Usually I don’t read others’ reviews of a movie before I write mine, but in the case of The Tree of Life I wanted to see what had been said about it: the new movie from the much-hailed American auteur Terence Malick, winner of the Palm d’Or at Cannes this year, and yet a film that I found mostly pretty tedious.
Not that reading these reviews helped me appreciate the movie any better. Several churned through the debate about God, atheism, and the Big Bang — one reviewer said this film showed definitively that Malick believes in God, another that it demonstrated his atheist materialism. Some drew the connection between vast cosmic events and life on little Planet Earth; a dinosaur sequence in The Tree of Life seemed particularly to spark discussion of parallels between a “nature red in tooth and claw” and human relations.
And a few reviews confused me further. One said that Sean Penn, in the framing narrative, was an architect who looked out from his high-rise office upon the skyline of Houston, while another reviewer said it was New York. No reviews that I saw established whether the Penn bits were set in the 1970s, which would make more sense in terms of the narrative’s chronology, or the present day, as apparently implied. (If it’s the present, he should be 60 or 70 years old.)
But most reviewers did seem to feel that The Tree of Life was a grand masterpiece from a great American filmmaker; many mentioned his previous masterworks, from Badlands to The Thin Red Line, though few seemed to have seen his more recent disquisition on colonialism, The New World. One or two drew comparisons between Malick and Stanley Kubrick, noting their common reclusiveness and obsessiveness, though I’m uncertain whether such qualities necessarily make either a great filmmaker.
Great cosmic clouds
My own response to The Tree of Life was that there was a better and more modest film inside it, struggling to get out. That would be the storyline about a family in the United States (possibly Texas) in the early 1950s, with Brad Pitt as a stern dad, and focusing especially on his relationship with his son Jack (Hunter McCracken). This is the son we will see played by Penn once he’s all growed-up and, it seems, looking back on those years with pain and puzzlement — not that the Penn framing device in fact adds anything to the story as a whole.
It may be that the material juxtaposed with the 1950s-family storyline is also supposed to be going through adult Jack’s mind: the sequences of great cosmic clouds gathering and dissipating, the dinosaur bit. He’s pondering the meaning of life, it seems, “or some shit”, as one internet commentator has it, concluding: “Whatever.”
Which is an uncharitable response, no doubt, but it’s a response you risk when you make a movie about the meaning of life, or at least throw in a whole lot of stuff that points towards such vast and intractable questions. Maybe that’s very brave of Malick, and it’s certainly a great step beyond the usual summarised life lessons that conclude much American filmmaking and TV, but it doesn’t add up to a cinematic experience that takes one anywhere new.
The family storyline in The Tree of Life is played beautifully, with excellent acting work from Pitt, McCracken and Jessica Chastain, who plays the mom. The period feels right, and the camera glides seductively around them as if trying to examine them from all sides.
Interlarded with this story are the movie’s big cosmic sequences, pointing no doubt to the fact that we humans are still grappling with the mystery of life. We may know more about how we came to be here, but we’re not so sure about why. Still, dazzling the viewer with images of the cosmos out there, however eye-boggling, does not in fact make a movie cosmic.
The Tree of Life seems to linger lovingly over itself, especially its own awed pondering, and that helps bring it up to its inordinate 140-minute length. Pondering becomes ponderous.
“When I consider the heavens,” wrote the Psalmist, “the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; what is man, that thou art mindful of him?” Whether atheist or believer, Malick seems to be asking the same question, without getting any closer to an answer.