And that’s probably the simplest, most concise statement you’ll read in this whole review. It’s just that kind of movie.
Let me see if I can sum it up in one sentence: It’s writer/director Terrence Malick’s highly conceptual interpretation of the existential crisis people face when they question their faith and ponder the meaning of life. Does that sound like academic babble? If you’ve ever seen his other movies, like The Thin Red Line, you understand how hard it is to describe his work in simple terms. But I’ll give it another shot.
There are two major components to The Tree of Life that are broken down and shuffled together like a deck of cards. One is a storyline that lets the audience hear a 1950s Texas family’s inner thoughts/prayers/dialogues with God as they each try to make sense of loss and other harsh realities of life. Brad Pitt plays the dad who loves his family to bits, but tends to take his frustrations and failures out on them with his nitpicking and explosive outbursts. His wife (Jessica Chastain) is a loving, nurturing mother who’s torn between remaining obedient to her husband and protecting her sons from him. Their oldest boy (Hunter McCracken) is struggling to find a balance between being a good kid and doing the naughty stuff red-blooded mean big brothers do. As an adult, he (Sean Penn) continues to grapple with the big questions, appears to eventually make some sense of it all spiritually, but can’t seem to apply it to the real world.
The story is presented in chunks, mostly out of sequence, and it’s interspersed with the other major component: spectacular images of natural and cosmic events. I guess they’re open to interpretation, but I took them to represent everything from the human soul to heaven and hell to the origins of life on Earth. Y’know, the concepts people tackle when they’re trying to figure out… well, the meaning of life.
Quite an ambitious undertaking, don’t you think?
There's a line towards the beginning of the movie that says, and I'm paraphrasing, that people have to choose between the way of grace and the way of nature. I think Malick's suggesting that we have to marry the two or we wind up with confusion, as he illustrates with the unusual composition of the movie.
If you don’t enjoy puzzles and visual stimuli that don’t always have a clear-cut purpose, you probably won’t dig this movie. I sort of took it as a challenge, and I wavered back and forth between just letting images and concepts wash over me to guessing their meaning like a mental game show. (Lava flow of emotion! Inner demons? No, wait -- purgatory!) I've chosen not to read much that's been written about this movie because my interpretation makes sense to me, so if it's wrong, I have no freakin' idea what I watched for two-and-a-half hours.
I hear the movie was booed by audiences at Cannes, which I think is ridiculous. Sure, it’s frustrating that Malick didn’t fill in all the gaps and some of his symbolism just flew right over my head, but the performances are pretty strong (even Brad Pitt’s, can you believe it?!) and you’ve gotta at least give Malick major points for creativity and originality. At the very least, I doubt you’re going to walk out of this thinking, “Oh, please. He totally ripped off Liar, Liar.” (See Mr. Popper’s Penguins revieux.)
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