The Tree of Life

This is a work of pure genius, easily the best movie in the past 10-20 years. It is not an irregular thing to be emotionally moved within the first five minutes. Fair warning though, this movie is not about a specific plot or conflict, rather it is about life in a very open and generalized sense.

[9.6/10] “Theodicy” is the fancy term for the problem of evil -- why would an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving deity create a world where evil is allowed to exist? It’s one of the fundamental questions that Western theology grapples with, and it raises subsidiary questions that can be just as significant and thorny. Why choose to be good when it seems as though evil is not always punished and good is not always rewarded? What does the goodness or badness of our actions matter in the mind-boggling vastness of the universe and in the incomprehensible length of eons between its beginning and its end?

*The Tree of Life* addresses these questions head on, but does so through the filter of a young boy trying different moral stances on for size. Terrence Mallick delivers a sumptuous, naturalistic picture, that grounds some of the most pressing and intractable issues in moral philosophy in the day-to-day struggles and growth of a young man coming of age in Waco, Texas. As gorgeous at the cinematography of the film is, what stands out about the film is how it takes such a provincial, prosaic struggle to figure out how to be in the confines of your family and small town, and turns into a universal meditation on the struggle and questioning of what it means to be good.

The film centers on Jack, a prepubescent boy who’s part of a nuclear family and figuring out the way of the world. He has an angel and a devil on his shoulders, each in their own way pushing him to take a particular path. His mother (Jessica Chastain) is a devout woman, full of grace and forgiveness who tells Jack and his two brothers to love everyone. She is a bastion of empathy, one who’s constantly shown taking delight in the joys of her children, in playing with them, teaching them, bringing them through the world. She is the image of radiance, and the beacon that calls her sons to the path of kindness and caring.

On the other side sits Jack’s father (Brad Pitt), a harder man who teaches his sons that the good are taken advantage of. He teaches them strength, discipline, the notion that corners have to be cut, rules broken, spines stiffened in order to get ahead in this world and have a decent life. It would be so easy for Jack’s father to be a pure villain, and he certainly casts a shadow over his children in this film, but *The Tree of Life* makes things more complicated than that.

It makes Mr. O’Brien someone who feels stepped on by life. He had aspirations to be a great musician that were crushed and never to be realized. He struggles to write patents and secure a financial future for his wife and children and feels the fruits of his labor are stolen by men who shake hands and smile with the judge. He is harsh with his family, taking his frustrations out on them in unfair and unfortunate ways, but the film takes time to make him comprehensible, even as it paints him as a cross to be borne. He loves his children as much as Mrs. O’Brien does, demanding their affection but earnestly wanting it, wanting them to have a better life than he has, trying in so human a fashion to make them better at this race than he is.

In the valley between those two major figures, Jack questions how he should act, what he should be. His father does what he judges to be terrible things, hypocritical things, ungodly things, and yet he seems to exist unscathed and unchallenged. His mother, so kind and so decent and so loving, loses one of her sons when he’s only nineteen, asking her own questions about why an equally loving God would allow such a terrible thing to happen. It’s in this environment that Jack tests his boundaries, that he begins to wonder where the divine is, where justice could lie, in such a world, in such a life.

Mallick and legendary director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki trace the contours of both that world and that life, tying the two together. Unusually for a film so small in scope, *The Tree of Life* depicts the creation of the universe, the expanse of stars and galaxies stretching across millennia and light years of space. The film puts on a beautiful cosmic ballet, with swirling colors and swooshes of light and form that blur the line between breathtaking spacescapes and Renaissance art.

Lubezki’s camera follows the formation of the universe with the emergence of life on this lonely planet, from primordial ooze to undulating fish to dinosaurs capable of showing mercy and indifference. It’s then that the film follows Jack’s own growth, shown as momentous and lovingly as the creation of the whole world. The image of his little foot in his father’s hands graces the film’s poster, and Mallick uses a light touch as the curious little boy begins to experience the vastness and wonder of the world around him.

By connecting the cosmologically large with the tiniest and most ordinary of human lives, Mallick brings the two in sync, communicating the depth and breadth of the questions Jack is answering in an immense thunderous universe that makes any life, any choices, seem so small and insignificant, and yet metonym for what for those miniscule lives to be a part of so great a whole.

Confronted with the seeming injustice of the world, Jack forswears grace. He stops struggling to be good, to not give into his baser desires. He rebukes his mother; he breaks windows; he’s even cruel to a small amphibian with the misfortune to cross paths with young boys playing. He crosses each line and waits for divine retribution, to find the biblical bulwark for his bad behavior that never seems to come.

But then he pushes further, trying to goad his brother into fights, taunts him into jamming his finger into lamp sockets, and test the limits of his baser impulses. Finally he has his brother put his finger over a B.B. gun, pulls the trigger, and hurts his sibling. It’s then that Jack feels remorse for his actions and reaches a turning point. He seeks forgiveness. He seeks offers himself up as repentance. He understands the existence of other lives and others’ pain and the personal cost of extracting it from innocent people.

