Film review: “The Tree of Life”

David Begelman  

Terrence Malick’s new film is something of a paradox. Surprisingly, a majority of film critics on the internet’s website, “Rotten Tomatoes” was more positive about the flick (86%) than ordinary filmgoers (66%), a reversal of the usual expectations. As a rule, critics are less glowing—and often more caustic—than audiences. The customary division of opinion in, say, “The Green Lantern” (critics 26%, audiences 55%) illustrates the point.

“The Tree of Life” is a creative effort born of assiduous attention to detail—not to mention several years in the cutting room—together with a supposed exploration of philosophical issues to which the director is no stranger. Malick has in the past translated “The Essence of Reasons” by Martin Heidegger, the existentialist who is a darling of postmodern theorists. This, despite his pro-Nazi ideology and a philosophy that drove logical positivists like Rudolph Carnap (who considered it to be sheer nonsense) into a conceptual dither.

 “The Tree of Life” is, to put it bluntly, pretentious, although it inaugurates a new mode of film-making in which cinematic statements are made by juxtaposing ostensibly unrelated images. I suspect a newer tradition of movie-making will follow Malick’s auspicious lead. That being said, it is not enough for a director to be an ice-breaker; he’s got to turn out a film with some semblance of intelligibility, an artistic goal that is often elusive in Malick’s film. It seems he has confused trompe l’oeil, or a parade of visually arresting images, with a transparent narrative, believing that cryptic realities surface through presenting those images sequentially. Perhaps this is possible—but not in what Malick has delivered.

Evidently, Geoffrey O’Brien, writing in The New York Review of Books, was sufficiently impressed with the film to author a long review extolling Malick’s walking “us through the stages and conditions and outer boundaries of human existence,” in order to “provide a basic introduction to annihilating and fecundating cosmic forces.” His encomium continues in a transport of adulation that comes perilously close to being incomprehensible.

Even so, O’Brien captures a gist of Malick’s thinking when he indicates that the filmmaker can’t show you “the life of this boy unless he shows you his parents; and the time and place where the parents lived”—perhaps. But then he goes on to insist that these in turn can’t be shown unless the planet and the universe which ushered in the planet is also shown. I disagree. The audience can damn well take the measure of a family without knowledge of cosmic beginnings. And even if there were such thing as a cinematic reality that transmits a transcendent message by juggling or alternating ostensibly unrelated images, you’d still have to craft it properly in delineating the effort.

“The Tree of Life” pulsates with phony rhetoric; it attempts to convince you that any series of images it pastes together amounts to something weightier than arbitrary concoction. Is Jack, a redneck paterfamilias played by Brad Pitt (in what may be his best performance to date), any the less disagreeable because his nascent goodness, making a late appearance on the heels of his being downsized and hobbled vocationally, is preceded or followed by eye-catching vistas of cosmic and elemental forces of nature during the origin of the world? What if he were replaced by Hitler or Torquemada in Malick’s screenplay? Would we then be obliged to regard those monsters in a new light when dished up against a backdrop of primeval origins commencing with the Big Bang?    

To make matters worse, the film is laced with redundant voiceovers, including the pious, “Love is the answer,” a.k.a. everyone’s answer to nothing in particular. Besides, whatever answer love conceivably provides can’t redeem arbitrarily constructed artifice.

It’s anybody’s guess why the insertion of God’s challenge to Job: “Where was thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?” is connected to anything else Malick has to say in his film (or illustrate, if saying the unsayable wasn’t a challenge he was prepared to tackle). Of course, the God of the Old Testament didn’t have to confront Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens, who probably would have welcomed the divine interrogative, if only to retort, “Where were you during the black death, the slave trade, the witch-craze, the holocaust, or tsunamis?”

Many of Malick’s conceits either don’t ring true or else depend upon trite thematic material. One doesn’t expect a father whose cruel and authoritarian ways drive his forbearing wife, Mrs. O’Brien (Jessica Chastain) to distraction or elder son Jack (Hunter McCracken) to harbor thoughts of murdering him, to give an accomplished recital of Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in G Minor,” on a keyboard. It’s a piece that macho types like Jack would ordinarily consider to be music for sissies. Nor is it clear why Malick opts to punctuate brooding metaphysical themes with such overworked passages as the one from Bedrich Smetana’s “Moldau.”

At the end of the film, Jack as an adult (Sean Penn) is seen meandering dreamily around a beach with dozens of others, a scene eerily reminiscent of older Frederico Fellini vehicles, especially the finale of La Dolce Vita. It seems the cosmic force that drives the universe is not above an inclination to borrow or steal, if not to beg.