FILM REVIEW

The beauty of everyday life

The Tree of Life
Directed by Terrence Malick
Reviewed by Faline Bobier

Terrence Malick’s new film is nothing short of a masterpiece. Maybe he doesn’t achieve everything he’s trying for, but he does create a thing of immense beauty, unfathomable mystery and intimate familiarity, all at the same time.

The Tree of Life, as the title suggests, is taking on big questions: the origins of human life, our relationship to the cosmos, what happens after we die. But these large questions are grounded in the specific story that Malick uses to tie these questions to concrete reality. The somewhat autobiographical story of the O’Brien family living in Waco, Texas in the 1950s is both specific and universal.

The center of the film’s universe is Jack O’Brien. We first meet him, in the person of Sean Penn, as a middle-aged architect who lives amid gleaming skyscrapers and clean, ultramodern surfaces and who is haunted by the death, many years earlier, of his younger brother.

The opening scenes take us briefly back to Jack’s youth, acquainting us with his parents and allowing their grief over the loss of their son to cast a shadow of tragedy over everything to follow.

What follows immediately is the creation of the universe, which unfolds before our wondering, bewildered eyes and which is somewhat reminiscent of some of the grandiose scenes from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, but without the cold, removed distance that is there in most Kubrick films.

Malick is a filmmaker who always integrates the natural world into his vision and here the images are breathtaking and primordial. When I was in the theatre you could have heard a pin drop, in spite of the fact that there was almost no dialogue, or very little, for almost 45 minutes.

The scenes of family life are no less perfect, thanks in large part to the actors and the filmmaker, who collaborate to convey the feel of family life with very little of the overt social realism or dialogue that would usually require.

It is conveyed through the rigid gender roles embodied by Mr. and Mrs. O’Brien (Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain) and by the three young actors who portray their sons, above all, Hunter McCracken, a first-timer who brings us inside young Jack’s restless, itching skin.

The film manages both to convey the straitjacket of the rigid roles enforced in 1950s America and the beauty of those long summer days when it seemed you could be a child forever—as in Dylan Thomas’ famous poem on the fleeting nature of childhood, “I sang in my chains like the sea.”

The relationship between Mr. O’Brien and his sons, particularly Jack, is a troubled one. Pitt plays a man, living a life of quiet desperation, doing his best to conform to the role of stern male breadwinner. This alienates him from his children whom he deeply loves (creating an underlying conflict with Jack) and leaves him sadly bereft when he loses his job of many years, casually discarded by the company when it implements technology as a cost-cutting measure.

The ending of The Tree of Life is possibly the weakest element in the film—an attempt to depict the afterlife which only makes it look incredibly boring—but this is a film definitely worth seeing on the big screen, for all the beauty of everyday life it shows us.