The Tree of Life reviews

ITALIANO
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Re: The Tree of Life reviews

Post by ITALIANO »

Uri wrote:This film is now officially dead on this board. Caout.

:D

Yes, I kind of knew this while I was translating Benigni's words, but then I thought - and I still feel - that it would be dead here anyway - with a few exceptions, I doubt many would like it (certainly not those who went crazy for The Social Network), and it's a pity. But not only on this board - I mean, all those American critics who last year hailed The Social Network as the ultimate work of art... well, what should they say about this clearly superior movie then? Which words will they have to use?

Benigni isn't a critic, so his reaction is clearly more on the emotional side - and very Italian, which isn't necessarily a good thing. But let's face it - for an Italian comparing a movie to the Sistine Chapel is the highest possible praise. It can't even be explained to Americans - it's not like comparing a movie to, say, the Empire State Building - except maybe to those Americans who have actually visited the Sistine Chapel and have felt that absolute, pervasive sense of wonder which is both emotional and intellectual - like when you are in presence not only of Art with a capital "a", but of art which, while being extraordinary and in many ways bigger than life, still includes you as a human being and your own "little" life, your point of view - art which includes and doesn't exclude.

Well, I'm talking like Benigni now so I should stop - and by the way honestly I'm not sure that I would personally put The Tree of Life on the same level as Michelangelo (as I said, I still think that The Thin Red Line is an even better movie). But I find interesting that so many Italians and, more generally, Europeans who are into art have been so impressed with this movie - it's as if they were anxiously waiting for a masterpiece and they have finally found it. I'm curious to see if Americans have the same reaction.

( I should also add - but maybe I shouldn't - that Malick is a big admirer of Benigni and of Life is Beautiful - in his famous 2007 Rome interview he compared Benigni to his two favorite comic actors - he righly used the word "artists" - Totò and Charles Chaplin. And now yes, The Tree of Life is officially dead on this board! )
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Re: The Tree of Life reviews

Post by Sabin »

A more coherent take will be coming soon, but here are some scattered thoughts:

...if someone were to ask me "What is a Malick film?", I would point them to The Tree of Life. Everything glorious and self-parodic that is Malick is evident in The Tree of Life, and in typical Malick fashion that which appears immediately self-parodic is also some kind of glorious. But this is what he does: mood, poetry, a mish-mash of philosophy and flower child ruminations, and above all daring stripped of most narrative constraints. This is Malick.

...the images of the birth pangs of the universe. My goodness. These images exist as both cosmic and biological. Just as an egg is inseminated, so does the cosmic vapor erupt. This is clearly a conscious choice on Malick's part to evoke the duality of cosmic and utero. Additionally, he evokes the scientific and the spiritual in what could just as easily be God parting existence to bring light into the world...which could just as easily be the Big Bang. This stuff is ravishing to look at, and when terra becomes firma it also creates several narrative ellipses that one must take stock of. We will return to the same river again and again. The pack mentality of dinosaurs and man-children will occur in the same bedrock separated by billions of years.

...it's stunning to behold, true. And Malick and his editors do a pretty amazing job of wedging it into the film, but really this is a tone poem of childhood in Waco, TX, and we're bound to leave talking about ethereal images and the dispersal of anti-matter. It's all stunning to look at and ponder, and far too seldom are we witness to something like this, but it's a show-stopper in the best and worst sense of the word.

...after reading much about how mundane the Waco story was, I was very pleasantly surprised. The film is a very loose narrative and Malick succeeds in creating his masterful rhythms, snapping us into a child's point of view and uncertainty as he beholds a parent's moods change, and how certain moments last forever and others erratically dart here and there. The tapestry that Malick weaves in his hometown is the more paired-down narrative of his career, but it's his most intensely meditative for sure. But meditative on what?

...Marco says that there is philosophy in this film, but I'm unsure. I think Malick is etching a filmic short story over two hours. He evokes childhood and stages it like a primal tragedy, brings us into the passage of time moving erratically fast and at times endless. And there is a nurturing mother and a sculpting father. The more I thought during The Tree of Life, the less I felt. The more I shut my mind off and allowed myself to be carried away, the greater it became. It's a sensory experience first and foremost, and while Malick's education might fuel his filmic proficiency it's still all in the serve of recreating a home movie.

The main thrust comes from the whiplash Malick conveys from overbearing father to enabling mother. This tug of war is portrayed as expertly as I've ever seen.

...the manner in which Malick charts the growth of child from baby to teen is beautiful. Like the rest of the film, it's a major in a minor, but it's still beautiful. I suppose it can be viewed as a major piece of Americana and there is truth in that, but...well...my next point is coming up...

...the finale. I'm 30 years old. My father was a teenager when 2001: A Space Odyssey was released. I can't know what it was like to sit down and witness that film in all its glory, but I do know that one was in the presence of an idea. Malick really has more in common with Tarkovsky, I suspect, but whereas Malick gives the impression of going out on set in search of an idea, Tarkovsky is a poet who has one already. The Sean Penn scenes are that of a man awash, alone, isolated, and he re-immerses himself in that which is lost to him in the tide of memory. It's at least somewhat implied that the end of the world occurs and he meets back up with his father on the shores. I could be mistaken, but that's what I took from it. You can't get more beautiful than that! Aged Father and Equally Aged Son at the end of the world. But is that what's happening? And beyond this, why was I not affected?

