‘The Tree of Life’: Leave it alone
If you watch Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” (and I’m not recommending you do), you’ll gain a whole new understanding of the phrase “art film.”
Malick isn’t a visual story-teller; he’s a visual artist whose medium happens to be film. With each successive film, he moves farther and farther away from the conventional understanding of terms like plot, character and action.
Indeed, you can count on two hands the number of scenes in “The Tree of Life” (which just won the Cannes Film Festival) that involve characters actually speaking in view of the camera. You frequently hear their voices – but it’s rare that Malick’s camera actually shows anyone talking.
Story? Well, if I had to summarize it, I’d say that Malick’s film is about a father (played by Brad Pitt) who lives to regret the harsh way he treats his preadolescent sons. Eventually one of those sons grows up to be Sean Penn, who learns to forgive his father (in his 10 or so minutes of screen time).
And that, I believe, is what the takeaway would be for the average person who saw this film unprepared – that and the fact that Malick takes almost 140 minutes to tell a story that could be the length of a TV movie (or less). After seeing the film, however, I read the press notes, which state:
“(Jack’s) human struggles become part of the cosmos’ vast creative and destructive powers, as he begins to sense his connections to the dust of the stars, to the prehistoric creatures who once roamed the earth and to his ultimate destiny.”
Really? See, I got none of that. What I did see was an early sequence in which parents (played by Pitt and Jessica Chastain, Hollywood’s new It girl) get the news that one of their sons is dead. That obviously takes place in the past, probably the late 1960s – and then we cut to the present, where an unhappy looking Penn scowls around a modern-looking workplace and mumbles into a phone about disagreements with his father and the fact that his brother was killed when he was 19. And then … what?
Well, there’s a 15-minute wordless interlude in which Malick apparently takes us back to the Big Bang and brings us through the formation of Earth, the evolution of life from single cells to dinosaurs to the Ice Age – and then plops us back in the West Texas backyard of Pitt and Chastain in the 1950s, as their three children are born and grow to pre-adolescence.
Seriously – there’s a solid 15 minutes without dialogue (except voice-over dithering in which someone – Penn? – mutters whispered questions like “Who are we to you?” and “Did you know?”). It’s a ballsy move – and one that’s almost guaranteed to clear theaters. After all, this segment – bound to perplex even sentient movie-goers – comes a half-hour into the film, 30 minutes that have been vague (at a minimum), cryptic and mysterious to the point of impermeability.
Or perhaps it’s all more simple than that – it’s the circle of life, as Disney would have it, or the tree of life, as Malick would. We create the world all over with each new life we introduce into it. Yeah, you could probably say that a little more succinctly and without alienating your audience.
Look, I get it. Malick makes the movies he wants to make in the way he wants to make them. He communicates visually and through indirection (as opposed to misdirection). In doing so, he summons surprising emotion, given how ephemeral his actual story-telling is. He elicits a strong performance out of Pitt as a father who is determined not to pass his own shortcomings (or what he perceives as shortcomings) on to his children – even if it means disciplining them until they bridle against and defy him.
And he also gets something spookily real out of Hunter McCracken, who plays Penn as a boy and dominates the film. He conveys the kid’s sensitivity and rebelliousness. He also gets that “what the hell – why not?” sense of destructive curiosity that leads a kid to tape a toad to a skyrocket, or talk his younger brother into putting his finger over the end of a BB gun and then pull the trigger.
Malick’s writing leans toward the heavy-handed: “There is a way of nature and a way of grace,” Chastain intones in voice-over at the very beginning. Her character is identified in the press notes only as “Mrs. O’Brien,” but if she had a first name, it probably would be Grace – which would make Pitt’s character’s name Nat, I suppose.
Certainly the cinematography by Emmanuel Lubezki is gorgeous, capturing Malick’s signature love of nature and sense of awe at its force and guilelessness. The film flows from image to image, not necessarily telling a story but still evoking feelings in the viewer, not all of which are impatience.
But impatience does accrue – not so much a feeling of “What’s the point?” as “Get to the point.” And the obvious point in “The Tree of Life” seems exactly that. Malick may not believe in creationism, but he does believe in a higher power. It’s surprising how corny that power seems once he gets around to acknowledging it, in a final scene apparently set in a heaven that exists as a beach.
Otherwise, “The Tree of Life” is a film that’s too precious and wispy, too insubstantial in its artiness, to be satisfying in virtually any way. Malick notoriously takes years, sometimes decades, between projects (20 years between “Days of Heaven” and “The Thin Red Line”). I’d be happy to wait a long time before having to watch another one.
