Review: The Tree of Life
The highlight for many of this year’s Cannes Film Festival was Terence Malick’s triumphant return to the director’s chair, his much-delayed and much-anticipated The Tree of Life. As noteworthy as Lars von Trier’s bizarre declarations of Nazism were, this summer’s fortnight-long orgy of paparazzi, arthouse cinema and gourmet finger-food should certainly be remembered as Malick’s richly-deserved moment in the sun, with a Palme d’Or victory cementing his place as one of our most important living filmmakers. However, this inevitable canonisation may blur the many dissenting voices: charges of pretension have been articulated by some of the leading critics, and when initially screened this future-winner was met by a sizable number of boos.
Second paragraphs of film reviews usually demand a concise plot summary, but this is really no ordinary film. I’ll give it my best shot: The Tree of Life is a drama that spans the entire cycle of our existence, from the birth of the universe to the creation of civilisation, to our own lifespans and in a spiritual and metaphorical sense, our reincarnation and redemption. It entwines a coming-of-age story about a young boy and his two brothers in 1950s Texan suburbia with these staggering glimpses of the cosmos – the big bang, the elements of fire and water, and an image akin to a cosmic Hanukkah candle that some have taken to represent God himself.
As well assembled as the film’s promotional campaign has been (and the Palme d’Or should smooth its passage even further), it won’t win any awards for Truth in Advertising. The poster and accompanying material present Brad Pitt and Sean Penn as the film’s marketable headliners, yet Pitt has only about 40 minutes’ primary screen time, and possibly ten lines of identifiable dialogue. A grunt and a sigh from Penn could perhaps be discerned but that may be generous. He certainly earns his money traipsing around a surreal and seemingly endless desert, in one of the film’s more impressionistic moments. So our two cinematic superstars are not butting heads for recognition. They cede the momentum from their performances into this film’s real main character: Malick’s seemingly boundless imagination. Every element in this film is a pyramid stone supporting Malick’s directorial imprint gleaming at the top. But bizarrely, and also remarkably, it never scans as a work of self-indulgence. It’s simply a delight to watch him tell this universal story in his own way.
That ‘way’ involves sending Penn’s character Jack O’Brian on a journey through his memories, returning to his idyllic childhood in Waco, Texas shared with his two younger brothers, an adoring mum (Jessica Chastain) and an authoritarian father (played by Pitt). Malick intersperses these longer dispatches from Jack’s past with a fireworks display of cosmological imagery, but the heartbeat of the film comes from these vivid remembrances of times past. With a roving, mobile camera, cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (who also worked on Children of Men) documents Jack as he grows up, clashes with his brothers, and begins to explore his relationship with the fierce world around him. This is an Edenic, idealised representation of growing up in a bygone era, demarkated by white picket fences, glowing sunlight and family barbecues. I think it will both resonate and distance itself from its audience – it will be a head-trip into the past for some, but it’s a very different portrait of how young people grow up today, away from a buzzing digital world of TV and video games, where your only real recreational options were tag-and-run or kicking the tomato soup can across the pavement.
It isn’t light-hearted nor is it a conventionally solemn, symbolic art film as it might be classified. The Tree of Life’s cinematic compatriots are a rarified company, films that ask tfundamental questions about what it might mean to exist: Kubrick’s immortal 2001 (with which it shares a special effects supervisor), Tarkovsky’s Mirror, and it certainly chimes with Malick’s unique stream of poetic considerations on man’s place in nature: Badlands and the undervalued The New World. Like all of those films, the balance of directness and abstraction is expertly set. This is largely achieved through the musical choices; the classical selections from Brahms, Bach and Berlioz (along with some original piano compositions from composer Alexandre Desplat) provide a playful counterpoint to something potentially oppressive and alienating. Although the camera roams freely around the O’Brian’s childhood, it never loses its sharp eye for dramatic detail, daring us to piece together its images into relative clarity.
As much as the critical community seems to occupy a distinct consensus-forming niche, people still have very different ideas about what constitutes ‘a great movie’ or a work of depth. Every gasp of wonder at this film will be underpinned by a reaction that deems it overambitious, incoherent, or worse, actually having very little to say. Neither will be wrong – this is what keeps our response to cinema so dynamic – and it’s a testament to what a strange and powerful movie this is.
The Tree of Life was released in the UK on July 8th 2011.