I don't think that Malick knew what he wanted to say with the end of The Tree of Life and this is annoying to me because I loved the beginning, the Birth of the Universe, the Entire Waco Passage, and then we arrive at...what? I don't know. I think the worst filmmaking of Malick's career can be found at the end of The Tree of Life. Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line...all these films knew what they were. The New World is not a great film, but it's a confidently average film imbued by a beauty only Malick can render. The Tree of Life? By the end of the film, I thought that Malick had created something ineffable to himself and the audience. Is that a bad thing? No, but my preference has always been that of the artist who drops the mic rather than trails off.

...all pending the almighty second viewing that transformed The New World from masterpiece to homework and The Thin Red Line from butchered crane to soaring bird.
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Re: The Tree of Life reviews

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ITALIANO wrote:In the meantime, The Tree of Life has fastly become, in Italy, the movie one "has to see". Friends I had never thought would be interested are now dutifully buying their ticket to it. The reason? More than one - the reviews, the Golden Palm... but especially, I'd say, Roberto Benigni's reaction to it - right after seeing the movie he was interviewed on national tv - the news program with the highest audience. I know that Benigni isn't exactly popular here, but he's an extremely well-educated man, and he was literally speechless with enthusiasm, and obviously overcome with emotion. This is part of what he said:

" After seeing such a movie we change, we all become more beautiful. It's like suddenly facing Greatness, and being part of it. It's like... I've just watched this movie and I want to watch it again, so this interview must be short. It's like a sonata - it's like finding yourself in an eternal sonata, the daily and the eternal, beauty and cinema.

Look, it's as if Michelangelo had finished the Sistine Chapel now, and invited you to see it. He opens the door, and you discover the greatness of the world, and the greatness of your own personal story. From a simple spoon to the birth of planets - and the meaning of life. You don't even have to move, in the Sistine Chapel, because everything moves around you, and you are part of it.

I'm like... I dont even know the word, I must invent it. I look forward to seeing this movie again. It's pure art... It even makes you better, not only spiritually, phisically too... I was ugly, now I feel beautiful. I feel part of that beauty. And this is something that must be told: go and see The Tree of Life, directed by Michelangelo Buonarroti. Thank you Michelangelo!"

The Tree of Life will certainly get at least one vote when it comes to Best Picture.

He does like to run at the mouth, doesn't he? Like all that ''running'' he did at the Oscars years ago.
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Re: The Tree of Life reviews

Post by Uri »

This film is now officially dead on this board. Caput.
Last edited by Uri on Sun May 29, 2011 6:54 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: The Tree of Life reviews

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In the meantime, The Tree of Life has fast become, in Italy, the movie one "has to see". Friends I had never thought would be interested are now dutifully buying their ticket to it. The reason? More than one - the reviews, the Golden Palm... but especially, I'd say, Roberto Benigni's reaction to it - right after seeing the movie he was interviewed on national tv - the news program with the highest audience. I know that Benigni isn't exactly popular here, but he's an extremely well-educated man, and he was literally speechless with enthusiasm, and obviously overcome with emotion. This is part of what he said:

" After seeing such a movie we change, we all become more beautiful. It's like suddenly facing Greatness, and being part of it. It's like... I've just watched this movie and I want to watch it again, so this interview must be short. It's like a sonata - it's like finding yourself in an eternal sonata, the daily and the eternal, beauty and cinema.

Look, it's as if Michelangelo had finished the Sistine Chapel now, and invited you to see it. He opens the door, and you discover the greatness of the world, and the greatness of your own personal story. From a simple spoon to the birth of planets - and the meaning of life. You don't even have to move, in the Sistine Chapel, because everything moves around you, and you are part of it.

I'm like... I dont even know the word, I must invent it. I look forward to seeing this movie again. It's pure art... It even makes you better, not only spiritually, phisically too... I was ugly, now I feel beautiful. I feel part of that beauty. And this is something that must be told: go and see The Tree of Life, directed by Michelangelo Buonarroti. Thank you Michelangelo!"

The Tree of Life will certainly get at least one vote when it comes to Best Picture.
Last edited by ITALIANO on Sun May 29, 2011 4:28 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: The Tree of Life reviews

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I won't use the word "masterpiece" - I do it very rarely, because I have seen the true masterpieces of cinema and I must compare any new movie to those; plus, I used it - and I'm sure I was right - for another Malick movie, The Thin Red Line, and honestly The Tree of Life is a (slightly) less successful effort. But it doesn't mean that it isn't a very, very good movie, and maybe a great one. It is.

I was a bit afraid. In Italy it opened the day after its Cannes debut, days before it won the Golden Palm - mostly in multiplexes, where the prominently featured names of Brad Pitt and Sean Penn attracted the wrong kind of audience. There were reports of viewers loudly complaining, of many walking out, bored and annoyed. I was quite sure that my reaction would have been different, but I didn't want all this to spoil the experience for me. So I chose the right cinema and I chose the right person to see it with (well, this wasn't difficult, as he lives with me) - at the end of the movie the people there (and there were many) sat in silence, almost stunned. I strongly advise you to do the same, to choose carefully the place and the people. It's that kind of movie.

