June 24, 2011 in Features

‘Tree of Life’ branches out far beyond one family’s tale

• Print
• Email
• Share

To make a movie as daring and ambitious as “The Tree of Life,” one needs to forget all about critical reaction or box office results.

Director Terrence Malick (“Days of Heaven,” “Badlands,” “The Thin Red Line,” “The New World”) is the J.D. Salinger of filmmaking – he never gives interviews – but “The Tree of Life” is probably as personal and self-revealing a movie as he’s ever going to make.

It is also more ambitious than any of his previous films: Even if you are familiar with his love for whispered voice-over narration or his tendency to ignore plot, this movie is still a challenge.

It is also a transporting, stunningly beautiful film (shot using only natural light).

The setting is Waco, Texas, home in the 1950s to an ordinary family living the proverbial American dream: Mr. O’Brien (Brad Pitt), a stern disciplinarian, engineer and devout churchgoer, and his wife (Jessica Chastain), who devotes her life to pleasing her husband and raising their kids – the eldest Jack (Hunter McCracken), the middle child R.L. (Laramie Eppler) and young, doomed Steve (Tye Sheridan).

In a tricky, subtle performance, Pitt doesn’t turn his character into the typical monstrous father: He loves his sons as much as his wife loves them, but he has different ideas about how best to raise them, and as they grow older, his manner toughens, like that of a drill sergeant for children.

“The Tree of Life” unfolds primarily through the eyes of Jack (also glimpsed as a sour adult, played by Sean Penn in a few brief scenes), who gradually comes to resent – and resemble – his father for his sometimes cruel ways.

Like his brothers, Jack adores his mother: She’s a saint-like figure who, at one point, even levitates.

There is no traditional plot in “The Tree of Life,” which is why so many people have deemed it boring even though it won the grand prize at the Cannes Film Festival. The movie plays out as a series of memories, so exact and evocative that watching it becomes an immersive experience (the editing, credited to five people, is intentionally disorienting).

Never before has Malick been able to burrow so deeply into your head: The childhood played out on screen is so vivid, it reminds you of yours, regardless of the circumstances.

But instead of keeping the movie within the limits of a domestic drama, Malick pushes it into something far more grand and risky. Twenty minutes in, we cut away from Waco and into outer space, where we witness the Big Bang and the eventual creation of life on Earth – a puny little amoeba that eventually begets dinosaurs.

Throughout the film, the characters talk to God (“What are we to You?”), and the ending puts a literal face on Malick’s belief in an afterlife.

“The Tree of Life” is the story of a family, but it is also a bold, uninhibited exploration of man’s place in the universe, of our role as dust specks in an impossibly large universe.

Malik sees miracles everywhere. You just have to make an effort to see them, too.

No comments on this story so far. Add yours!