Brad Pitt gives the strongest performance of his career, but The Tree Of Life is by far the weakest film Terrence Malick has ever made. Rating: * *
“This is so exciting!” “I can’t believe it.” “Will it really show?” The Tree of Life has been the most breathlessly awaited film at Cannes this year. For many years, in fact. Its director Terrence Malick is widely regarded as a visionary, the half-Lebanese semi-recluse whose films, though there have only been four since Badlands in 1973, go to places both real and metaphysical that no other American filmmaker can dream of going. And yet, after all the enthusiasm and expectation, The Tree Of Life ended up being booed by sections of the premiere audience even before the credits went up. What happened?
Malick makes lushly ambitious and archaeologically deep films that take time to sink in. They’re especially unsuited to the frantic scrums and instant judgments of a festival like Cannes. Yet after one viewing, I must confess to being underwhelmed. Though it has scenes of great beauty, and just about keeps you compelled with a sense that something important is about to be disclosed, it resembles a Malick-hater’s parody of a Malick movie, an overwrought compendium of topographical and cosmic imagery that awkwardly sits alongside an assiduously-constructed, but far from exceptional depiction of emotionally repressive small-town life in 1950s America.
Of course, the film strives to be much more. It begins with a quote from the Book of Job: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding.” A boy dies – for reasons that are purposefully left unclarified - and his parents (Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain) grieve. Meanwhile, cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki and special-effects expert Douglas Trumbull offer a long flow of pictures: sperm swims around looking for eggs, volcanoes erupt, fleet-footed dinosaurs skitter about. Sun, oceans, the everythingness of being. It’s all infinitely suggestive. Purposefully so; the point may be to force us to ponder how far across time and space we must travel if we wish to grapple with the meaning of life – and of death.
The middle section offers a taut, touch elliptical portrait of the father’s relationship to his three sons, particularly Jack (Hunter McCracken). Mr O’Brien is a former GI who had harboured dreams of being an artist. Now he’s a company man who’s building up his portfolio of patents, a tense, church-going patriarch who brings up his children with fierce and not always productive discipline. Pitt, treated – like the rest of the characters – as no more and possibly a fraction less important than the grass he walks on and the air he breathes, gives the strongest performance of his career, reining in any urge to make the father either a monster or a soulful artist humanized by his thwarted aspirations.
O’Brien represents many things: a clenched masculinity, the impact on human sensibility of modern forms of labour, the psychological drive to assert order over the environments - and its limits. He’s counterpointed by his wife who seems to better equipped to tolerate the vagaries of life as well as the awkward, ineloquent yearning of her kids. The children too – breaking windows, witnessing a swimming-pool drowning, drawn to women’s underclothing – are beginning to learn about the ways in which they can impact their surroundings. A brief shot of a vehicle spraying the neighbourhood with toxic DDT spray is another reminder of Malick’s fundamental and philosophically far-reaching concern for the environment.
It’s impossible not to marvel at the ambition of The Tree of Life. It uses arboreal and rhizomatic metaphors to link post-war Texas and infinity, and to show that both are contained within each other. Indeed, it wants to go beyond mere showing. Through its very structure; its tremulous, concussed moodscapes; its occasional opacities: it seeks to incarnate the mysteries and infinities which profoundly move it.
Yet it’s impossible too not to overlook the film’s many faults. One of them is the choice to include scenes of the grown-up Jack (played by Sean Penn), now apparently an architect, wandering across high-rise, geometric urban landscapes that seem to represent a kind of post-Edenic wilderness. By the end of the film, in a sequence that recalls those happy-clappy I’d Like To Teach The World To Sing soft-drink advertisements from the 1970s, he’s to be found on a beach, reunited with many of the film’s characters.
More aggravating is the over-employment of composers such as Bach and Berlioz and Brahms to denote the gravity of the films and its stabs at the sublime. Malick shouldn’t feel obliged to draw from the pop charts of the 1950s, but his reliance on the European classical canon sonically smothers those scenes set in Texas comes across as ponderous, expressions of cultural cringe to the Old World.
Worst of all are those extended scenes swarming with trans-historical imagery. At the level of formal daring they’re to be applauded. Initially, they’re often stunning, serving as effective portals to the altered state of consciousness The Tree Of Life wants us to occupy. But they go on for an awfully long time. Malick seems to be addicted to them for their own sake, as if he’s prepping for a National Geographic Channel or BBC Planet Earth documentary series. And some shots, rather than conjuring up awe and wonder, resemble shampoo advertisements or a pharmaceutical-company corporate video.
In spite of the stodge and longeurs, there are fleeting moments of magic that glint - a shot of children’s shadows in the sun that looks like an ancient cave painting, a flock of birds billowing across a metropolitan sky like a ballet dancer’ ribbon – but these are relatively few. It’s customary on occasions such as this to hedge one’s bets, to talk about ‘magnificent follies’. But if this wasn’t directed by Malick it would attract far curter dismissal.
That said, it’s hard to imagine anyone other than Malick making The Tree Of Life. It has his stamp all over it. But it’s by some measure, the weakest film he’s ever made. Everywhere there is the appearance of profundity, everywhere the grandiose signifiers of ‘the epic’. Too often it calfies into abstraction, so infatuated with ‘Life’ that it lacks vitality itself.
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