I won't say too much before you get to see it - partly because I can't, not in English at least. This is an extremely ambitious movie, something we don't get often today, which may have led to those mixed reactions from the critics (though frankly at least critics should have the cultural instruments to "get" this kind of movie - it's their job after all, or it should be. In the 70s, they'd have been totally confused then). It's also, of course, very profound, and Americans - who are often accused of making only popcorn movies nowadays - should be, I think, especially proud. They, Americans, may even not appreciate this movie - and I'll admit that it's not a perfect one: there's even too much in it, too much for just ONE movie - but they certainly can't dismiss it. Like it or not, it's an important work, an important film.

It's also the work of an obviously well-educated man. You feel it. Most directors aren't, especially today - they may be intelligent, they may be talented, but they are often not well-educated. I know, now I should say that it doesn't matter, that education and culture don't necessarily make a movie good or even interesting, etc - all true, all very true. Still, between us, I will be honest and say that, especially after seeing a movie of such scope, I realize that it DOES matter, and that it's a relief to see that there still are directors who have obviously read books, the right books, and not only seen movies.

In Italy, Malick always brings out the philosopher in us - a dangerous thing. It has happened even this time - more than before. The Italian movie board I go to - and where I can express myself better, as I can use my own language - has become a battleground of panopticists, pantheists, ontologists, etc. It's understandable and even interesting, but because philosophy has recently been too often trivialized, "made easy" for the sake of mass consumerism, the risk is that such discussions, and even parts of the movie itself, may seem more banal than they really are - it's difficult today to say something authentically deep, as this movie tries to do, without being misunderstood by some.

Plus, the movie isn't only philosophy. It's poetry, too - with images of great beauty "dancing" in front of your eyes. But it's also the portrayal of an American childhood, one of the best portrayals of American childhood I've ever seen at the movies. And I guess this is why, as I was watching it, another movie instinctively came to my mind: To Kill a Mockingbird. Now, don't get me wrong, The Tree of Life doesn't have anything in common with To Kill a Mockingbird - except maybe that it, too, perfectly captures the wonders, the mysteries, the pain of childhood, of growing up. It does it in a lyrical way (though there are social issues too), but it still does it, and does it successfully. This part of the movie, the central part, with the three young brothers experiencing life in the small town they live in, torn between a stern, authorative father and a comforting mother, is wonderful. Really wonderful, and I don't say this often. If The Tree of Life has flaws, and it does, it's in other parts (it's a very long movie) and for other reasons.

As for the Academy Awards... Well, this isn't the kind of movie that usually wins loads of Oscars. It's not The King's Speech, of course, and most importantly it's not The Social Network either - you know, "smart", "intelligent", and VERY accessible. Still, the combination of prestige, Golden Palm and ten-slots format should give it a Best Picture nod, and other nominations are possible - Director, Original Screenplay, Cinematography for example. Editing, also, except that too many editors worked on it. The music score is great but there are heavy doses of classical music too, which may limit its chances. As for the actors, the children are perfect and perfectly cast, but certainly won't be nominated. Brad Pitt maybe - though I doubt. Anyway, movie after movie he's definitely becoming a very good, very daring actor, one of the best working in American movies today (who'd have said this, only ten years ago? Not me for sure). This is one of his best performances ever.
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The Tree of Life: Terrence Malick's Cosmic Cinema
Posted by Richard Corliss
Time Magazine


The mob scene of a couple thousand critics pushing and shoving, pleading and shouting, to get in; the hushed anticipation as the film began; and at the end, the belligerent booing answered by defiant applause. What stoked the rucks? Not a Brad Pitt movie, though the dreamboat star has a central role, but a Terrence Malick film. And who, ask the children raised on Spielberg and Michael Bay, is Terrence Malick?

This morning's world premiere of Malick's The Tree of Life — hands down the most avidly anticipated film at Cannes 2011 — had all the angry urgency of legendary Festival screenings from the 1970s. Mary Corliss recalls the congestion at the old Palais at the first showing, in 1979, of Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now: the crowd was so tightly packed that it lifted her when it surged forward. As she was swept from the lobby into the auditorium, Mary's feet literally did not touch the ground.

That was a time (to quote the title of Dave Kehr's new collection of his reviews from the period) when movies mattered — when filmmakers strove to expand the cinematic vocabulary instead of simply parroting it, and took adventurous audiences along for the exhilarating ride. Most of the acclaimed auteurs were European; back then foreign movies mattered too, crucially. But Malick, a Waco, Texas, kid who studied philosophy at Harvard and Oxford, was up there with Coppola and Robert Altman on the list of prime questers in American film.


His first feature, Badlands, which premiered at the 1973 New York Film Festival, and Days of Heaven five years later were a gifted naturalist's portraits of rural life streaked with violence and deceit. Then Malick moved to Paris and into a prolonged, profound seclusion. The movie all those critics were fighting to get into this morning is just his third film in the past 33 years. It's been at least that long since Malick gave an interview. He did not attend the Tree of Life press conference this morning, leaving the crowd management to the genial Pitt.)

