Terrence Malick’s Mystical Tree of Life
The Tree of Life is strange, vivid, at times glorious. Prominent among its features are a crumbled and exasperating narrative, little dialogue, and astonishing leaps in time — all the way back from 1950s and 60s Texas, where most of the film is set, to the creation of the universe. But what might be its most surprising aspect is its wonderment in the face of God.
This open-ended but immensely serious movie begins with a quotation from Job 38:4, 7, in which God asks Job where the mortal was when He laid the foundations of the earth.
At the start of the story (I almost said “in the beginning”), two middle-aged parents (played by Brad Pitt and newcomer Jessica Chastain) of three grown boys find out that one of the children has died. What exactly happened to him remains clouded in mystery. In their anguish, the surviving characters begin speaking to God, pleading for answers about the grand design.
This is as far as most Hollywood directors would go, but Terrence Malick is not an ordinary hack. After his classic debut Badlands in 1973, he began to grow increasingly interested in abstraction. Followup movies like Days of Heaven (1978), The Thin Red Line (1998, his first released film in two decades), and especially The New World (2005) were content to wallow in a sort of dreamy stupor, with storytelling pushed well to the background.
The Tree of Life, too, is certainly not for all tastes. It won the Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. That prize usually is awarded to experimental films. But there is something special about The Tree of Life and that something is a hushed reverence for the Almighty and all His works (or, if you prefer, for the universe and all its workings).
As we learn more about the family at the center of the film, one boy (played as an adult by Sean Penn, who in some of the film’s less successful scenes spends a lot of time wandering around a rocky and deserted landscaped) gradually becomes accepting of the ways of wickedness while one of his little brothers takes on an Abel-like quality of innocence. The Pitt character, the patriarch, bears much blame for impressing sin into his oldest son, telling him that in business and in life it’s okay to cut corners. He also encourages the boy to turn to violence as a solution to problems and as a general attitude.
Thanks for attempting to explain for us what appears to be a complex, challenging and worthy film. Too bad Sean Penn is in it. His presence on film means a lack on mine at the box office. The malicious buffoon has made it impossible to seperate his screen portrayals from his public behaviour. Perhaps Penn can commune with his father’s shade to find out why he is such a shmuck.
From my knowledge of Bible history, sounds like if another brother has “Abel-like” qualities, that Penn might be the “Cain” character (the son of Adam and Eve who killed his brother)?
Maybe it is better casting than at first thought?????
Why are we seeing more movie reviews here (like “Hangover II”) these days? All of these movies sound lame and silly. This one is dripping with symbolism and sounds like a real snoozer, more suitable for a film school than a movie theater. And Hollywood wonders why fewer ADULTS are going to the movies on a regular basis.
I prefer intellectual films but that’s not what sells. More people prefer to see films like Hangover and Transformers 2 than movies like 2001-Space Odyssey.
Brad Pit and Sean Penn: I’ll miss this one.
The Pit and the Penn — get it?
Terence Malick is a genius, and I don’t use that word lightly. His eye for life and image is scalpel sharp. As in everything these days, people watch or read with their attention elsewhere and miss most of what lies beneath the surface.
I agree tho that Sean Penn is not a casting decision I would have made.
You’ve definitely piqued my interest and I’ve now put this on my summer movie list. Pitt and Penn are not my favs, but mercifully, he hasn’t cast Arnold in the film. Don’t think its brillance could have overcome that!
Sean Penn? PASS. Too bad. I actually like Terry Malick; “Days of Heaven” is probably the most visually beautiful films ever shot.
This review gives me a little more appreciation for what Malick was trying to do in The Thin Red Line, one of my most regretted DVD purchases. The film savaged the source material to make art-school points, and Sean Penn’s acting displayed his usual dramatic depth, that of a birdbath in the Gobi desert. The novel worked; the movie was made as Oscar and critic bait, at which it might have succeeded, but as an entertainment property it failed.
To suggest that there’s nothing out there but Hollyweird’s two extremes of fart slapstick and capital-a Art pretension is a strawman argument. It’s possible to make a film that entertains adults without pandering to the two lobes of neoteny, those forever trapped in third grade and those forever trapped in undergrad bong transcendence. In fact, the industry used to do it thirty or forty times a year. Back when they weren’t ashamed to be Americans, and even came from all the world to become Americans. They still do occasionally (compare Thin Red Line to another war movie set in the pacific, Letters from Iwo Jima).
I was eager to see the film, and did so today. It is indeed lovely in every respect, and renders a small-town Southern family with the lyrical sweep and telling attention to detail of James Agee. Its attempt to conflate the birth of the world with that of a family — and contrast the themes of nature and grace — was an inspired artistic leap, and largely pays off. It falters at the end, I think, choosing to remain numinous and float away as opposed to coming down to earth and resolving the story of the older brother in a concrete way. The latter would have been my choice, anyway. But a unique, worthy and moving film.
Maybe Malick left it open-ended to keep open the possibility of redemption later on?….
I’ll go see it if it comes this way, because Malick’s “Days of Heaven,” is, in my opinion, one of the greatest movies ever made. This new one sounds like a jewel.