The long front lawns of summer afternoons, the flicker of sunlight as it sprays through tree branches, the volcanic surge of the Earth's interior as the planet heaves itself into being--you certainly can't say Terrence Malick lacks for visual expressiveness. The Tree of Life is Malick's long-cherished project, a film that centres on a family in 1950s Waco, Texas, yet also reaches for cosmic significance in the creation of the universe itself. The Texas memories belong to Jack (Sean Penn), a modern man seemingly ground down by the soulless glass-and-metal corporate... world that surrounds him. We learn early in the film of a family loss that happened at a later time, but the flashbacks concern only the dark Eden of Jack's childhood: his games with his two younger brothers, his frustrated, bullying father (Brad Pitt), his one-dimensionally radiant mother (Jessica Chastain). None of which unfolds in anything like a conventional narrative, but in a series of disconnected scenes that conjure, with poetry and specificity, a particular childhood realm. The contributions of cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki and production designer Jack Fisk cannot be underestimated in that regard, and it should be noted that Brad Pitt contributes his best performance: strong yet haunted. And how does the Big Bang material (especially a long, trippy sequence in the film's first hour) tie into this material? Yes, well, the answer to that question will determine whether you find Malick's film a profound exploration of existence or crazy-ambitious failure full of beautiful things. Malick's sincerity is winning (and so is his exceptional touch with the child actors), yet many of the movie's touches are simultaneously gaseous (amongst the bits of whispered narration is the war between nature and grace, roles assigned to mother and father) and all-too-literal (a dinosaur retreats from nearly killing a fellow creature--the first moments of species kindness, or anthropomorphic poppycock?). The Tree of Life premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and won the Palme d'Or there after receiving boos at its press screening. The debate continues, unabated, from that point. --Robert Horton [show more]
Say what you like about Terrence Malick, but he certainly takes great care in his art. The Tree of Life is only his fifth feature in a career spanning 40 years, and is undoubtedly the film he has been trying to make throughout his life. Looking at the themes of the universe, life and religion all wrapped up in some of the most glorious cinematography I have ever seen, it is not an understatement to say that The Tree of Life is the most ambitious film made since 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The story follows the life of Jack O'Brien (Sean Penn) looking back on his life in 1950's Texas, following the death of his brother at the age of 19 (a tragedy unfortunately shared with Malick's life as well). It looks at the conflicts in his childhood between his mother (Jessica Chastain), who embodies the spirit of grace (gentle, nurturing, and authoritative), and his father (Brad Pitt), who embodies the spirit of nature (strict, authoritarian, and quick to lose his temper). It shows how Jack struggles to come to terms with a mother who wants her son to treat the world like a place of wonder, and his father who sees the world as a cruel place, which he needs to protect his sons from. It's a simple story in its essence dealing with issues we can all relate to the conflicts of family, the questioning of religion, the cruelness of death, and a struggle of existentialism over our place in the universe.
Yet, Malick does not stop there this is a movie that wants to put the issues we face in our lives into perspective, by showing the birth of the universe in a sequence of 20 minutes that could only be described as mesmerising. Encompassing images of planets been formed, leading to volcanoes exploding on the earth, microbes beginning to form, and then glimpses of dinosaurs before an asteroid comes crashing into the Earth. All the while being set to the classical piece 'Lacrimosa', it is awe-inspiring cinema that shares a lot with a similar sequence from the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, in that it is so grand that it makes everything feel so insignificant. It's not just this sequence though that is visually spectacular; the entire movie is beautiful, Malick and his cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (Children of Men) have a talent for finding unbelievable beauty in the simplest of things, the trees in a forest, cracks in a canyon where the light shimmers through, even the surprising affectedness of a close-up of a newborn's foot. It's a movie that captures the true beauty of the world in every single shot, and the use of hand-held cameras for most of the film give it a personal quality which allows the beauty to resonate even more. Finally, the experience is completed with some wondrous uses of music, again taking its cues from 2001 with a wide variety of classical music to add scope to the many images Malick throws at you, but it also has an original score from Alexandre Desplat (The King's Speech) that wonderfully complements the film as well.