The first thing to say about The Tree of Life is that… well, the first thing is that it's a heightened, almost hallucinatory sensual experience, and essential viewing for serious moviegoers (and you know who you are). But the main thing to say is that Malick has captured the feeling of texture of his early films and those other '70s movies that mattered. It proceeds through its microscopic narrative, and its macro-view of the cosmos, as if three decades of artistic retrenchment in American moviemaking had not happened. For Malick the movie screen is a canvas for his visions, and his job is not to anticipate what audiences will love but to offer his uncompromised take and see if they'll take it.

Not everyone at the Cannes screening was in a taking mood. The early reviews from here vary from quiet admiration (Todd McCarthy in The Hollywood Reporter) to scathing dismissal (J. Hoberman in The Village Voice). Most concentrate on The Tree of Life's macro side, on Malick's reach for the stars. Few critics, though, have addressed the film's plainly autobiographical central section, which is most of the movie. That's what will be emphasized here.

In its acute stethoscoping of nature, of light slowly moving across a forest or a front lawn, and in its reliance on gesture over dialogue, The Tree of Life a near-sibling to Badlands and Days of Heaven. The film's core 90 minutes, which detail a dozen baby-boomer years in the life of a small-town Texas family — the stern Mr. O'Brien (Brad Pitt), his sweet wife (Jessica Chastain) and their young sons Jack (Hunter McCracken), Steve (Tye Sheridan) and R.L. (Laramie Eppler) — could pass as a modern indie film, though one astonishingly attentive to behavioral detail and the natural world that surrounds and nourishes the boys and their beloved mom.

This bucolic narrative is a flashback from the first scene, set in the '60s, in which Mrs. O'Brien gets news that her youngest son, R.L., has died; and that scene gives way to present-day Houston, where middle-age Jack (Sean Penn), in a phone conversation with his father, is still mourning the loss of his brother. Having begun with a death, the film ends with a resurrection, as loved and lost ones are reunited.

But before he lands in the 1950s, Malick takes viewers on a mostly abstract sound-and-light show that gloriously summarizes the history of the cosmos in 17 minutes. Stars collide, organisms split and breed, anemones and eels swim through the sea, then sharks and, on the beach by the sea, a few dinosaurs. Though the sequence lacks cavemen tossing bones, it's reminiscent of the more extravagant elements from 2001: A Space Odyssey. (Douglas Trumbull, who worked with Stanley Kubrick on 2001's special effects, had an artful hand here.) But Malick is even ballsier, since this sequence is not the powerful if perplexing culmination of a science-fiction storyline but a spectacular planetarium art film inserted toward the beginning of a miniature domestic tale. It's the director's grand f-you gesture to the timidity of modern moviemakers.

In this cosmos section, a few images may connect with the main story. A desert rock formation suggests Chastain's distinctive silhouette. One dinosaur sees a smaller creature lying on the beach and places its foot on the smaller dinosaur's head, in a gesture of dominance that Mr. O'Brien might have applied to one of his recalcitrant sons. (His wife represents nature's rapture; he's the carnivorous raptor.) But Malick's larger point is that, as 19th-century scientists put it, "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" — that the growth of an individual organism (the human fetus in its mother's womb, for examples) mimics the history of evolution; billions of years compressed into nine months.

Even more succinctly — and now with humans, so the viewer's attitude can shift from awe (or bafflement) to empathy — the movie synopsizes the first 10 years of the O'Brien family: the birth of Jack and, a year or so later, of his next brother, and then of R.L. We understand the film's title when Mr. O'Brien plants a sapling in the front yard and tells the pre-school Jack, "You'll be grown before that tree is tall." Dad loves his kids, and doesn't use physical violence, but he's inept at conveying any tone except the rigidity of a drill sergeant or office manager. He insists on being called Sir, not Father; he tries to prepare the boys for the world by ordering them to "Hit me!"; and one evening at dinner he asks one of his sons, "For the next half-hour, will you not speak unless you have something important to say?" The boy's about 10; and when he does shyly speak up, there's hell to pay.

Giving a sensitive performance in the role of an insensitive man, Pitt shows that Mr. O'Brien, like many a man, is just not good at parenting. His severity may be a function of the disappointments he endured in his career. He wanted to be a professional musician; the Army intervened. He fancies himself an inventor, and has applied for many patents, but is stuck in a job he'd loved to break out of, if only he's not fired from it. He doesn't seem to notice the unapproving glances the other townsmen shoot his way. In a telling scene with his family at a diner, he first gives the waitress a warning, then kisses her hand, then plays at withholding her tip. He must think these games are somehow ingratiating; but they show why he hasn't succeeded in business, or with his kids. In Willy Loman's phrase, he's "not well-liked."

Malick's counterposes the sharply drawn Mr. O'Brien with a shadowy sketch of his wife. With neither a name nor more than a few lines of dialogue, she's a woodland sprite consigned to the kitchen. Suffering her husband's rebukes, and not defying him when he's harsh with the kids, she comes alive only when he leaves on a long business trip. Then she's unleashed, a giddy sister to her sons, whirling in the yard and feigning fright when one boy puts a lizard in the bathtub.

Otherwise, the character is generic, and as translucent as Chastain's pale skin. The mother exists as the impossible ideal for young Jack to cherish, while he forges the will to fight his father and worries that he will turn into the old man. As it happens, Mr. O'Brien shares this apprehension. But he will have to wait for the film's last few minutes, in a dreamland on excellent beach property, to be asolvd and embraced.