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May 24th, 2011 at 1:54 pm
This is a fairly embarrassing review. It makes it seem like you’ve never watched a non-linear art film in your life. You’re a film critic right? Malick is understandably not everyone’s cup of joe when it comes to film, but this review makes you seem like a disgruntled old rube. “movies for smart people” huh?
Looks like you found one smarter than you. Its ok to admit it. Take a film history or aesthetic class.
May 24th, 2011 at 11:54 pm
Thanks for the great review. I will skip it in spades…
May 24th, 2011 at 11:55 pm
Great review. I will save my money and life’s energy avoiding this dreck.
May 25th, 2011 at 10:15 pm
Terrence Malick’s movies bring out all the Emperor’s advisors who tell him how great his new clothes look. Most of his movies are the cinematic equivalent to sodium pentathol.
May 27th, 2011 at 10:55 am
For an alternate view: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jesse-kornbluth/dont-wait-to-see-tree-of_b_866597.html
May 27th, 2011 at 7:51 pm
I suffered through a screening of The Thin Red Line back in the 1990s. My experience then taught me all too well that Terence Malick’s mix of aesthetics and religiosity simply does not agree with my digestion. Thin Red had lots of gorgeous photography, yes, but all the droning on about good and evil, all the rotting corpses and the joyous hymns to Jesus, made me yearn for something more substantial and less sadistic — Fellini, Kubrick, Jane Campion, anything! Every time the trailer for The Tree of Life appears before whichever film I happen to be seeing these days, my companion and I slump in our seats and groan. Nonlinearity and preachiness make a poisonous cocktail. As another commenter noted, the terminally pretentious Mr. Malick makes an excellent Naked Emperor.
June 8th, 2011 at 12:18 am
This is the worst film I’ve ever seen. So bad, that by the end, my husband and I could hardly refrain from laughing, similar to our reaction to a Busby Berkeley’s phatasmagorical dance sequence. However Berkeley’s movies are entertaining whereas “The Tree of Life” is pretentious and tedious.
June 12th, 2011 at 2:49 pm
Your review was in fact far too generous. I have never seen the equal in self-indulgent cornball sentiment. And for stunning natural photography I will stick with “Scientific American” and “National Geographic”
June 13th, 2011 at 2:26 pm
Have to agree with you Lucy – and to me this review captures my experience exactly (and I am a Terence Mallick fan btw!). I was gripped and moved right at the beginning by the way the loss of the child was portrayed, but after half an hour of David Hamilton-style wispy shots of trees, red-haired mothers looking wistful, waving skirts and children playing in the garden, was having problems working out where it was all going (lots of whispered “metaphysical” questions and archetypal shots, little substance or exploration). Then for 15 minutes, it’s a National geographic documentary about the wonders of the Universe and the Creation (now I was getting really mystified). Beautiful, impressive, but that Andromeda galaxy shot – how many times have we seen it already ? With classical choirs in the background too ?) Then cut to a primeaval jungle where what looks like a comical rabbit – but turns out to be a CGI dinosaur – pops it’s head up among the ferns and looks around blinking. At this point, a lot of the audience giggled involuntarily – and it just got worse, we expected the comic dinos to start making wisecracks in squeaky voices like in a cartoon. On to more National Geographic shots of the Universe, interlaced with a sour-faced Sean Penn muttering incomprehensively in La Grande Arche de la Défense in Paris, then back to the family story – but by then I was no longer really following and was having a hard time believing this long-winded visual orgy of juxtaposed, jumbled images, ethereal choirs and confused whispers had won the Palme d’Or.
And then it just got worse.
Finally everyone ends up walking meditatively around and hugging each other on some beach, the family reunites with the dead kid (he was killed at 19 but on the beach, he’s 12), the mother caresses his face, then surrenders him to a pair of what are no doubt supposed to be cherubs (little girls with freckles, wavy hair, flying around kissing and caressing him). People in the theater by this time were getting pretty restive – giggles, a few catcalls….then the film slowly grinds it’s long-winded way to a juddering halt. At the end people spontaneously clapped, not out of admiration, but simply because – at last – this sorry affair was over.
So what’s left? Terence Mallick seems to be so far up his own pompous ass he’s been filming the experience, Pitt and the elder kid put on an impressive performance – there was a good film in there somewhere – Mallick’s metaphysics are about as profound as an evangelical version of Walt Disney (at least from this showing), a number of amazing shots, a huge jumble of hackneyed clichés taken from an life insurance ad, some hilarious involuntary Monty Python moments and from this point on, a profound mistrust of the world of film critics, who are either too scared, too sycophantic or too well paid to say what they really think and risk annoying the major movie producers.
