Tree of Life

Terrance Malick's Tree of Life is probably the most interesting film experience I've ever had that I cannot recommend. People should know they are wandering into a two-and-a-half-hour tone poem where nothing much happens. The "story," if you can call it that, concerns an aging Sean Penn who thinks back on his childhood and relives his relationship with his younger brother, when they were still innocent, years before that brother would go off to Vietnam and get killed. Penn's younger self is shaped mostly by his overbearing disciplinarian father, played by Brad Pitt. But Malick doesn't start there. No, he has to start earlier than that to tell this story properly. He must begin at the beginning of the universe.

About fifteen minutes into this Dawn of Man sequence people started filing out of the theater. There was open laughter, and then more filing out, probably 15 people or so in total. And still the earth's molten core was forming and the oceans were spewing and microbial life was wiggling and cells were dividing. Then there were CGI dinosaurs, and more laughter from a pocket of soon-to-depart folks. In some ways Tree of Life owes more of a debt to 2001 -- even Solaris -- than it does to Revolutionary Road or any other family melodramas from the period.

I found it mesmerizing.

K noted: "The problem is that this is a movie, so it's being marketed as a movie. If this were an art installation you saw at MoMA you'd adore it." I'd have to agree with that. People can't wrap their heads around it because it's like no movie they've ever seen. There's no plot or rising action or red herrings or anything dependable that Robert McKee or Gustav Freytag would use to build a narrative. It's an art event, not traditional storytelling.

But it's amazing in its own way. Malick is unafraid to go from macro to micro in one edit, from the dawn of the universe to the tiny insignificant details that make up this cosmic infinity -- a frog tied to a toy rocket, a mother's hemline, a neighbor's lingerie spread out on a bed, a tiny newborn foot cupped in two hands. I was browsing a review complaining that when all was said and done Tree of Life was just a scrapbook of pretty pictures. Is that not enough? Tree of Life IS a scrapbook -- the cinematography (shot completely without artificial film lighting) is remarkable -- and it catalogues everything about these lives, and life in general. Tree of Life is a celebration of what it is to be alive -- all of life's grand moments and banalities and emotion and dread in two and a half hours. It is by turns operatic and very still and quiet. And it is boring, and it is long, but it is definitely the film I'd put on the Golden DVD for the next Voyager spacecraft, the film that most completely explains us to whatever space alien awaits us. It is somehow the film that most totally details how life works -- physically and metaphysically -- and, like life, it is not always entertaining.

I asked K whether films like this would still be made ten years from now. She didn't think so. Malick is kind of a relic -- a true auteur -- and Tree of Life is the shotgun blast of an older director contemplating his mortality and the end of a filmmaking career. They shot multiple formats of film (35mm, 65mm, and IMAX -- over a million feet), and used no film lights. Malick is famous for shooting at magic hour -- 45 minutes a day -- on sections of Days of Heaven... to get the soft post-dusk lighting just right. On Tree of Life if it was cloudy and they were doing interiors they'd find something else to shoot. Or just come back the next day and hope for the best. Directors who came up in the 70s -- when there was more freedom and auteur theory was in vogue -- still cling to this control. Directors coming up now will never have this control, or this desire to have this control. They will be cutting different versions for test audiences.

I skimmed a few review quotes of this film and the word "pretentious" seemed to crop of up quite a bit. I actually think that Tree of Life is the opposite of pretension -- Malick made a film that only he could make. It's shockingly personal when you think about it. Malick's entire being is in this film. How often does a director so completely imprint his soul on a motion picture so that you feel like you know him personally? There's nothing pretentious about it. Bombastic maybe. Overreaching, sure. I myself will probably never want to sit through it again, but I'm so glad I went to see it in the theater because such a film could never be tolerated on DVD with all of one's household and its distractions circling.

So I refuse to recommend this movie -- or "art experience" -- because I think it IS problematic. It rides the razor's edge between laughable and laudable; on a different day I might be tittering in the dark and slinking out with everyone else. Tree of Life is big and baggy and messy and inspired and lyrical and tedious... and uneven and beautiful too.

Just like life.