Let's have a look at the performances because there are some truly outstanding bits of work done here by Chastain and Pitt. Chastain brings this wonderful childish glee to her role, coupling this small girl-like astonishment about the world around her, with this deep-rooted frustration with her husband who cannot get past his own failings and is polluting the minds of her children. It's Pitt though who really shines in this movie, taking a very stereotypical role such as the authoritarian father and infusing it with this deep sense of longing. He plays the role with the perfect amount of frustration at his own failings, whilst continuing to hope to achieve his dreams, but moreover make sure that his boys can achieve theirs. Whilst Pitt was undoubtedly excellent in Moneyball, it would be no disservice if he were to get an Oscar nomination for this film instead.
Ultimately then The Tree of Life is one of those movies that you just don't see enough of in this day and age, a movie that demands you give it full attention and leaves you with questions to ponder at the end. In many ways The Tree of Life is not a film, but an experience. You allow yourself to be dragged along into a world lovingly crafted by a director whose reclusive nature makes this an autobiography of sorts, and is a movie that everybody should experience.
Now at this stage most reviews would end, after all The Tree of Life has become a critical darling and has been free from most criticism, but I felt watching The Tree of Life that this was a movie with as many flaws as strengths. Let's look at the most fundamental failing that being that the narrative isn't strong enough to carry a film of this weight. That's not to say that the story is bad, but it's not developed enough to really make you feel like you've grown along with the characters, this is partly to do with the unconventional structure that Malick employs. The Tree of Life is happy to jump around from point to point in Jack's life at a moments notice, but this can make the movie unduly tricky to follow and worse yet it impacts upon the effect that moments in the movie have upon the characters. Also the use of Sean Penn in this movie is woefully under-developed, Penn spends most of his time moping around some beautiful scenery dropping philosophical statements like they're going out of fashion. A bit more time exploring the development of Jack from troubled youth, to the middle-aged Sean Penn we see would have given these moments a form of clarity and deservedness rather than the shallow auras surrounding them as they stand. This is one thing 2001 did so much better than The Tree of Life, 2001 infused its narrative with a sense of direction that made the payoff at the end all the more mind-blowing. The Tree of Life on the other hand never gets that moment; it spends so much time posing philosophical questions that it never really tries to offer an opinion on them, and this to me is a shame I would loved to have seen more of Malick's views on spirituality and religion than more sequences of Sean Penn looking sad and spilling out some over-wrought dialogue.
These are fairly big problems that stop The Tree of Life being the classic many people are professing it to be, but don't let that deter you from seeing this movie even with its flaws The Tree of Life is so visually compelling you will always be content to let it meander its way slowly to its open-ended conclusion. Cinema needs filmmakers like Terrence Malick, those directors who are so focused in their vision that they don't care how slow or pretentious the movie can appear, only whether the vision in their mind is been projected onto the screen and the vision in Malick's mind is a beautiful one indeed.
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Brad Pitt and Sean Penn star in Terrence Malick's ambitious, fantasy-tinged, coming-of-age tale. Jack (Hunter McCracken) is one of three brothers brought up in the 1950s by his spiritually-minded mother (Jessica Chastain) and pragmatic, no-nonsense father (Pitt). After witnessing a disturbing event that shakes his world to the core, the young Jack struggles to reconcile the differing world views of his parents. Later, as a jaded middle-aged man with a failed marriage behind him, Jack (Penn) retraces his emotional journey from the hope and innocence of childhood to his disillusioned adult years in a quest to rediscover meaning in his life.
Please note this is a region B Blu-ray and will require a region B or region free Blu-ray player in order to play. The impressionistic story of a Texas family in the 1950s. The film follows the life journey of the eldest son Jack through the innocence of childhood to his disillusioned adult years as he tries to reconcile a complicated relationship with his father (Brad Pitt). Jack (played as an adult by Sean Penn) finds himself a lost soul in the modern world seeking answers to the origins and meaning of life while questioning the existence of faith. Directed by Terrence Malick.
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