June 26th, 2011 at 7:24 pm
Just saw this movie. Read Ebert’s review. Fine’s is right on. This movie is an example of trying too hard. It ignores the craft of good film making, doesn’t connect with the audience. It tries so hard to be profound and deep, while hitting the viewer over the head with the vastness of the universe. OK, I get it; we’re part of a vastly bigger universe. Doesn’t make this a good movie. So while the movie may connect with a few critics and deep thinkers, it leaves the rest of us waiting for a good movie, with a good story, something to connect with. Instead, it hits us over the head with how profound the universe is. No kidding. There is a good reason why good art has to choose limitations, it cannot be all things profound and do everything. It can’t be the uber-movie.
At the core, the movie fails because it isn’t genuine. It errs on being profound. I can go to NASA’s website to see some representation of the universe. I go to the movies to see a well developed story.
June 29th, 2011 at 2:57 pm
I agree that this is an embarrassing review. It’s as if you want all movies to be Midnight Run, Forest Gump or The Big Chill and nothing more. You slander a mere 15 min period of zero dialogue…you don’t respect 2001 Space Odyessy. Where can there ever be a place for challenging the comfortable conceptions of safe thought and experience if reviewers like you fail to let a movie such as Tree of Life enter into the realm of respect. Art takes all forms, thusly it has no form. Remember this as you declare Tree of Life isn’t genuine yet you use sound bits like Jessica Chastain being “Hollywood’s It Girl” to turn already skeptical Americans off of a film that, at the very least, is integral to the future of cinema and art being made outside of the immediate response pleasure and heat seeking machine that is controlled by your money grubbing constituents for all I care.
June 29th, 2011 at 3:03 pm
Just for the record: While I still like “The Big Chill,” I’ve always thought “Midnight Express” and “Forrest Gump” were vastly overrated.
July 4th, 2011 at 3:45 am
Oh, I wish I had read this review before seeing this pretenious film. It was spot on! We stayed until the end but seven couples walked out.
We should have known, too. When we arrived an older man and his wife were trying to scam the manager into refunding their money. “We thought it was Midnight in Paris and kept wondering when we would see France.” I think they really could not stand to waste 20 bucks on such a bad movie.
July 9th, 2011 at 3:03 am
Twice in my life have I walked out in the middle of a movie. First time: Jaws III in 3-D. Second time: Tree of Life. ‘Nuf said.
July 12th, 2011 at 6:02 am
This was easily the best film I have seen in the last ten years. (So much better than masturbatory fluff like Midnight in Paris.)
Is it really so difficult to appreciate an artist who actually catches the PROCESS of life? If you try to reduce this movie to a “story”, you end up making it sound …well, all the things the negative types writing here make it sound like as they tramp out of the cinema uttering intellectual words like “dreck”. (And who in fk’s name would confuse the titles “Tree of Life” and “Midnight in Paris”. People like that probably sleep on straw.)
If you try to reduce James Joyce’s Ulysses to a description of the “story”, it sounds like something totally banal. But much of life is indeed banal…look around you as you type your responses here…look in the mirror and there it is, life in all its banality as you sip your coffee or shave or go to the toilet.
How do you make those boring daily processes somehow interesting?
This movie was brilliant at showing, practically without words, the development of relationships between parents and children and between husbands and wives.
Sorry, between partners..we have to be PC, don’t we?
July 24th, 2011 at 6:51 am
Just go & see the film and let it was over you like a piece of music. Like Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring or Holst’s The Planets or J S Bach, the film can be enjoyed as a deluge of emotions. I stopped trying to make sense of the film in a linear way after 5 minutes, and just let it take me away like a dream. The photography is a always arresting and the editing is fragmentary but no more so than a dream. I have no idea what Sean Penn s doing in his office, but, as someone who likes looking at buildings, the capture of the architecture in the Penn scenes was breathtaking. This film did remind me of 2001, but the big difference is Tree of Life is awash with emotions and has an extraordinary ability to provoke memories in a visceral way. I grew up in the 1950s, with a brother and a sister. My family was nothing like the one you see in the film but the film captured the looks between the children, the suppressed emotions of family life, the intensely physical play of the boys, in a way I found astonishing. It captured how, in childhood, home is all you know. Before you go out into the world, your back yard and your family are your whole universe. It conveyed how a suburban garden can encompass both heaven and hell. I’m not religious, and I don’t believe in god (though I do find religious music beautiful, including Bach and black gospel music) but I didn’t feel I was being preached a religious message. The scene on the beach at the end did not suggest to me baptism, or absolution or an afterlife. Just the sense that you have to forgive your parents and accept what they did, for better and worse, in order to feel psychologically whole.
