr. O’Brien cannot, pointing to the sky and saying “That’s where God lives.” Mr. O’Brien claims that she turns the children against him, and indeed she does come across as the “fun” one, unwilling to take any action that might jeopardize her standing as the favored parent. She encourages them to feel, more than anything, saying: “Unless you love, your life will flash by.” We get the sense from the mournful look at the older Jack that he hasn’t heeded her advice.

It's all immensely heady. I confess that I found the film a bit less enrapturing than I did The Thin Red Line or The New World; it's less reliant on action than those films are, and is much more focused on a single character, and attempts to use the medium of film to bring you inside Jack's head as best it can, somewhat like how James Joyce attempted to with his novels. It's an impossible task, perhaps, but that doesn't mean that Malick doesn't get credit for attempting it, and he at least succeeds to the point where I did forget that I was actually watching a film at times. There's a power to the film that's undeniable, but it comes and goes sporadically; some vignettes are more compelling than others. Malick is one of those directors that creates films where you're sure every shot was inserted for a reason; the process of divining those reasons is nearly impossible on first viewing, however.

The Tree Of Life is a film for which it’s difficult to issue a general recommendation: if you are interested in artistic experiments, it might be for you; if you desire strong narratives and resolutions to the questions that a director raises, then you’ll likely be left wanting. It is, above all, a sincere work, and sincerity does have the unfortunate side effect of occasionally coming across as ridiculous, but Malick should at the very least be embraced as a filmmaker who isn’t afraid to challenge his audience. He sees the forest and the trees, and intends to show you everything, all at once, in a rush that might be difficult to cope with, but is also unlike anything else you've seen on film. This is a film that is both best watched alone and one that deserves immediate post-viewing discussion; it’s moving, infuriating, puzzling, slow, at times impenetrable, but above all, it’s a movie that invites interpretation. There are no answers given; you have to supply them yourself. In the world of twenty-first century film, that’s a rare treasure.