Film Review | "The Tree of Life" (2011)

(originally posted 27 June 2011)

Dripping with ambition and marvelous to behold, Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life is a rapturous meditation on life and on death, on creation, destruction, and on humanity’s most achingly existential questions. “There are two ways through life: the way of nature, and the way of grace,” muses Mrs. O’Brien (in an ethereal performance from Jessica Chastain) to her eldest son, Jack (portrayed impressively by first timer Hunter McCracken), shedding a modicum of insight into an altogether unprecedented film.

It is this reality with which the latter character, an older, sleek-suited Jack in the form of Sean Penn, is conflicted at the onset of, but also throughout, the film upon learning of his younger brother’s death. What follows over the next two hours of a definitively lyric, non-linear film is Jack’s reflections on this, on the course of his 1950s childhood under the reign of a demanding, perceivably unyielding father (Brad Pitt, in, yes, the thespian achievement of his career) and the care of an overtly loving, expectantly merciful mother (Chastain).

Were Malick to contain his poetry in this tale, a moving narrative of an idyllic midcentury America depicted magnificently in every splendid detail by production designer Jack Fisk, he would have succeeded in achieving conventional greatness. Alas, he does not, aspiring instead to utilize these scenes as a means to contemplate all of existence, from the eruptive birth of the universe and the dawning of life on this planet to closing scenes of the afterlife, and, perhaps, the afterworld.

In this vision, amid sweeping renderings of the infinity of deep space and scenes of a primordial Earth replete with dinosaurs and prehistoric landscapes, Malick makes those inquiries of life and existence whose answers serve to explain, and often justify, creation itself. He does so literally, with whispered narrations from several of the O’Briens, though mainly from the young Jack, that define the film foremost as a prayer. It is these prayers, which play out as an absorbingly abstract dialogue with a Creator (one that Malick actually, audaciously, depicts in several instances throughout the film), that operatically probe the piece’s central theme, the eternal struggle between grace and nature, mercy and harsh reality. Pitt and Chastain, in their opposing roles as the extremes of parenting, archetypally portray this—the demanding father, the forgiving mother.

Malick, and his cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, present these ideas with a stark, moving beauty that is quite likely unmatched in cinema; to say anything less of such imagery is remiss. Scored brilliantly with enduring compositions from, among others, Brahms, Smetana and Berlioz, along with an original theme from Alexandre Desplat that stands on its own against these classical heavyweights (and shall we not forget Cassidy's haunting "Funeral March"), The Tree of Life succeeds as much as visual and sonic poetry as it does as a meditation on the ideas that these sweeping, moving pictures serve to represent. Comparisons to 2001: A Space Odyssey will be inevitable, and are mostly apt, but while Kubrick’s great work stands as equally visionary and ambitious in probing the great mysteries of existence and beyond, it lacks the humanity and vigorous emotion of the present film. Visually, one might find the film, or at least parts of it, most closely resembles particular scenes from Fantasia. In spite of any comparison though, the film stands apart, unique in its interpretation of the bounds of film.

Beautiful, captivating, eccentric, The Tree of Life is a transcendent masterpiece, a seminal work deserving of nothing less than placement among our greatest contributions to lyrical craft. With it, Terrence Malick has forged a breathtaking piece that is not simply an immaculate addition to cinema, but one that may well be a watershed moment for the medium and a veritable monument in America’s artistic consciousness.