REVIEW: “The Tree of Life” (***)
Posted by Guy Lodge · 4:51 am · May 16th, 2011
Landscape has always been character in the films of Terrence Malick. The even, rolling fields of “Days of Heaven,” the sweatily green hill ladders of “The Thin Red Line,” even the dry-toast mesa of “Badlands”: all expansive, overwhelming environments that dictate the behavior of the films’ human occupants through sheer force of presence, for it’s often all they have to live in and live with. It’s an approach that, across 33 years of widely-spaced work, has drawn as many accusations of vacant pictorialism as it has rapt devotion — without the mystique Malick has accrued through his slow-loris work patterns, it’s difficult to say which camp might have emerged dominant — but it’s made for an oeuvre with a stylistic and textual throughline that belies its scattered production.
Until, that is, “The Tree of Life,” Malick’s long, long delayed fifth feature that is at once his most interior work and his most grandiosely conceived. A fractured, impressionistic memory album documenting the roots of familial estrangement in a middle-class 1950s household in the director’s hometown of Waco, Texas, it arrives on the screen surrounded by bookends within bookends: scenes depicting the present-day social alienation of the family’s grown eldest son (Sean Penn), bracketed by vastly scaled sequences addressing more generalized concerns of theology, evolution and mortality.
It’s the first of Malick’s films to feel like the product of more than one purposeful creative urge; his first to preferentially separate its thematic concerns from its narrative ones, such as they are; his first, to balance my opening gambit, in which character is allowed to become landscape. His most open-armed and structurally undisciplined film to date, it might yet prove his least rewarding.
Malick opens proceedings with a heavy hint as to the broadness of his conceptual brief by quoting Job 38:4-7, a Biblical passage in which God asserts full creative ownership of our planet with something approaching defensiveness: “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?” He asks, as if curtly reminding us (or the believers among us, at least) that He was here first, and that we are merely fleeting guest residents. It’s a deceptively emphatic start to a film that probes capital-letter issues of Existence with curiosity if not great subtlety.
This opening half-hour, not unlike a further “Koyaanisqatsi” sequel with heavier effects and more ringing classical accompaniment, will likely remain the principal talking point of the film. Positively so for some — there’s no denying the visual wow factor at play here, as we hurtle through enough richly rendered constellations, rivers and canyons to fill an entire David Attenborough series — but it struck this viewer as faintly stilted, over-determined filmmaking of the variety the director has always danced around, yet never quite succumbed to. That the narration is delivered in an ecstatic stage whisper rather heightens the sense of self-awe.
If the sheer bigness of this filmmaking offers a mixed payoff, it’s followed by a reminder of what an economically sensual director Malick can be: the entire courtship of Pitt and Chastain’s character is dazzlingly navigated via quick cuts in and out of shadow: a laugh, a caress, a pregnant belly. It’s the first clue that, while the film speaks its loftier ideas elsewhere, the meat of the film lies in this domestic narrative. Perhaps something of a deflected memoir for the director, the film’s dominant middle section shrinks dramatically as it sketches the relationships between the beautiful couple and their three equally Rockwellian young sons — the eldest of whom has the most trouble bending himself to the rigid rule of his emotionally constipated father.
Largely shirking dialogue in favor of sensation, Malick paints this family portrait in free-associative scraps of anecdote and conflict, across a canvas of endless, blissed-out summer: from key events such as an abusive dinner-table argument that carves divides of parental loyalty into the family, to isolated incidents as large as the death of a neighboring boy at the public pool or small as the prankish explosion of a frog on a skyrocket. Denied his usual geographical breadth, Malick and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (often working in a more serene vein of the vertiginous, bob-and-weave tracking that he mastered in “Children of Men”) still conjure frame upon frame of opalescent, five-in-the-afternoon beauty.
Malick attempts to shoehorn these disparately scaled lines of philosphical inquiry into a coda that regrettably averages out as overreaching kitsch, as characters living and dead unite in a beachy, pearl-lit afterlife, Chastain’s breathy narration relinquishes her son to the angels and enough cream-colored tuile floats around the screen to clothe several Enya music videos. (We’ll just assume that the shot of a commedia dell’arte mask floating in the ocean — something that has no logic whatsoever in Malick’s image system — floated in from one of them.)
