Film Review: The Tree of Life

Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life sat on our dining room table in it’s Netflix sleeve for a week and a half before we finally committed the two and a half hours necessary to watch this behemoth.  I have seen Malick’s A New World and the director’s cut at that, so I was prepared for a ponderously long film with lots of whispering, but not for two and a half hours of nature footage intercut with a cold man in a cold glass tower, who I hardly cared two straws about, intercut with an intimate, well-acted, if impressionistic childhood story.  I found this film extremely frustrating to watch, at times infuriating.  I am extremely busy with lots of films in my queue and to feel I’m wasting an hour on a ridiculous grandiose vision of life and the cosmos and evolution and being etc. etc. does not sit well.  Mostly, I was frustrated because it felt like a missed opportunity.  The childhood story was great and the performances delivered, particularly by the children were phenomenal, so to ruin it by going so over the top with all the other stuff just seemed a shame. 

Ostensibly, the story is about Jack, a man who has found commercial success in his life, but is still unhappy.  He is remembering his childhood and feeling the struggle within himself of the two opposite world views of his dominant, "take what you want in life" father (Brad Pitt) and his mother pious, selfless, and loving mother (Jessica Chastain).  Really, we hardly even meet adult Jack or care about him at all.  This element to the story, seems completely unnecessary really.  I don’t even understand we bother meeting adult Jack at all.

Malick’s other motive for creating this film, besides telling the story of Jack, a baby-boomer who grows up in Waco, TX, with his two brothers, is conveying some sort of (possibly deist) concept of the origins and meaning of life.  To do this, he feels it necessary to take us from the big bang through dinosaurs to their extinction, all scored with huge orchestral and choral pieces from the annals of classical music history.  For a moment I thought I was watching Fantasia.  One piece he uses, Smetana’s "The Moldau", is used for the trailer as well, and is actually a wonderful piece, that I’ve always liked.

Overall, I felt like there was so much subtlety and nuance in the performances of the actors, but in the storytelling I felt I was being bludgeoned over the head with symbolism that didn’t feel subtle at all.  Every time I felt myself being drawn into the film and the story of young Jack, Malick would do something to jerk me out of the story again.  Very frustrating to watch, especially when everything is so beautiful and he was able to elicit such amazing performances from such young children.  Overall, I wouldn’t recommend this film unless you are a solid Malick fan or a serious film buff and need to make sure you’ve seen it.