Like our own experiences as they exist in our brains, it consists of whole scenes and conversations alongside torrential fragments, jumbled flashes, and wild associations.
Willfully elliptical and provocatively visual, The Tree of Life is an impossibly ambitious film that sets out to encompass not just the human condition but the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.
Beginning with a quote from the Book of Job – “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth?” asks God – Terrence Malick’s sixth film in a career spanning 42 years offers more questions than answers and more rumination than explanation as it settles on a suburban family in Waco, Texas, as a microcosm of all that is.
Chock full of dreamily beautiful shots of nature – towering trees, lush foliage, trickling streams, crashing surf – Tree of Life eschews dialogue for long stretches in favour of murmured, almost prayerful narration and stirring music from the likes of Bach, Mahler, and Holst alongside composer Alexandre Desplat’s original contributions.
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Tree of Life Directed by Terrence Malick Starring Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain, Hunter McCracken, Sean Penn |
The figure whose thoughts and memories these are is Jack O’Brien (Sean Penn), a disenchanted corporate architect who feels adrift in his adult life. Tree of Life juxtaposes cascading recollections of his upbringing with the birth of the universe, the dawn of life, the age of dinosaurs, and a lightly sketched afterlife where the departed reunite and, in true Christian fashion, the highest powers are forgiveness, redemption, and love.
Though the film charts Jack’s life from birth, the narrative puts its focus on his early adolescence when, as the eldest of three sons (played by Hunter McCracken, Laramie Eppler, and Tye Sheridan), he begins to learn life’s lessons from his strict father (Brad Pitt) and lovingly obliging mother (Jessica Chastain ).
Malick envisions life as a choice between the way of nature – red in tooth and claw – and the way of grace. The former is embodied by the stern Mr. O’Brien, whose brand of paternal affection entails teaching his sons to fight (“Hit me! Harder!” he demands) so that they will survive what he sees as a world even harsher than he is. His wife, meanwhile, champions the way of grace, running around the house and jumping on the bed with her sons when their father is away on business.
Viewers get their own corresponding fork in the path. Some will rail at the long silences, the studied obliqueness, and the veiled pretension of it all. Others will happily abandon themselves to the tidal pull of Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography and the sibilant narration.
But nearly everyone will find some moment or image as captivating and resonant as a long-lost memory unearthed and put on display like a primordial insect in amber.
As a nostalgia picture in many senses, Tree of Life invites comparison to Super 8, just released and similarly packed with kids touring the suburbs on their bicycles, with particular focus on little boys enacting little boy adventures.
But the grandeur of vision, the recurrent cosmic imagery, and the illustration of key points in the history of life on earth all recall Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, as does the use of majestic classical music during lengthy interludes containing neither dialogue nor narration.
Visual effects supervisor Douglas Trumbull – who held the same role working on 2001 – recreated the Big Bang on film with minimal use of CGI, and the resultant protozoan imagery (which evokes The Fountain’s similarly produced and motivated deep-space sequences) is perfectly ambiguous in scale, visually linking the near-divinity of infinite space to the humble miracle of life.
“Father, Mother – always you wrestle inside me, always you will,” utters a pensive narrator-Jack. This, as much as anything, can be taken as the film’s summation, that we live and die but endure nonetheless, that in both the most fanciful and the most cynically literal of ways our forebears live on through us, and the procession will continue after we too pass on. Each moment of living, each pregnant image, is precious beyond articulation.
Fiercely unique, muscularly poetic, Tree of Life is more than just unapologetic in its approach – it demands total surrender. Whether it earns and receives compliance is a question for individual viewers, but even to those who consider the film unsuccessful, it will likely prove indelible.