The film is opaque about whether Jack finds his connection to the divine again, but he feels the pull of goodness from his simply acts of empathy. From loving his mom, from understanding his dad, from placing a hand on the shoulder of a burned fellow boy whom he recoiled from previously. That is his answer to the problem of evil, to the indifference of the world. There is goodness for goodness sake, whether or not he can feel the imprimatur of God, and Jack embraces it.

He grows up to be a man in a great glass tower (Sean Penn), seemingly the success his father wanted him to be, but again feels the pull of that. The film contrasts the constructed beauty of downtown Dallas with the gorgeous naturalism of the countryside. Trees grow, outside the O’Brien home to mark the time from the children’s youth to their adulthood, in the spaces between the concrete in the city, serving as a reminder of where Jack came from. Even in this tamed world, there is life that pokes through, that cannot be repressed or forgotten.

The film’s end is impressionistic, but it suggests Heaven, it suggests reward, that for all Jack’s uncertainty and the doubt his parents express over the course of the film, they and all whom they love are to be reunited. Whether it’s meant to be real or just in Jack’s head or some combination of the two, there is catharsis in all this wondering, all this doubting, all this struggle leading to a place of reunion and love. Whatever they flaws and falters, Jack feels that, receives that, the chance to renew his affections with the people he cares about. It’s a powerful finish to a powerful film.

There is next-to-no exposition in *The Tree of Life*. There is barely a plot, more a series of moments built around a theme, piece of this life sewn together to make a greater whole. It is not a movie in the way we think of movies, depicting the beginning of time before delving into the mundane but meaningful lives of its subjects and drifting back again into the majesty of the great unknown and beyond. But that is also its source of power, creating something affecting and visceral from the truth of it, whether that truth emerges from the sweep of the cosmos or the embrace between mother and child. It is an everything movie, one that reaches from the beginning to the end, that speaks about one thing and yet speaks to all things. It is beauty. It is grace. Captured on celluloid, but transcending the mores of form and convention and the grammar of film, it is life.

Like Wes Anderson, Terrance Malick is one of the very few modern auteurs to have a singularly defined style that is instantly recognizable. Perhaps it says something about me that I prefer Malick’s primal, ethereal vision of the world, especially in a film like this, to Anderson’s fussy precision. Watching this movie feels like floating in a quiet, shallow river on a warm summer day. Almost completely eschewing traditional narrative, Malick often builds emotion around the carefully arranged juxtaposition of images in a style reminiscent of the Soviet Montage theorists of the 1920s, but from the perspective of a 19th century Romantic. The camera moves here constantly, gracefully, like a ballet dancer underwater. (Indeed, there’s a beautiful shot of Jessica Chastain dancing in the yard so exquisitely she begins floating.) All of this, plus the classical score and whispered narration creates this effect for me of immersive emotion, as if the film is feeding through an IV directly to my soul.

I can’t imagine anyone else daring to make a film like this or to raise the questions he does. This film is a reflection on no less than the entire history of the universe. The insignificance of existence. The incomprehensibility of grief. The unknowability of God. These are themes too transcendent for words (especially my own attempt at explication), which is why Malick’s meditative style is so intimately well-suited for this exploration.

You will either absolutely love or strongly hate this movie.
For me, it was love. This movie, in my eyes, is like a beautiful song or a poem, and watching it just made me experience something I rarely do when watching movies. It's unconventional and thought provoking. One of a kind.

46% Loved? C'mon people, this is one of the best films of the year!

This masterpiece took my breath for a while, because there are shrouds of my childhood in it, Terrence is a Hollywood Genius.

Just sat speechless in tears. Beautiful!

Fantastic.

I saw what might have been the most unique movie since "Blue Velvet". At times I both hated it and loved it.

Imagine if someone tasked you to make a movie about life. Not life itself but the essence of life. Where would you possibly begin?

We nearly turned off the movie about 30 minutes in. There was a small plot twist and then ten minutes of beautiful trippiness. The problem is that it seemed like it was going to go on for the rest of the film. That part of the film was difficult because at that point I had not figured out how to watch the film. I know that sounds rather vague but I don't want to give away too much. Once I understood what was going on I completely get the scene and why it was necessary (hint: it is absolutely beautiful on a big screen).

In short the film should not be taken literally. There are many interesting and beautiful scenes and dialog but the whole is soooo much greater than the individual parts. The film, moreso than any other film I've ever scene, is meant to be an experience. I read through the various reviews on rottentomatoes.com and reviewers either loved it or hated it. In a weird kind of way I completely understood what the bad reviews were saying. I can't say that it is among my favorite (there is a difference between "best" and "favorite") movies of all time or that I would watch it again any time soon but I was completely engrossed from start to finish.

If I were to change one thing it would have been the religious aspect to the film. I understand that it is part of the human experience (for some reason we feel the need to invent gods) but one scene kind of made me cringe. I know, I know... I am biased.

I know that this seems kind of scattered but it is extremely difficult to quantify the film. As an aside, this was a beautiful film to watch so you'd be doing yourself a favor if you watch it on a quality setup.

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