Terrence Malick’s Mystical Tree of Life
This East of Eden aspect mingles beautifully with a 2001: A Space Odyssey quality: Malick gorgeously imagines the creation of Earth and its development through periods of fire and mayhem. We see wonderfully done shots of the early days of the planet that include images of dinosaurs. At one point, one dinosaur lies stricken and perhaps dying on the ground while another dinosaur comes up and seems bent on killing it — but then apparently thinks better of this and walks away again. It’s as if Malick is illustrating the most rudimentary appearance of mercy.
As the boy wonders what it is his father has turned him into (via monologues that play out against cosmic images worthy of 2001) and his mother wonders why God has taken from her her son, each of these characters ultimately stands for the same idea: That we are all, in a sense, children of a great power that we can never hope to understand. Again and again, Malick returns to a simple, fascinating image of a flame-like light, glowing and throbbing as magnificently as the Burning Bush did in The Ten Commandments. Special effects have come a long way since the 1950s, and it’s now fully within the power of the most advanced visual-effects teams to awe the viewer. Malick adds to the potency by using beautiful arias on the soundtrack.
It’s entirely proper, and refreshingly unusual, for a filmmaker to try to use the majesty of cinema to make us feel the majesty of God. Though The Tree of Life is often vague to the point where different viewers may come away with very different ideas about what it all means, Malick has created a mesmerizing work centered on a deep wellspring of respect for the omnipotent.
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.