Further fuzzing the question of what “The Tree of Life” wishes to say about our collective spiritual journey — perhaps it’s that the director is still open to all options, which is no bad thing, though confusing to visualize — it’s a badly misjudged finish to a film that nonetheless has sections so rapturous as to justify the six-year wait since “The New World” on their own. (That said, the film’s weaknesses may well be the result of an overthought creative process.) Malick’s slow-burn cinema tends to take several viewings to reveal its full arsenal of tactile pleasures, so I already look forward to a second encounter with his latest. At first blush, however, I’m left stimulated but unmoved, as if having watched the life of someone I hardly know flash before my eyes.
Inside Movies & DVD with Drew McWeeny
Review: Terrence Malick's 'Tree Of Life' reaches for greatness, falls short
A beautiful but oddly hollow experience ultimately disappoints
Monday, May 16, 2011 10:25 AM
This is what happens when we turn our filmmakers into religious figures.
I can barely express how much I adore the first three films by Terrence Malick. I saw "Badlands" for the first time in college, and it was one of those lightning bolt moments for me. I love everything about that film, about his aesthetic sense, about the performances by Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek. I think of that movie, and I think of a dozen little moments, about the use of score, about that stunningly gorgeous light that the entire film is bathed in. "Days Of Heaven" is one I love even more, and that Blu-ray has been played at least three times since I got it. It's a remarkable film, a simple story but a rich and wonderful slice of history captured as if by magic. Again, it's the performances I come back to in that one. Brooke Adams, Richard Gere, and Sam Shepard are all at their very best, and young Linda Manz is so strange, such an unusual narrator, that I find myself wanting to put the film on right now just to hear her voice again. For the longest time, that's all there was, those two movies, and then we finally got a third film out of him, his adaptation of the James Jones novel "The Thin Red Line," which managed to start life as a fairly straight adaption only to become something totally different in the editing room. That year, many people tried to pit "Saving Private Ryan" against "Thin Red Line," but aside from being set during WWII, the two films couldn't be more different. Malick's God's-eye view of men at wartime is a piercing character study and confirmed that even after almost 20 years away from filmmaking, he still maintained a rigid control of every element of what you saw onscreen.
"The New World," however, is a more problematic film for me, and in that movie's weaknesses, I see the seeds that have blossomed in "The Tree Of Life," a beautiful, at times infuriating, undeniably indulgent new effort that comes dangerously close to self-parody at times. There are many moments in this new film that I think are compelling, and the work by cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki is above reproach, absolutely ravishing. Any random five minutes of the movie looks like a work of overwhelming film art, and taken simply as a visual experience, "The Tree Of Life" is remarkable. But the film makes its thematic points early on, and in surprisingly overt fashion, then spends the next two hours making those same points again and again and again. Considering how much ground the film covers, it has very little to add after making its initial points.
The basic spine of the film has to do with the O'Briens, a family in Texas in the '50s and the battle of wills between a harsh, demanding father (Brad Pitt) and the oldest of his three sons, Jack. At the same time, we also see Jack as an adult, played by Sean Penn, grappling with his memories, the death of one of his brothers, and the lessons passed down by his father. While individual moments between the family members are compelling and even harrowing at times, I can't help but feel that the material is, in the end, somewhat thin. With "Badlands," Malick dealt with America's love affair with evil in the media at a time when that subject was still fairly fresh, and so many films since then have taken their cues from the way he dealt with it. Here, his handling of the family dynamic falls into a few basic shapes, repeated many times over the course of the two hours, without ever really illuminating much beyond the idea that Mr. O'Brien is frustrated with his life and determined to push his sons to do better than he did. There are some nice details, like his love of music and his gift for playing, but there aren't enough of those grace notes. I'll be honest… I had to look at the press notes to come up with the name of the family, because they are symbols more than characters, and no one more so than Jessica Chastain as the mother of the family. She's lovely, and there is an ethereal quality to her work, but she exists mainly to either give Brad Pitt disapproving glances or to play with the boys in montage. She never really becomes a person. She might be a very good actor, but I'm not sure based on her work here. I can't be. She doesn't really do anything. And I've written at length about how much I admire Pitt, and how I think he is one of our best movie star actors. He's like a strong character actor wrapped in the skin of a leading man, and I love his eccentricities. Here, though, he feels muted, underplayed to the point of invisibility. One might argue that all of this is simply Jack's memory at work, since Penn does bookend the movie, but that ignores the epic digressions Malick makes to the beginning of the world in one of the loveliest and most frustrating sequences I've ever seen.
