The Tree of Life

A movie that wants to mean more than what is actually telling.

Taking a lot of things borrowed from 2001, it doesn't even come close to have such a deep an interesting meaning.

Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life is an attempt to inject some cosmic wonder into the most mundane American story.

In the 1950s, two parents bring up three boys in an American white middle-class, small-town existence. The mother (Jessica Chastain) radiates love and warmth, while the father (Brad Pitt) feels the obligation to be cold and distant in order to prepare his sons for the cruel world that awaits them. As we are informed at the beginning of the film, sometime during this mid-century upbringing, one of the boys would eventually die. We are also shown flashfowards to the present day, when the eldest son Jack, now a successful architect working in New York City, reflects on the death of his brother decades ago. There is very little conventional spoken dialogue in this family drama. The story is told through voiceovers on top of a rich series of images, these monologues representing the inner thoughts, doubts and fears of the characters.

But Malick adds something on top of this, one of the most controversial turns in Hollywood filmmaking in recent years. Early on we are treated to a depiction of the creation of the universe and of life on Earth, from the initial clouds of gas right after the Big Bang to small nebulae, then big galaxies like our own Milky Way, the Earth as an inchoate ball of lava, life arising in tidepools, and then into the era of the dinosaurs. These special effects were created by Douglas Trumbull, best known for the cosmic visuals of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The titles of the film quote from the Book of Job: "Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth, when the morning stars sang together?"

I get what Malick is trying to do here, that is, to show that the trials and tribulations of an individual human life are part of some vast unknown plan. Nonetheless, while I can understand this on an intellectual level, the film does not seem to reconcile the two layers into a single coherent plot. The film is indeed a v...

Visually grandiose and made with true technical and artistic mastery, it is a film with difficult and indigestible themes, which will scare the audience with its slowness and tiring atmosphere.

There are films that are made for some audiences and not for most people, the general public. This film is one of them: being what it is, it doesn't even try to capture our sympathy or attention. The film did very well on the festivals circuit and even won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, in addition to being acclaimed by critics and intellectuals. However, it was not understood by almost anyone but them, it seems extremely cryptic in its message and script, and it was not able to please the mass audience: the proof is in the fact that it received three Oscar nominations without, however, winning any, and not even have been considered by the Globes or BAFTA.

The film revolves around a middle-class Texan family between the present and the 1950s, and focuses particularly on the figure of Jack, the couple's son. The film shows how he lives his childhood, the unequal relationship he has with his parents (a more tolerant and good mother, and a more authoritarian and disillusioned father) and the way both, each in their own way, they try to prepare and educate him. In between, we observe the way they react to the death of one of the youngest members of the family. The film seeks to relate all this to the search for a meaning for human life, showing us images of the planet's history, and others that refer us to various spiritual and metaphysical meanings. We even got access to the characters' prayers and thoughts.

All of this is very beautiful and interesting, and I even liked the characters because they are believable, genuine, well-built, with a rich psychology and manage to capture the audience's sympathy. The problem is that this audience may not even be able to handle the first half hour of film! When cinema deals with philosophical and spiritual themes, it tends to make...