Though The Tree of Life identifies all these conflicting vectors, which should ring achingly true to anyone raised in a large family around the American mid-century, it doesn't spell them out. Malick is as tactful about these people as he is critical of some and connected to all. Affection or animosity is revealed in a glance, a tilt of the restless camera, a cut from an argument in the house to the apprehensive kids outside. You can see the dinner-table tension in every lad's's face, anxious for an explosion. In large part that's due to the natural, persuasive performances Malick has drawn from his kids — they somehow intuit how boys behaved a half-century ago. McCracken is a wonderful worrier, and Eppler, the spitting image of a young Brad Pitt, radiates the easy appeal of the child who may not even realize tht he's the one who is loved best.

Not all of the movie's secrets can be revealed at one screening (I saw it twice), and not all its revelations embraced. But, like the most ambitious cinema of the '70s, the film needs its audience to participate fully, to pore over the images as closely as Terry Malick the philosophy student did over Heidegger. As Malick sees it, the moviegoer is not an infant; the director is not a babysitter. It's fine if you don't get all of The Tree of Life. But try to get with it.

If you do, you may be lifted into the movie's cosmos, micro- or macro-. There will be times when the great spirit moves you, and your feet won't touch the ground.
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Post by Sabin »

(Sonic Youth @ May 16 2011,8:07
The Tree Of Life
16 May, 2011 | By Mark Adams, chief film critic
Screendaily

A cinematic symphony more than a classic narrative film, Terrence Malick’s long-awaited The Tree Of Life has moments of breathtaking visual and aural beauty, but in the end it has us longing for the days of Badlands, Days Of Heaven or The Thin Red Line, when the Texan auteur also knew how to spin a good yarn.

Two things: first, who left The Thin Red Line thinking it was a mighty finely spun yarn? As I imagine it said with a Barry Fitzgerald accent. And second, no seriously. Who did? Wasn't The Thin Red Line as polarizing as anything to come out in 1998? Didn't it receive reviews up and down like this one? Didn't it take a good long while for most people to come around? Wasn't the exact same thing said in '98 about his good ol' yarns of yesteryear? And although I could certainly be wrong, I'd be willing to bet the same thing was said in '78.

With ten movies this year, The Tree of Life might not win the Oscar this year but it certainly could be nominated if enough people are passionately moved by the majority of it. A cinematography nomination seems in the bag as perhaps a scoring nom for Desplat.

Right now? I'm going out on a limb and say that a De Niro-headed jury will be very kind to this one. Also, The Artist seems like the kind of film that wins the Grand Prix.
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Post by Greg »

I have read reports of audience members booing The Tree Of Life at Cannes.
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Post by Big Magilla »

These reviews read like the critics are on the fence not knowing which way to jump off - they say audiences and critics may or may not like the film, but don't really seem to have an opinion of their own. It's like they're waiting for the consensus to decide for them.

Oh, and the Serendipity "chief critic" doesn't seem to know the difference between New York, where he says Penn's character has an office, and Houston, where the Variety critic rightly places it - check the filming locations on IMDb.
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The Tree Of Life
16 May, 2011 | By Mark Adams, chief film critic
Screendaily

Dir/scr: Terrence Malick. US. 2011. 138mins



A cinematic symphony more than a classic narrative film, Terrence Malick’s long-awaited The Tree Of Life has moments of breathtaking visual and aural beauty, but in the end it has us longing for the days of Badlands, Days Of Heaven or The Thin Red Line, when the Texan auteur also knew how to spin a good yarn. In his previous films, a sense of wonder at the mysteries of nature, the human spirit and the cosmos was always there in the background, lifting, contrasting and sometimes ironically critiquing the main story. In The Tree Of Life, it very nearly is the story — and the result is a cinematic credo about spiritual transcendence which, while often shot with poetic yearning, preaches too directly to its audience. If ever a whole film were on the nose, this is it.

The reputation of Malick, the presence of Brad Pitt (who also co-produced), and the packaging of the film as a unique cinematic experience - though not, it should be noted, a 3D one - will help at the box office. And the mixture of boos and applause that greeted the film’s Cannes press premiere suggest that some media reactions will be more upbeat than this one. But if it’s true, as some reports suggest, that the film’s budget exceeded the $32m initially announced, breaking even is going to be a struggle. The Tree Of Life is a more focused film, and a better one, than Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain - but that pompous New Age saga’s poor box-office performance is still probably a good benchmark for a film that requires a serious leap of faith, and poker-straight faces, from its audience.

The quotation from the Book Of Job that introduces the story signals the fact that we’re in Biblical territory, in the field of parable rather than the muddy swamp of narrative realism. In the first of the film’s four movements - to use a musical metaphor that is touched on more than once in the story - fragments of the lives we will be following are woven together impressionistically, linked by Malick’s familiar poetic, rhetorical voiceovers: characters (not always identifiable at first) talk about the two opposing life forces, strong but selfish nature and vulnerable but selfless grace, which are soon identified respectively with the stern father (Pitt, solid in the role) and the radiant, loving mother (a bravura performance from Chastain) of the 1950s suburban family we begin to follow.