Yes, we have dinosaurs. And while I understand that Malick is illustrating what he sees as the two ways through life, the way of grace or the way of nature, I'm not sure I've ever seen as much energy spent to so little effect. The entire section of the film involving the early days of our planet is gorgeous, and the CGI in the sequence is exactly as good as you'd expect from a meticulous perfectionist like Malick. But ultimately… so what? I say this as a fan of experimental cinema, as someone who loves it when people push the boundaries of narrative, and as a fan of Malick's. The time spent on that sequence could easily have been spent fleshing out the family so that I felt something for them. This is, ultimately, a movie of surfaces, and that's where I think Malick is on the verge of becoming a sort of joke on himself. By indulging all of his stylistic flourishes here at the expense of his characters, he has lost track of what made his work great, which was the balance between the two. I love the characters in "Badlands" and "Days of Heaven" and "The Thin Red Line" just as much as I love the visual work, but here, I don't feel like I got to know any characters. It frustrates and saddens me, and it leaves me less interested in revisiting this one, something I'd never expect from a Terrence Malick movie.
I'm glad he's already got another film shot, and that it was something that came together fairly quickly. Maybe we'll see a more spontaneous Malick in that one. For now, though, while "The Tree Of Life" is gorgeous throughout and even occasionally affecting, it never achieves the transcendence it so desperately chases. By the time the film reaches its final "big moment," which I thought was pretty close to dopey, I found myself genuinely upset. I thought I'd spend my whole morning in a frenzy, digging deeply into the text and subtext of the film, and instead, I find myself hard-pressed to find much more to say about the movie.
For me, this is a pretty crushing disappointment, something that's hard to admit and even harder to write.
CANNES REVIEW: Tree of Life Is All About Life; But Does Malick Care Much for People?
Every day, critics and journalists exiting the Palais must fight through throngs of onlookers holding up hopeful hand-drawn signs, begging for invitations to the evening’s highly restricted screenings (not that most of us are able to provide them). This morning, as I was leaving the screening of Tree of Life, I saw a young man holding a placard on which he’d scrawled, “I would die for an invitation to Tree of Life.” Oh, my dear boy, I certainly hope not.
The Tree of Life is a gargantuan work of pretension and cleverly concealed self-absorption, featuring some absolutely gorgeous photography (courtesy of Emmanuel Lubezski, who also shot The New World). Malick does care about craftsmanship: He’s clearly poured thought and care into the images and the editing, and the sections of the film in which characters are actually allowed to interact — instead of just issuing forth in ponderous voice-overs as images of cosmic tadpoles and Ansel Adams-style calendar shots fill the screen — manage some degree of dramatic intensity.
Never trust an actor’s face to convey complicated feelings when you can just dub in words.
But through much of The Tree of Life, Malick, characteristically, doesn’t seem to care much for people at all. Desert rock formations, rushing streams, sunflowers waving gently in the sun, and all sorts of cradle-of-life folderol are the things that really rock his world — he cuts to them whenever he needs to try to explain the inexplicable, which is often. This is a movie about spiritual searching, about reckoning with the nature of God and his frustrating insistence on allowing suffering in the world. We know that because the movie’s characters tell us what they’re thinking, repeatedly, in voice-over: “How did she bear it? Mother.” “Lord — why?” Never trust an actor’s face to convey complicated feelings when you can just dub in words.
We know at the beginning of The Tree of Life that we’re dealing with a family who has suffered tremendous grief. After an opening containing shots of those aforementioned sunflowers and a girl cuddling a goat, we see visual fragments, like bits torn from a scrapbook, of a seemingly once-happy family: There’s a mother (Jessica Chastain) twirling about in ’50s sundresses; a stern, sensible-looking dad in a wiffle cut (Brad Pitt); and two or three cavorting little boys (it’s hard to count them, they’re moving so fast) enjoying idyllic 1950s American suburbia.
Which can’t be idyllic forever: We learn that one son, one of those little boys (who has since grown into a young man), has died. The family is torn by grief. Mother is wearing 60s-style mourning clothes. Cut ahead, many years later: Sean Penn is working in some giant, slick glass building; it’s apparently the anniversary of his brother’s death, and you can tell he’s sad because he’s scowling, but mostly because he tells us so, once again in voice-over.
