Movies we love... "The Tree of Life" (2011)

Terence Malick's new epic motion picture, "The Tree of Life," is a mind blower, and perhaps the most intriguing and puzzling film since Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey." The scale is both grand in scope and intimate in its perception of family relationships. Virtually indescribable, it speaks with a pure cinematic language. Images and sound overlap and are juxtaposed in free flowing compositions, so that the meaning of what we see at any one moment may not become clear until later, if at all. We distill a thought or idea, or perhaps an emotion, only after a series of competing and contrasting images have passed before our eyes. Echoes and reflections contrast with, yet complement each other. 

There is not a clear narrative, but the film is centered on several incidents in the life of a family living in Waco, Texas in the 1950's. Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain are the O'Briens, a couple with three young sons, living what is in many ways an idyllic small town life. They love their children deeply, although the father's authoritarian attitude toward raising the boys creates conflict, especially with the oldest boy, Jack. We are also shown scenes of Jack as a middle aged man (Sean Penn) who seems to be haunted by a tragedy that struck the family years ago, and by the oedipal conflict with his father. Is the movie taking place in his mind? Are the images and sounds we experience his memories and thoughts? This is not clear, and perhaps is not meant to be so simply interpreted. 

Early in "The Tree of Life" we are shown a wordless sequence of about twenty minutes, which seems to be a visual history of the universe. Stars and galaxies swirl across the screen; boiling volcanoes and turbulent oceans disturb the surface of a planet (our own?) as ages and aeons pass before our eyes; strange life forms move through primordial seas, dinosaurs make an appearance, but even this is not gratuitous as it gives added meaning to the themes of struggle and release, dominance and subjection that play heavily in the later family scenes. This chronicle of life culminates in scenes of the O'Brien courtship and the births of their children... we have come from the universal to the personal in a smooth and flawless panorama. 

A Malick trademark is present throughout... the whispered voiceovers... Whose voice do we hear? Are they speaking to themselves, to us, or to God? Early on we are given a theme which may be the key to understanding "Tree of LIfe." We are told that each of us must follow one of two paths - the way of nature or the way of grace. Religion is part of the O'Briens story, and the presence of God is ever apparent in tumbling patterns of images and music. Jack's struggle is the human story. Do his shortcomings and his father's flaws represent the fallen state of man? Is his mother with the face of an angel meant to represent the innocence of Eden? She is shown in one remarkable scene in apparent levitation. Time and again the viewer may be moved to tears by the beauty presented on the screen: a flock of starlings dipping and swirling in the twilight, the simple act of a father and son planting and watering a tree, a field of surreal sunflowers standing in rapt attention, as if they were contemplating the face of God, a mother tracing the contours of her child's body. 

Some may say this mystical film is too long, yet we cannot think of a single image or sound we would have wanted to miss. A memorable scene toward the end of the film finds all our characters transported to what could be interpreted as the shores of eternity. All of time seems telescoped into a single moment. Have we reached the portals of heaven? We think this movie will speak differently to different people. But in any case we promise you will be deeply moved. Malick's embrace is broad. It takes in all of life. Somewhere in this movie, each of us will find himself, and after all one feels as though, no matter what course of nature we may follow, none of us will be left untouched by grace.