Features > Movie Reviews > The Tree of…

Not only because it’s the latest movie from writer-director Terrence Malick, a filmmaker who only makes must-see pictures. And yes, because it won the Palme d’Or at Cannes against some pretty impressive competition. But also because it’s the most ambitious, audacious, unconventional film to come out of the US mainstream in a long, long time. If it works for you, this could also be the most profound cinema experience of the year: The Tree of Life aspires to nothing less than the spiritual and the sublime.

I have to add, it didn’t work for me – at least not completely – and on first viewing I came out with some sympathy for those critics who had booed at the premiere in Cannes.

We’ll get to my misgivings later. First let’s take a look at what Malick has come up with here.

It’s an elliptical, sometimes confusing film, but at heart a simple and straightforward scenario. There has been a death in the family. We see a middle-aged man (Sean Penn), perhaps an architect, reacting to the news. We gather that his brother has died. Flashbacks take us back to his memories of growing up in Texas in the 1950s: the arrival of a baby brother; the delight of his parents (Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain).

As the children grow up they begin to resent their father’s firm insistence on silence and respect; he is a devout Christian and a strict disciplinarian. Their mother is kind and loving, especially when father is away on business, but she almost never stands up to her husband. The boys play together and with a larger group of kids. Sometimes they get into mischief. Sometimes the older brother foolishly puts his younger into danger, more out of idle curiosity than malevolence. Mostly they are close. Meanwhile their father’s business failures accumulate. He becomes increasingly frustrated with his lot.

As I say, the film’s narrative is simple. But Malick’s fragmentary, impressionistic approach is not always linear. It doesn’t play as a series of scenes, but as a mosaic of vivid moments, associations and emotions. Voices on the soundtrack seem to be interior monologues from the characters, but it’s not always clear who is speaking (or more accurately, thinking), or when. The handheld camerawork (by Emmanuel Lubezki, who did The New World, Ali and Children of Men) often seems less centred on the characters than their environment: the grass, the trees, the sky.

Some audiences in the US have been restive. There have been walkouts, even (according the New York Times) demands for refunds. But Malick’s unusual approach is deeply immersive and keenly felt. The Tree of Life makes the past intensely present. At its best, the film is a vivid, very moving remembrance of childhood, and especially the abrasive bond between father and son(s). As a side-note, this is an extraordinarily personal film from a famous recluse: what little we know about Malick is that he grew up in small town Texas in the 1950s, the son of a very strict and devout father, and brother to two siblings who died tragically young (one in an accident, the other by suicide).

Further, according to some accounts, Malick is himself a very strict father, who, for instance, refuses to have a television in the house. He may also be – and the film seems to support this supposition – a born again Christian.

As for my own doubts… Well, I haven’t yet mentioned the long early sequence devoted to the creation of the world. This CGI spectacle, akin to the apes sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey, is visually striking and puts a universal, metaphysical question mark around the small family drama that follows. But I’m not convinced it really belongs or enhances the film – rather it stops it in its tracks just as its pulling out of the station. What are we to make of the CGI dinosaur that attacks, then spares, a wounded foe? The moment might signal the birth of grace – but is this the same filmmaker who shoots everything in natural light? An image that’s entirely composited?

Like too many sequences in The Tree of Life, the creation is too long and over-emphatic. The film is apparently cut down from a four-hour cut that may eventually see the light of day, but frankly I would prefer to see it lose and half an hour from its present 139 minutes. While we’re at it, let’s please ditch the entire ending: a heavily allegorical sequence that seems to me quite the worst thing Malick has done, not so much for its overtly religious symbolism as for its emotional emptiness.

That said: a film like this will generate extreme reactions, pro and con. Fathers and sons may see it differently. Religious believers will surely see it differently from atheists and agnostics. What’s more, I would not be surprised if my own reactions shift with subsequent viewings and over time. For now, I am left with very mixed feelings about a movie of rare, piercing insight and lofty ambition, a film that seeks to locate God in the mundane, the eternal in the personal.