A tragedy - the death of their 19-year-old son - is announced via telegram; we cut to a city scene, where a drawn and intense Sean Penn drifts between his boxy modernist steel and glass house and the New York skyscraper where he works, apparently as an architect. We work hard at first to connect these plot scraps — the task not being made any easier by the almost complete absence of dialogue.

The second part of the film, designed with the help of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner special-effects veteran Douglas Trumbull, is the most audacious: an impressionistic cinematic history of the universe in around 20 minutes, from its beginnings in cosmic dust to the appearance of life on earth. Smoky nebulae, gushing lava, the corpuscular pulse of flowing magma, sunrise and star-rise, amoeba and jellyfish, hammerhead sharks and CGI dinosaurs all feature in a virtuoso peformance that stands in the same relation to the rest of the film that a flashy guitar solo does to the main melody.

It’s only after around 55 minutes that the main narrative kicks in. We’re back with the family we met earlier, but years before that telegram. Three boys are born to a couple who live in a classic American suburban house with a lawn outside dominated by a spreading oak tree. Dad, a former air force officer, works in a factory and hopes that certain patents he has taken out will make the family rich, though his real passion is classical music (he plays the organ in church). Mom is a housewife and homemaker. Gradually conflict develops between the authoritarian father and his eldest son, Jack (an excellent, intense debut by young McCracken).

We’re in Oedipal territory here, and in case we don’t get the message, Jack is given on-the-nose, character-defying lines like one he delivers to pa: “I’m as bad as you are - I’m more like you than her.” By now, we have realised that the Sean Penn character, who has taken to wandering anguished in his designer suit through rocky deserts, is Jack in adulthood. The film’s short final movement has him greeting all those he has known on a beach, in a valedictory dream sequence that does pack a certain elegiac punch.

The camera is always moving, panning, gliding away, as if impatient to get to the imminent truth that lies behind this shabby reality - a truth that finds its expression in the soundtrack of transcendental choral or stately orchestral music by composers from Respighi and Mahler to Taverner and Gorecki. The problem is, we need a little shabby reality every now and then. That’s how cinematic poetry is earned.
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Words like "polarize" and "divisive" in the reviews mean no Best Picture Oscar, just in case anyone was expecting it (which I almost was. When you wait three years for a film, your mind starts to invent all sorts of happy scenarios for it.)

The Tree of Life
By Justin Chang
Variety


Few American filmmakers are as alive to the splendor of the natural world as Terrence Malick, but even by his standards, "The Tree of Life" represents something extraordinary. The iconoclastic director's long-awaited fifth feature is in many ways his simplest yet most challenging work, a transfixing odyssey through time and memory that melds a young boy's 1950s upbringing with a magisterial rumination on the Earth's origins. Result is pure-grade art cinema destined primarily for the delectation of Malick partisans and adventurous arthouse-goers, but with its cast names and see-it-to-believe-it stature, this inescapably divisive picture could captivate the zeitgeist for a spell.

A magnum opus that's been kicking around inside Malick's head for decades and awaited by his fans for almost as long, the film will certainly invite even-more-vociferous-than-usual charges of pretension and overambition, criticisms that are admittedly not entirely without merit here. Taking the director's elusive, elliptical style perhaps as far as it will go, "The Tree of Life" is nothing less than a hymn to the glory of creation, an exploratory, often mystifying 138-minute tone poem that will test any Malick non-fan's patience for whispery voiceover and flights of lyrical abstraction.

Critical response will be passionately split (judging by the noisy mixture of boos and applause at the Cannes press screening), even among those who share Malick's poetic orientation and appreciate his willingness to place A-list stars and visual effects in service of unapologetically spiritual and philosophical concerns. Still others may find the picture underwhelming in light of its epic journey to the screen -- a troubled six-year gestation period replete with casting woes and editing delays; the shuttering of U.S. distributor Apparition before Fox Searchlight swooped in; and a last-minute tussle over whether its U.K. release date would trump its world premiere in competition at Cannes.

And so it's only fitting that "The Tree of Life" should demand a measure of patience. The same could of course be said of Malick's four other features, all veiled parables of man's fall from grace and the corruption of an irretrievable innocence. With his new film, Malick has essentially parted the veil. He has abandoned the oblique historical narratives of his previous two pictures, "The Thin Red Line" and "The New World," to tell an intimate wisp of a story that allows him to address his cosmic concerns in the most direct, least compromised manner possible. Yet far from feeling slight, the film surprisingly emerges as Malick's most emotionally accessible work since 1978's "Days of Heaven," so primal and recognizable are the childlike perceptions and feelings he puts onscreen.

An opening quotation from the book of Job ("Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?") lays the celestial groundwork as the film eases the viewer into the preadolescence of Jack O'Brien (Hunter McCracken), the eldest of three boys in midcentury small-town Texas. The first of numerous narrators speaks of two possible paths through life: the way of nature, embodied by the boys' stern taskmaster of a father (Brad Pitt), and the way of grace, represented by their sweet, nurturing mother (Jessica Chastain).

The early reels convey the arc of Jack's life as a series of subjective impressions, leaping ahead to the pivotal moment when Mr. and Mrs. O'Brien receive word that one of Jack's brothers has died at age 19, an occurrence that is neither lingered on nor really explained. Before long, Jack is a grown man (a weary-looking Sean Penn), seen roaming the executive offices of a Houston high-rise and speaking on the phone with his father, who has clearly not mellowed with age.

