Friday, June 3, 2011

I don’t know if there’s any reason at this point to say anything about Terrence Malick’s cosmos-spanning opus The Tree of Life. It has taken home the big awards at Cannes and every critic on the face of the planet has weighed in one way or another. Leaving the theater after seeing The Tree of Life some weeks ago, the usual chirpy PR person thrust a clipboard in my face and demanded an opinion. Thirty seconds of thought doesn’t do a film like Tree of Life justice and I gently barked, "I’m glad there’s still a director out there making films like this." Someone behind me hurrahed, and I was on my way. It’s been two or so weeks now and my thoughts about The Tree of Life are similarly vague and I think Terrence Malick would enjoy that. The notoriously reclusive director has made a career of crafting both films and a persona that leave much to the imagination and The Tree of Life does not subvert these expectations. Malick’s newest film is a film only because it exists on celluloid. The Tree of Life is a tone poem, a brave, bold experiment in visuals and sound that deigns the concept of linear story unworthy.

Movie Review - The Tree Of Life

The Tree of Life could be said to be about, well, everything. Though a loose story of a small family in Texas in the 1950s creates the needed characters we as an audience need to connect with the film, the majority of the film is scattered visuals of the Earth, the cosmos, nature, flora, and fauna. Oh yeah, Brad Pitt is in the film as a crew-cut sporting father with an iron hand, and Jessica Chastain is his attractive, soft wife and there’s kids and Sean Penn exists in the future where he just sort of stumbles around looking sweaty, but none of these are the point. Nor are the individual visuals of the Sun spouting fire or a dinosaur racing across a river. Malick has made a film that can’t be critiqued like your casual cinematic experience, because he’s alluded the casual cinematic requisites and replaced them with what could be seen as an entirely cinematic experience. Terrence Malick has crafted a living piece of memory - arguably his memory - that interacts the way the actual mind processes thought. It isn’t about picking through the grey matter to find one single scene, it’s about the rush of visuals and sounds and places and people that our entire brain revolves about. Watching The Tree of Life is like experiencing a virtual reality ride through the childhood of Terrence Malick ... and the Earth.

Luckily for us Terrence Malick is one of the finest visual composers of all time, and literally every shot in the entire picture is gorgeous. So much so that while sitting here trying to pick a few out I can only remember the film as single attractive entity. Malick worries not about pretentiousness (hell, there’s a 15 minute sequence in the film where he films the history of the Earth) and his lack of self-control coupled with his love for a beautiful image turns the final half an hour of the film (a sequence involving some sort of desolate afterlife) in to an exercise in New Age emotional pap. But again, I can forgive a leaden ending, because I don’t believe Malick wants us to look at things like "endings" in this film (or any of his films), he wants us to see a complete piece, a visual masterpiece that pulls you in and spits you exhausted and contemplative. Malick’s made the equivalent of an arthouse blockbuster, and I’ll say it again, films like these just aren’t made anymore, but I’m beyond glad that someone like Terrence Malick is still picking up the reigns from time to time.

- Noah Sanders -



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