September 6th, 2011 at 3:29 am
I just watched this film today. I told my friend who accompanied me that I doubted he would enjoy it. To my surprise he enjoyed it as much as I did.
Today’s average moviegoer wants instant gratification and the ability to walk out of the theater in complete comprehension of what they just witnessed. I find this disturbing and contrary to my own personal views. I don’t mind being left to wonder. I don’t mind having to watch a film several times, gaining a little more insight each and every time. I actually enjoy this ‘growth’ process. 2001: A Space Oddysey was mentioned previously, I’ve seen it a dozen times and still find wonderment when I watch it!
With Tree of Life, no, I don’t quite grasp how the different images or the timeline fit together, or what exactly Malick expects me to feel or think when I watch his film. But I don’t care about that. I got enough to know I need to see it again, perhaps several times, to grasp its’ full meaning. The soundtrack, acting, and cinematography were superb! I found this to be a joy to watch and look forward to purchasing the DVD so that I can watch it several more times.
October 6th, 2011 at 5:00 am
I just wish I had seen this review before spending my $$ on this movie, that or had taken the same hallucinogenic mushrooms Malick seemed to be on when directing this movie.
October 17th, 2011 at 4:58 am
Your review is tasteless and rude. It makes you seem simple minded and ignorant. Which clearly, you may be. I pity your negativity. The fact that you chose to waste however much time it took you to write this negative review is sad. I pity your sour attitude and dry imagination. You’re sarcasm doesn’t make you seem witty or intellegent, just plain arrogant. You are a bully and are quick to judge. Malick is an honorable artist, his awards prove it. He expressed his ideas and thoughts of life and love with out fear; fear of critcism or judgement. It’s too bad you couldn’t appreciate the beauty of his film as I did. Allow others to think for themselves. Rather than shitting on others’ work, why don’t you instead praise the films you enjoy? That is unless, you lack the morale…
February 7th, 2012 at 7:44 pm
I was somewhat disappointed albeit Malick still captured my soul when he was doing what he does best and wasn’t striving to be overtly sentimental.
February 19th, 2012 at 1:54 pm
Thank you. Finally for being honest. For highlighting the huge lack of plot,theme or dialogue. How on earth is this getting such raving reviews? Has everyone gone mad? Yes, it’s visually breathtaking at times, much like an IMAX movie shown at the Science Center and if that’s all it was trying to be,I may be satisfied (but bored nonetheless). Perhaps it belongs as a showing at MOMA but not at the movies because we didn’t get a story, or even an explanation of the death that the movie starts with. I felt taken advantage of, ripped off. It was like watching Penn and Teller but at least you know that you are paying to be tricked.
April 26th, 2012 at 12:07 pm
This movie was free to me on cinemax, and I still considered turning it off 20 minutes in. I wouldn’t watch the movie again if you paid me, however I seriously considered buying the DVD just to take a shit on it and mail it into the writer. Enough of you assholes trying to be intellectuals, and find insight in a movie that’s just clearly trying to appeal to that particular crowd. I honestly felt as though the writer’s first thoughts were lets throw together a ton of preachy garbage that doesn’t tie together in anyway whatsoever and see how many morons we can get to call it art and waste their money. I shit on this movie, I would give two years of my life just to get back those two hours of suffering through a terrible movie that went nowhere.
July 26th, 2012 at 1:30 am
This review was as long and boring and insipid as the critic feels the movie is. I saw it on On demand TV. It is obvious that you have no appreciation for the meaning of the movie, the story of abuse and reactions to it, the metaphors, and the value of grace and forgiveness. I for one found the photography riveting. I do agree it could have been edited to something shorter, but I watched it more than once and still have more to cull out of it
July 30th, 2012 at 9:59 pm
I loved your review bu I’m surprised so many people missed the real meaning,,, in the father and mother and the speech from God. The relationship was explained in the opening scene. The difference between Nature & Grace. Man-Woman, Father-Mother. The formation of the universe scene was God’s speech to Job. This is a spiritual understanding of the movie, as it was meant.
http://youtu.be/Sh4FS8OOn3A