THE TREE OF LIFE – Reviewed by Will | The Video Station: (303) 440-4448

“The nuns taught us there were two ways through life – the way of nature and the way of grace. You have to choose which one you’ll follow… Grace doesn’t try to please itself. Accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. Accepts insults and injuries… Nature only wants to please itself. Get others to please it too. Likes to lord it over them. To have its own way. It finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world is shining around it. And love is smiling through all things.”

The words above are spoken in voice-over at the outset of Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life–only his fifth feature film in 38 years as a director. It might seem peculiar that Malick of all people would attach any such negativity to the word “nature”–his work, especially of late, seems to reflect the eye of a naturalist in the classical sense of the term. But grace vs. nature is only one of many blurry dualities he explores in this opus, arguably his masterpiece. Most, in the “story” he weaves here, fall under two grand headings: mother and father, corresponding with obvious contrasts like love and fear, forgiveness and anger, along with more subtle distinctions, as between revelation and instruction.

Much of The Tree of Life is concerned with the infancy and childhood of a boy growing up in Waco, Texas, in the 1950′s. Though this setting makes up the bulk of the film, it is introduced through and played against nothing less than the entire history of the universe and life on Earth. These latter sequences include both the abstract (liquified cosmic explosions and expansions reminiscent of the finale to Kubrick’s 2001) and the literal (the formation of our solar system, visions of primordial Earth, the Cambrian Explosion, and, yes, dinosaurs–though not like you’ve seen them before). Though Charlie Kaufman played with this kind of stuff to comic effect in his brilliant screenplay for Adaptation, the images here are clean, beautiful–often downright majestic. It’s easy to be reminded of the work of the novelist James Michener, who never shied away from vast historical and prehistorical scope.

The birth of the cosmos sequence segues into the human birth and childhood of Jack (Hunter McCracken as a boy, with a little of Sean Penn as the adult), through whose eyes we witness the loss of innocence. From the joys of discovery, to the eventual remorse in destruction and cruelty. Love for his mother (Jessica Chastain) and fear of his father (Brad Pitt). Thus the title of the film itself has a dual meaning–in the biblical sense of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and the grand scientific vision of the tree of evolution.

The Tree of Life will challenge and perhaps disappoint many viewers. It is, like Malick’s other films, quite impressionistic, and not bound to standard narrative structure. Though there are snatches of fragmentary dialogue, most of the words spoken are heard through whispered voice-over soliloquies addressed blindly to mother, father, brother, and god. Many–perhaps most–images in the film are shot in silhouettes hard and soft, whether it be a hand cupping a candle, leaves and branches lit from above, or the cold globe of the Earth across the dying sun. The camera plunges forward through the dusty galactic spiral arms of the Milky Way and across grassy fields at child’s-eye level. The feast is not only visual but auditory–alive with insect and bird song, and swelling with seamlessly knit classical and choral music. (Both this disc and Criterion’s release of Malick’s The Thin Red Line relay an exhortation from him to “Play it Loud!”–I suggest you take his advice.)

For my part, I found The Tree of Life to be utterly sublime. For a good solid half hour in the central sections of the film, through the cosmic ballet to the evocation of early childhood, I was completely transported into realms of imagination and memory not often awakened. I delight in Malick’s penchant to pause and consider the surfaces on which a child walks and the objects that inhabit them, inanimate and otherwise. His curious gazing at the natural world reminds me of the great 19th Century naturalists, in particular Ernst Haeckel, who was among the first to map the genealogy of life as a many-branched tree, and spent his lifetime seeking grandeur and order in the chaotic and violent living world. Perhaps what Malick seeks, like Haeckel, is the discovery of grace within nature.- [DVD]

Drama

Rated PG-13

DVD Release Date: 10/11/11

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THE TREE OF LIFE – Reviewed by Will

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