Review: The Tree of Life
A new Terrence Malick film brings with it an immense weight of expectation. It is very easy to lose oneself in the hoopla surrounding the release of one his beguiling art films. He is the great magician of modern cinema, constantly disappearing in a cloud of smoke. Every so often he reappears to dazzle the bemused audience with a white rabbit or a bouquet of flowers from his sleeve. Over his 40 year career as a filmmaker he has made five films. That averages out at almost one film every ten years. Not even Tarantino works that slowly. A noted recluse he does not allow photographs of himself to be used by studios for publication and under no circumstances does he do press releases for his films. Even when ‘The Tree of Life’ was chosen by Robert De Niro’s jury at Cannes as the winner of the coveted Palme d’Or this year did he rear his head. Maybe Malick doesn’t even exist and he’s just a composite creation dreamed up by some underground group of cinephiles out to prank the Hollywood suits. Kind of like a Dan Brown novel.
‘The Tree of Life’, Malick’s fifth film and first since his dreamy Pocahontas biopic ‘The New World’ is not an easy film to sum up in a few sentences. You can cut it into three distinct narrative threads. The first centres on a Texas family in the 1950s where patriarch Brad Pitt and his wife Jessica Chastain are bringing up their three sons. They fall into traditional parenting roles. Pitt’s father is a potent mix of bravado masculinity, getting his sons to hit him as hard as they can and genuine love for his kids. He is a man haunted by his own failures. Chastain’s mother is the polar opposite; submerged in dappled sunlight hers is “the way of grace” she is nurturing and full of kindness teaching her kids to love.
The second narrative thread is Malick’s exploration of the dawn of time, the meaning of life and God knows what else. Here the audience is subjected to breathtaking images of the universe and the birth of the dinosaurs, brought to life by VFX genius Douglas Trumbull. The third and final part of the film follows one of the sons as an adult (played by Sean Penn) as he tries to find meaning in the modern world. It isn’t so much that the film is difficult to understand it’s more a case of being overwhelmed at the sheer ambition of it. Transformers this is not.
‘The Tree of Life’ is like nothing you have seen before. It is in fact more of a video art installation than a coherent piece of cinema. In the first half an hour of so Malick seems to have no interest in constructing anything that could be called a scene or traditional notions of a narrative. It is merely a succession of beautiful images played out against a classical score by French composer Alexandre Desplat. Hypnotic yes, but after a while it gets slightly nauseating and you end up praying for a line of dialogue that doesn’t have a violin solo in the background.
Some of the images that Malick and his collaborators conjure are nothing short of astonishing. Meteors fly into star systems that resemble Petri dishes and prehistoric beasts skulk around ancient forests. In one perplexing scene something resembling a velociraptor contemplates eating a dinosaur that is half alive on a pebbled beach but decides against it at the last moment. As if he was feeling guilty about it or something. You think to yourself my god even dinosaurs in a Terrence Malick film have philosophical hang-ups about life and death!
If there were still any doubters out there that questioned Pitt’s skill as a screen actor then there won’t be following ‘The Tree of Life’. It is a revolutionary performance, capturing all the mannerisms of the alpha male father figure. His clenched jaw deserves an Oscar on its own. Chastain and Penn are slightly underused, all the former has to do is look ethereal and Penn doesn’t really have any lines of dialogue, he just stares forlornly at water running from a tap.
‘The Tree of Life’ is at its strongest when it is studying the intricacies of family life. Through the eyes of the son who will grow up into Sean Penn we are given a window into the pains and joys of childhood: swimming in rivers during the summer months and awkward family diners. The photography, as is the case in all of Malick’s work is extraordinary. Experimental Mexican cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki bathes these scenes in an eternal glow of golden light. Perfectly composed shot after perfectly composed shot overflows the frame. Malick’s films are always visual experiences and in that regard ‘The Tree of Life’ is a resounding success.
There is so much you can say and write about ‘The Tree of Life’. It is revolutionary. It is astonishing. Nothing like it has graced the cinema screens for decades if ever. Enough is here to churn out a 10,000 word masters dissertation at the snap of a finger. However, it is also exhausting. In every sense of the word, emotionally, physically and mentally. It is constantly on the verge of collapsing under its own philosophical ambition.
