Written and Directed by Terrence Malick.
Starring Brad Pitt, Sean Penn and Jessica Chastain.
SYNOPSIS:
Err... you want an actual synopsis?
Ka-chunk, ka-chunk, ka-chunk. That’s the sound of a folding cinema seat being left in frustration. It happened at least three times in the opening 20 minutes.
Tree of Life isn’t the easiest film to watch. It asks you to do the hard work: making connections between its often-unrelated shots, or giving meaning to an occasional, abstract CGI sequence. Sometimes you get the impression the film doesn’t care if you’re there to watch it or not. It seems to exist only for itself.
The opening 50 minutes work almost as a vetting procedure. A “ka-chunk” would interrupt the cinema’s church-like silence after nearly every scene change, if you can call them scene changes. They’re more like slight shifts in a train of thought. The first half hour is difficult. Although comprised of the finest cinematography, the montage is sparse and unfocused. Mrs. O’Brien (Jessica Chastain, who looks like Badlands’ Sissy Spacek) speaks a voice-over of half-sentences and thoughts. They overlap the images and bestow upon them a vague meaning. Her son has died, and she is remembering him. The montage is of her, her three sons, one of whom is now deceased, and her husband, Mr. O’Brien (Brad Pitt). The shots focus on the insignificant details, like the way the hallway light can be seen from their children’s bedroom past an ajar door. She’ll occasionally ask God why her son has been taken, and you think it a rhetorical question of mourning. But then Malick will answer by showing a yellow/orange entity, a bit like a shapeless embryo, a bit like a Window Media Player visualisation. It’s odd to see this abstract CGI breaking in on such naturalism.
Others have made the embryo comparison. They explain it in terms of ‘life’ and ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’. The parallels are definitely there, but The Tree of Life’s main strength is its ambiguity. There won’t be many wrong answers. I always revert to Kuleshov when struggling to interpret films. The ‘effect’ he discovered was that if you have a shot of someone looking, the viewer will assume that the following shot is the object of their gaze. Here, Mrs. O’Brien asks questions of God, and then Malick cuts to the yellow/orange entity. It’s easy to mistake for Futurama’s representation of God, as a vast cosmic presence. But he doesn’t reply. Who said God was sentient? Or that he would even care?
The voice over and 50s montage is eventually revealed as belonging to Jack (Sean Penn) in the present day, son to Mrs. O’Brien and survivor of his brother. His corporate world of straight lines, glass and metal makes for an oppressive contrast to the open, nature-fuelled memories of his youth. That his profession is architecture implies an attempted escape of his earthy past. But older Jack’s sequences are as unconnected as those from his childhood. There is still no structure to his scenes. Everything in this film appears as a half-dream, like when the mind jumps between memory and imagination as it tentatively approaches sleep. Perhaps Jack is a dead man and his afterlife is this stream of consciousness.
Then comes a 20-minute CGI sequence, beginning with the yellow/orange entity. Those still left in the cinema started to shift nervously. It charts the formation of Earth from vast clouds of slowly compressing space dust, then its infant, fiery stages of lava and rock. Then to a primordial liquid full of atoms, which learn to replicate, and then how to engulf others. You see coiled molecules and then what looks like chromosomes. They split, and then there is life in these new seas.
The life progresses to a jellyfish-like organism, and then to a small squid. This is not a single shot, like the music video for Fatboy Slim’s ‘Right Here, Right Now’, but a series of different ones, as though from the unedited rushes of a nature documentary spanning the entire history of the Universe. At first it’s disorientating, but then your mind realises the connections, joining the various…oh shit is that a dinosaur?
There’s a brief scene between a wounded dinosaur and what looks like its predator. It’s bold, as Rohan Morbey argued in his review that just beat mine to print, but it crosses a line into pretension. Of course, the entire film tightrope walks such a boundary, and occasionally looses its balance (with the voice-over, mainly), but the mini-drama the dinosaurs play out is conceited. Also, their CGI looks like a crude Flash animation compared to the scenery they inhabit, and somewhat undoes the eye-fooling imagery preceding it.
But stick with it. If anything, it’s refreshing to have your mind dangerously close to overheating just to understand when watching a film. It also makes for a nice dose of intellectual offsetting if you’ve recently seen Transformers: Dark of the Moon. Because after those opening 50 minutes, as trying and frustrating as they are, you’re rewarded with some of the most incredibly moving cinema.
We’re gifted our first real scene, and the voice-overs largely dissipate. Characters talk to each other and the camera cuts between them – something that has not yet happened. It’s misleading to call them ‘characters’ just as it’s deceptive to call the celluloid they inhabit a ‘film’. The shots still overlap like a stream of consciousness, making it more akin to a dream than any narrative. Malick has created a near-perfect visual representation of memory.
The death of a son and brother appears to have only been a stimulus as the film follows the relationship between Jack and his father. Mr. O’Brien is a strict, ambitious man, and is bitter at those who have inherited their success. He strives to be a self-made man, but also wants Jack to be nothing like him. Such intentions are futile. “I’m more like you than her,” Jack reveals near the end in the film’s most crushingly human moment.
Their complex bond haunts every scene as the film explores other confusing childhood emotions in relation to it: Jack’s Oedipal jealousy, his new, sexual desires and subsequent guilt. Those sound depressing, but a profound joy always brightens nearby. Everything is seeped in a syrupy nostalgia, like the way the sun pours into every shot.
I hate using ‘beautiful’ to describe anything, but it was the first word that tumbled through my lips as my own father asked me how it was. It won’t be for everyone’s tastes, especially those who left the Sunday evening showing in Haymarket. It’s a dangerous thing to be enticed to a film by the big names blazoned across its poster. But for those who can pass the endurance test and let the subsequent hour and a half overwhelm them, a genuinely affecting and poignant film awaits. And when it’s over, you’ll renter the ether with Malick-tinted eyes.
Oli Davis
365 Days, 100 Films
Vision Quest: The Making of The Tree of Life
Movie Review Archive
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