ON A FRAME-BY-FRAME, shot-by-shot, scene-by-scene basis, Terrence Malick is pretty unfuckwithable. Like a gene splice of Boo Radley and Stanley Kubrick, the reclusive filmmaker’s works are austere, confident, and frequently stunning; hitting the pause button at random during any of his films usually reveals the sort of shot that other filmmakers slave for their entire careers. Patient and defiant, Malick makes movies on his own terms: You either come to them willing to accept what he has to offer, and at the pace he’s willing to offer it, or you’re in for the longest 16 hours of your life.
With The Tree of Life, Malick’s created a film that embodies the best and worst of his tendencies. I’d tell you what it’s about, but it’s kind of about everything: Cosmic and daring and intimate and insightful, it straddles, dodders, and occasionally trips along the thin black line between glorious success and well-intentioned failure. It ranges from dourly introspective familial drama to life-and-death struggles between dinosaurs, spanning eons and species and the tiny distances between people. Sometimes it works, beautifully and boldly and with Old Testament-style grandeur; sometimes it feels like a deleted scene from Jurassic Park.
Crappily computer-generated dinosaurs aside (in a movie as jaw-droppingly gorgeous as this, it’s too bad Malick’s prehistoric stars look like they’re on loan from a 1997 PBS special), The Tree of Life mostly deals with the O’Briens, a Texas family in the ’50s. There’s a father (Brad Pitt), a mother (Jessica Chastain), and their three boys, most notably Jack (played as a child by the awesomely named Hunter McCracken, and as a grownup by an even-scowlier-than-usual Sean Penn). Young Jack’s thorny relationship with his overbearing father takes center stage, with Jack’s poignant memories treated with as much gravity as Malick’s fiery, rumbling depiction of the Big Bang. As the experiential, sensual The Tree of Life swoops and floats and rambles, spinning in directions both metaphysical and pedestrian, the only constants are life (exuberant, joyful, hard) and death (terrifying, ominous, also hard). Predictably enough, there are also about 5,000 serene, graceful shots of a sunlit tree, which either stands proudly as a majestic symbol of the interconnectedness of the universe, or it’s just a thing in the O’Briens’ yard. Your call.
The Tree of Life is inarguably beautiful, and there are frequent moments of clear, moving profundity—just as, especially toward its ethereal climax, there are sequences of goofy clunkiness when Malick gets too emo for anyone’s good. As a whole, The Tree of Life isn’t a masterpiece—but frame-by-frame, shot-by-shot, and scene-by-scene, it’s an astonishing assemblage of parts. Maybe all of ’em don’t fit together as seamlessly as they could, but hell. I’m guessing Malick’s got bigger things on his mind.
Hmm. Malick does seem to have trouble with special effects. Even in “Badlands,” the gun wounds looked painted-on, as they did in “Thin Red Line,” which didn’t really hang together for me, btw.
Nonetheless, this flick is still probably worth shelling out ten bux for. [Insert Heidegger joke here.]
@jamdox: Thing is, there are a good number of effects in the movie—the aforementioned Big Bang, for one—and all of ’em, with the exception of the dinosaurs, are beautiful. Malick got Douglas Trumbull to help out, for chrissakes: http://vnty.fr/lCMN2D. Sounds like a lot of those Trumbull-assisted shots were practical, though; it’s the CG dinosaurs where things get iffy.
Still, yes: Definitely worth 10 bucks.
Technically, it was fine. I didn’t mind the dinosaurs. The philosophy is shit, however. Recommendation: save your ten bux, and just rent Bergman’s “Winter Light”.
I think people have difficulty parsing the film, and so don’t understand its actual thesis, which is a good thing, because it’s yet more reactionary bullshit inspired by Heidegger.
Let’s ask a question the Malick’s ilk have been scrambling to answer for decades: how could Heidegger be a Nazi? After all his concern about Being in the world, about Authenticity, and so on, how could this great man of deep concern be a vociferous Nazi?
Simple. Beneath all the jargon, Heidegger’s philosophy is an extension of the whiny and constipated side of Germanic culture, wherein maladjusted fools seek to scapegoat the human condition, and whine and mope about how the nasty modern world interrupted their “meaningful” “organic” lives as dirty, superstitious peasants. (Sound like anyone you know living 5 to a house in SE?)
Heideggerian existentialism seems to argue for authenticity, but actually seeks escape. That’s why Heidegger was a Nazi, and why Malick is basically advocating joining the Christian Coalition in this repulsive film.