Tree of Life

You're average movie-goer probably doesn't have a clue who Terrence Malick is, but, to cineaste's, he is the closest thing to god many of them have (and as elusive). He barreled onto the scene in 1973 with his masterpiece debut, Badlands, followed only five years later by another masterpiece of 70's American cinema, Days of Heaven. It would be 20 years before we saw another film, 1998's The Thin Red Line, which would be followed by The New World, and now Tree of Life. While everyone can agree that it's fantastic to no longer have to wait twenty years to get a new film by Malick, Tree of Life has been gestating as a project since the Badlands/Days of Heaven era, a few more years and some quality input may have kept this one in line with Malicks previous works.

Tree of Life gives us a first hand view of a period of time in the lives of one Texas family. Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain play the father and mother. They have three young boys, the oldest, and the one that the film focuses on, is Jack, played by Hunter McCracken. We see Pitt be the traditional 1950's era father, trying to teach his boys how to be tough, while Chastain plays the traditional mother, gentle, loving and caring. Interspersed throughout their story is the very evolution of the universe and Earth itself, from the beginning of time back to the 1950's, and occasionally to the present, where we meet grown Jack, played by Sean Penn.

Tree of Life is a lot of what you would expect from a Malick film. The cinematography is epic and gorgeous, and the film is meditatively paced, and allows itself to unfold in front of you. The problem with Tree, though, is it is bloated. There are multiple scenes that don't really go anywhere, and edits within the scenes that feel contradictory, or are unnecessary. It's hard, though, because these things (and the sheer length of it), butts up against how beautiful and transcendent the film can be. While it doesn't seem to have a solid plot, Tree is more like a scrapbook of this family's life than anything else, and those little moments being strung together can really bring out an empathy in the audience, if they allow it too. Both Pitt and Chastain deliver fantastic performances, and the young boys playing their sons are pretty much perfect.

I feel incredibly mixed about this film. I like it and I don't. I think if you are already a Malick fan, you definitely should see it and make up your own mind. If you don't really know who the guy is, but you've heard good things, go rent Badlands or Days of Heaven instead.

Roger Ebert's review/meditation on Malick's "Tree of Life"

A Prayer Beneath The Tree Of Life

By

Roger Ebert

Terrence Malick's new film is a form of prayer. It created within me a spiritual awareness, and made me more alert to the awe of existence. I believe it stands free from conventional theologies, although at its end it has images that will evoke them for some people. It functions to pull us back from the distractions of the moment, and focus us on mystery and gratitude.

Not long after its beginning we apparently see the singularity of the Big Bang, when the universe came into existence. It hurtles through space and time, until it comes gently to a halt in a small Texas town in the 1950s. Here we will gradually learn who some of the people were as the film first opened.

In Texas we meet the O'Brien family. Bad news comes in the form of a telegram, as it always did in those days. Mrs. O'Brien (Jessica Chastain) reads it in her home, and gives vent to grief. Mr. O'Brien (Brad Pitt) gets the news at work. We gather a child has died. It is after that when we see the universe coming into being, and Hubble photographs of the far reaches.

This had an uncanny effect on me, because Malick sees the time spans of the universe and a human life a lot like I always have. As a child I lay awake obsessed with the idea of infinity and the idea of God, who we were told had no beginning and no end. How could that be? And if you traveled and traveled and traveled through the stars, would you ever get to the last one? Wouldn't there always be one more?

In my mind there has always been this conceptual time travel, in which the universe has been in existence for untold aeons, and then a speck appeared that was Earth, and on that speck evolved life, and among those specks of life were you and me. In the span of the universe, we inhabit an unimaginably small space and time, and yet we think we are so important. It is restful sometimes to pull back and change the scale, to be grateful that we have minds that can begin to understand who we are, and where are in the vastness.

Many films diminish us. They cheapen us, masturbate our senses, hammer us with shabby thrills, diminish the value of life. Some few films evoke the wonderment of life's experience, and those I consider a form of prayer. Not prayer "to" anyone or anything, but prayer "about" everyone and everything. I believe prayer that makes requests is pointless. What will be, will be. But I value the kind of prayer when you stand at the edge of the sea, or beneath a tree, or smell a flower, or love someone, or do a good thing. Those prayers validate existence and snatch it away from meaningless routine.

We all occupy our own box of space and time. We have our memories and no one else's. We live one life, accumulating it in our minds as we go along. Terrence Malick was born in Waco, Texas, and has filmed much of "Tree of Life" in small Texas towns; the house of the O'Brien family is in Smithville. I felt like I knew this house and this town. Malick and I were born within a year of one another, and grew up in small towns in the midlands. Someone else, without my memories to be stirred, might be less affected by its scenes of the O'Briens raising their three boys.

I know unpaved alleys with grass growing down the center,. I know big lawns with a swing hanging from a tree. I know windows that stand open all day in the summer. I know houses that are never locked. I know front porches, and font porch swings, and aluminum drinking glasses covered with beads of sweat from the ice tea and lemonade inside.I know picnic tables. I know the cars of the early 1950s, and the kitchens, and the limitless energy of kids running around the neighborhood.

And I know the imperfect family life Malick evokes. I know how even good parents sometimes lose their tempers. How children resent what seems to be the unforgivable cruelty of one parent, and the refuge seemingly offered by the other. I know what it is to see your parents having a argument, while you stand invisible on the lawn at dusk and half-hear the words drifting through the open windows. I know the feeling of dread, because when your parents fight, the foundation of your world shakes. I had no siblings, but I know how play can get out of hand and turn into hurt, and how hatred can flare up between two kids, and as quickly evaporate. I know above all how time moves slowly in a time before TV and computers and video games, a time when what you did was go outside every morning and play and dare each other, and mess around with firecrackers or throw bricks at the windows of an empty building, and run away giggling with guilt.

Those days and years create the fundament. Then time shifts and passes more quickly, and in some sense will never seem as real again. In the movie, we rejoin one of the O'Brien boys (now played by Sean Penn) when he grows to about the age his father was. We see him in a wilderness of skyscrapers, looking out high windows at a world of glass and steel. Here are not the scenes of the lawn through the dining room windows. These windows never open. He will never again run outside and play.

What Malick does in "Tree of Life" is create the span of lives. Of birth, childhood, the flush of triumph, the anger of belittlement, the poison of resentment, the warmth of forgiving. And he shows that he feels what I feel, that it was all most real when we were first setting out, and that it will never be real in that way again. In the face of Hunter McCracken, who plays Jack as a boy, we see the face of Sean Penn, who plays him as a man. We see fierceness and pain. We see that he hates his father and loves him. When his father has a talk with him and says, "I was a little hard on you sometimes," he says, "It's your house. You can do what you want to." And we realize how those are not words of anger but actually words of forgiveness. Someday he will be the father. It will not be so easy.