Emmanuel Lubezki's continually mobile camera, occasionally using wide-angle lenses, prowls through these early scenes as though observing them from a side angle; the visual restlessness mirrors Jack's own inner turmoil, echoed by the inchoate voices we hear in his head. Time and space themselves seem to destabilize, and the film, as though unable to abide the present any longer, retreats into the ancient past.

It's at this point, roughly 20 minutes in, that "The Tree of Life" undergoes arguably the most extreme temporal shift in the history of cinema. Comparisons to "2001: A Space Odyssey" are perhaps intended, not least because Stanley Kubrick's special-effects creator Douglas Trumbull served as a visual consultant on Malick's eye-candy evocation of the dawn of time (conceived by several visual-effects houses but designed with minimal reliance on CGI). We observe a flurry of awe-inspiring images at astronomical, biological, macro- and microscopic levels: a nebula expanding in outer space; cells multiplying in a frenzy; a school of shimmering jellyfish; darkness illuminated by a volcanic eruption; a bubbling primordial ooze.

Viewers may not always be sure of what they're looking at during this sequence, but that's no hindrance to appreciating the sublime imagery or the rhapsodic force of the accompanying choral and orchestral tracks. Yet the director isn't inclined to linger, not even on the stunning occasional glimpse of dinosaurs, whose presence on Earth is observed as matter-of-factly as the cataclysm that brings their chapter to a close.

Texas suburbia comes back into focus, and the film devotes its remaining 100 or so minutes to a sensitive portrait of Jack's upbringing, rendered here as a sort of symphony with many movements, often set to Alexandre Desplat's sometimes majestic, sometimes ominous score. As raggedly structured as this portion of the film is (five editors handled the disjunctive yet intuitive cutting), Malick couldn't be more attuned to the personal joys, sorrows and insecurities of this boy's life, and his tactile images seem suffused with a Norman Rockwell-esque nostalgia even as they seek to deconstruct it.

From the tension that sets in whenever Jack's father appears to the boys' exhilarating sense of freedom as they run through DDT clouds billowing from a spray rig, scene after scene brims with intimate, tenderly observed details, while the rural locations enable the helmer's signature shots of rustling grass and water-reflected sunlight, abetted by richly textured sound design. The camera whips through the family's Craftsman-style house (lovingly appointed by Malick's longtime production designer Jack Fisk) until it comes to seem like home.

The link between Jack's story and the film's prehistoric reverie is never made explicit, though its essential meaning could scarcely be plainer or more deeply felt. The rare film to urgently question, yet also accept, the presence of God in a fallen world, "Tree of Life" understands that every childhood is a creation story unto itself, and just as a new planet is formed by the elements, so an emerging soul is irrevocably shaped by the forces that nurture it.

No one exerts a more domineering influence in Jack's life, or on the film itself, than his father. Played with iron-jawed intensity by Pitt, Mr. O'Brien is the very picture of intimidation -- a strict, upright disciplinarian who, though not immune to affection, is not above using hugs and kisses as instruments of control. One moment, in which Jack considers a retaliatory act of violence, is both amusing and shockingly blunt. And yet Malick extends the father the same compassion he grants the mother, played with heartrending vulnerability by Chastain as a woman who strives to protect, defend and console her children at all times.

Young McCracken makes an outstanding screen debut, his eyes seeming to reflect a sad wisdom beyond his years; thesp captures Jack's fear of his father as well as the disturbing ways in which he takes after him. As his younger brothers, Laramie Eppler and Tye Sheridan are wonderfully authentic.

Penn's Jack receives the least screen time of the three adult principals, and he figures into the film's most abstruse, surreal passages, which frame him against a series of desert backdrops and make direct use of biblical imagery. In these moments, "The Tree of Life" seems to grope desperately, if movingly, for the sort of grand resolution its mysteries by definition cannot offer. But by that point it's clear Malick, after five films over nearly 40 years, hasn't given up his search for new ways of seeing truth and beauty -- in life, or in cinema.




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Win Butler
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The Tree of Life: Cannes Review
by Todd McCarthy
Hollywood Reporter


CANNES -- Brandishing an ambition it’s likely no film, including this one, could entirely fulfill, The Tree of Life is nonetheless a singular work, an impressionistic metaphysical inquiry into mankind’s place in the grand scheme of things that releases waves of insights amidst its narrative imprecisions. This fifth feature in Terrence Malick’s eccentric four-decade career is a beauteous creation that ponders the imponderables, asks the questions that religious and thoughtful people have posed for millennia and provokes expansive philosophical musings along with intense personal introspection. As such, it is hardly a movie for the masses and will polarize even buffs, some of whom may fail to grasp the connection between the depiction of the beginnings of life on Earth and the travails of a 1950s Texas family. But there are great, heady things here, both obvious and evanescent, more than enough to qualify this as an exceptional and major film. Critical passions, pro and con, along with Brad Pitt in one of his finest performances, will stir specialized audiences to attention, but Fox Searchlight will have its work cut out for it in luring a wider public.

