Viewer 1: “What the hell?”
Viewer 2: “Shut up.”
— Overheard during showing of Tree of Life
Since I watched Days of Heaven (1978) in a college movie theater, I have been a fan of director Terrence Malick. Seeing that beautiful and poetic movie was a unique cinema experience that changed my expectations and aspirations for movies. Little did I know then, though, that twenty years would pass between the time Malick made that movie and his next one, The Thin Red Line (1998), but I would love that movie too. Although he only has made five movies in a span of thirty-eight years, they are all unique and beautiful. So I was eagerly anticipating Tree of Life (2011), and its ruminations on life and death set around a suburban 1950s family, starring Brad Pitt, Sean Penn, and Jessica Chastain.
I give that background to disclose my expectations for Tree of Life. As has been noted in other Chimesfreedom posts, sometimes high expectations may doom your enjoyment of a movie. Either way, I was disappointed by Tree of Life. Maybe I will change my mind after repeated viewings and further reflection, as there is a lot to think about from the film.
Tree of Life is an ambitious movie, attempting to tie together creation, the meaning of life, memory, and maybe even the afterlife. There are beautiful scenes and big questions, as the movie ponders the age-old question of why the world was formed just to result in human pain and suffering. There is not much of a plot, but you do not go to a Malick movie looking for a story; you go looking for poetry. The film focuses on one boy and his interactions with two brothers and a loving mother and a frustrated disciplinarian father (Pitt). The movie gives you glimpses of their daily lives with occasional whispering voice-overs, but the narrating boy never whispers anything as literal as “I see dead people.”
The acting is good throughout. The child actors, including Hunter McCracken, do an excellent job, and Pitt gives a standout performance. If you go to the movie because you are a fan of Sean Penn, you should know that he only appears in the film about fifteen minutes more than the dinosaurs do.
Conclusion? I was not engaged for most of the first half hour and the ending, but the middle of the movie drew me into it. Overall, I wish more movies were as ambitious as this one, but I also wish this one reached its lofty goals a little more than it did. Most critics are getting this one right by saying it is an unusual movie that some people will love and others will hate, although I fell in the middle. So you should check it out for yourself if you think you might like a movie with high aspirations that may be more challenging than entertaining.
If you want to check out some other views, Rotten Tomatoes currently has a score of 86% by critics and 66% by viewers. Also, Bill Goodykoontz at the Arizona Republic has a very good positive review of Tree of Life (“Beautiful, baffling, poetic, pretentious, it’s one big ball of moviedom”), and Roger Moore at the Orlando Sentinel has a very good negative review (“this challenging time-skipping rumination is the big screen equivalent of watching that ‘Tree’ grow”).
What did you think of Tree of Life? Leave a comment.
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