Here is where Malick takes a breather to ponder the origins of life: It begins, apparently, with a shiny, glowing, translucent pinky-blue light-up mussel floating in black space. Next, there are some bubbles of primordial ooze and some jellyfish. Dinosaurs appear (and they are pretty good dinosaurs, the one thing in Tree of Life that impart a genuine sense of wonder). At the conclusion of this planetarium show, we’re returned to ’50s Waco, Texas, to learn more about that family.
Dad is tough on the boys, schooling them in proper table manners he doesn’t observe himself and rousing them early on Sundays so they can all head to church where he, formerly an aspiring musician and now some sort of inventor, plays the organ. Mom is the one who looks on in silence, protecting the boys when she can, occasionally dipping a toe into the family sprinkler to rinse bits of cut grass from her bare feet (because the water spurting forth from that sprinkler sure looks good in the sunlight).
Malick is at his best when he lets his guard down, which is rarely — there’s nothing casual about him as a director. But in this section of the movie, Malick (who both wrote and directed) does manage here and there to set aside his highly attuned aesthetics enough to capture some of the texture of family life, particularly as it was in the ’50s. In one sequence a DDT truck breezes down the street with little boys following behind, jumping up and down gleefully in the puffy clouds of white smoke it leaves in its wake. At one point the older boy (the characters don’t call one another by name, but his name is Jack — he’s the one who’ll grow up to be Sean Penn, and he’s played, with sure-footed serious-mindedness, by Hunter McCracken) betrays the trust of his younger brother (Laramie Eppler) by injuring him slightly with an airgun. Later, he attempts an apology by kissing his brother’s hurt arm. The brother makes a big show of brushing the kisses away, but the two eventually reach the kind of uneasy, unbreakable truce that sometimes interlaces siblings for life. It’s the movie’s finest moment.
There’s also lots of majestic orchestral music, courtesy of Alexandre Desplat, Bach and, presumably, God.
There’s also a third brother who’s mystically absent through most of the movie, maybe because he’s not the protagonist nor does he die. Some kids have all the luck. But then, The Tree of Life isn’t really about people as much as it’s about “life” in some broad, waving-of-the-arms sense. There certainly is a lot of filmmaking going on here: Malick grabs our attention with diminutive jump cuts; he often shoots characters in three-quarters profile, so we’re left to wonder what their faces might be saying; he invents dream images (like a slightly airborne Chastain pirouetting among the trees) and inserts them in unexpected places. There’s also lots of majestic orchestral music, courtesy of Alexandre Desplat, Bach and, presumably, God.
And then there are those visuals: A father fondling his newborn babe’s translucent toes. Dreamy, idyllic suburban ’50s streets that look as if they’ve been shot not with the most technically advanced movie camera money can buy but with something better, the Brownie camera of memory. Those sunflowers, standing bright and hopeful. Lubezski knows how to do it, all right.
But Lubezski — as he’s shown in Children of Men, Great Expectations, Sleepy Hollow, and any number of extraordinary-looking films that he’s worked on — knows how to do other things, too. Like shoot a scene so that the emotions of the characters are more compelling than their surroundings, no matter how beautiful those surroundings may be. It puzzles me that people think of Malick as a strong visual filmmaker. His movies are often gorgeous-looking — that was true even of The New World, which probably tops even Tree of Life in the pretentious snoozefest department.
But strong visuals don’t necessarily equal strong visual storytelling. If Malick could tell a story mostly with pictures — and faces — why would he need so many voice-overs? There are some good performances here, to the extent that Malick allows us to focus on them: Pitt, in particular, captures the essence of preoccupied dadness. As he schools his boys in the art of respecting the line dividing their property from a neighbor’s, or takes them all out to eat at a local diner, he’s both distanced and affectionate in the way many of us may remember our own dads to have been. Chastain has less latitude: She’s cast in the role of beatific mom-symbol, and it constrains her.
I can already hear the chorus of dissenters: But you just don’t understand! Tree of Life a tone poem made by a genius! You need to see it again, or at least think about it a lot more! Admittedly, in this particular case, deadline constraints demanded some pretty rapid processing. But I don’t think I’d find much more beneath the surface of Tree of Life if I thought about it for 12 more hours or 12 more days. Malick is doing what lots of directors do as they get older and ponder larger issues. I’m sympathetic, at least, to his intent. But he’s trying to answer big questions by making the biggest movie possible. Where is God when you need him? The one place he forgets to look is in his characters’ eyes.