Shot three years ago and molded and tinkered with ever since by Malick and no fewer than five editors, The Tree of Life is shaped in an unconventional way, not as a narrative with normal character arcs and dramatic tension but more like a symphony with several movements each expressive of its own natural phenomena and moods. Arguably, music plays a much more important role here than do words — there is some voice-over but scarcely any dialogue at all for nearly an hour, whereas the soaring, sometimes grandiose soundtrack, comprised of 35 mostly classical excerpts drawn from Bach, Brahms, Berlioz, Mahler, Holst, Respighi, Gorecki and others in addition to the contributions of Alexandre Desplat, dominates in the way it often did in Stanley Kubrick’s work.

Indeed, this comparison is inevitable, as Tree is destined to be endlessly likened to 2001: A Space Odyssey, due to the spacy imagery of undefinable celestial lights and formations as well as because of its presentation of key hypothetical moments in the evolution of life on this planet. There are also equivalent long stretches of silence and semi-boredom designed, perhaps, to provide some time to muse about matters rarely raised in conventional narrative films.

That Malick intends to think large is indicated by an opening quotation from the Book of Job, in which God intimidates the humble man by demanding, “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding.” Job is not cited again but is more or less paraphrased when, in moments of great personal distress, a smalltown mother cries out, “Lord, why? Where are you?” and “What are we to you?”

Tree doesn’t answer these questions but fashions a relationship between its big picture perspective and its intimate story that crucially serves the film’s philosophical purposes. Much of the early-going is devoted to spectacular footage of massive natural phenomena, both in space and on Earth; gaseous masses, light and matter in motion, volcanic explosions, fire and water, the creation and growth of cells and organisms, eventually the evolution of jellyfish and even dinosaurs, represented briefly by stunningly realistic creatures, one of which oddly appears to express compassion for another.

Juxtaposed with this are the lamentations of a mother (Jessica Chastain) for a son who has just died, in unexplained circumstances, and for a time it seems that placing the everyday doings of the O’Brien family of a quiet Texas town in the shadow of the seismic convulsions pertaining to the planet’s creation represents an inordinately elaborate way of expressing what Bogart said in Casablanca, that “the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.”

But while that may be true, it is also the case that those very problems, and everything else that people experience, are all that matter at the time one is experiencing them and are therefore of surpassing importance. Whatever else can — and will — be said about it, Tree gets the balance of its extraordinary dual perspective, between the cosmic and the momentary, remarkably right, which holds it together even during its occasional uncertain stretches.

Least effective is the contemporary framing material centered on the oldest O’Brien kid, Jack, portrayed as a middle-aged man by Sean Penn. A successful architect, Jack looks troubled and preoccupied as he moves through a world defined by giant Houston office towers and atriums shot so as to resemble secular cathedrals. While the connection to Jack’s childhood years is clear, the dramatic contributions of these largely wordless scenes are weak, even at the end, when a sense of reconciliation and closure is sought by the sight of flowers and disparate souls gathering on a beach in a way that uncomfortably resembles hippie-dippy reveries of the late 1960s.

But the climactic shortfall only marginally saps the impact of the central story of family life. Occupying a pleasant but not lavish home on a wide dirt street in a town that matches one’s idealized vision of a perfect 1950s community (it’s actually Smithville, population 3,900, just southeast of Austin and previously seen in Hope Floats), the family is dominated by a military veteran father (Pitt) who lays down the law to his three boys seemingly more by rote than due to any necessity. He’s compulsively physical with them, playfully, affectionately and violently, and yet rigidly holds something back.

Within Malick’s scheme of things, Dad represents nature, while Mom (Chastain) stands for grace. Great pals among themselves, Jack (Hunter McCracken), R.L. (Pitt look-alike Laramie Eppler) and Steve (Tye Sheridan) range all over town and would seem to enjoy near-ideal circumstances in which to indulge their youth.

But working in a manner diametrically opposed to that of theater dramatists inclined to spell everything out, Malick opens cracks and wounds by inflection, indirection and implication. Using fleet camerawork and jump-cutting that combine to intoxicating effect, the picture builds to unanticipated levels of disappointment and tragedy, much of it expressed with a minimum of dialogue in the final stages of Pitt’s terrific performance.

Embodying the American ideal with his clean-cut good looks, open face, look-you-in-the-eyes directness and strong build, Pitt’s Mr. O’Brien embodies the optimism and can-do attitude one associates with the post-war period. But this man had other, unfulfilled dreams — he became “sidetracked,” as he says — and as his pubescent oldest son begins to display a troublesome rebelliousness, fractures begins to show in his own character as well, heartbreakingly so.

Voice-over snippets suggestive of states of mind register more importantly than dialogue, while both are trumped by the diverse musical elements and the rumblings and murmurs of nature, which have all been blended in a masterful sound mix. Emmanuel Lubezki outdoes himself with cinematography of almost unimaginable crispness and luminosity. As in The New World, the camera is constantly on the move, forever reframing in search of the moment, which defines the film’s impressionistic manner.

Production designer Jack Fisk and costume designer Jacqueline West make indispensable contributions to creating the film’s world. That not a single image here seems fake or artificial can only be the ultimate praise for the work of senior visual effects supervisor Dan Glass and his team, while the presence of Douglas Trumbull as visual effects consultant further cements the film’s connection to 2001.
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