“The Tree of Life”
(2hrs & 19 min)
Any assemblage
of devout
people could not help but be drawn into a round of lengthy
discussion after a
shared viewing of this expansive production.
Within minutes after it gets underway we are told, in the
voice-over of a
mother playfully attentive to her small children, that we have
two ways to go
on our human journey: the
way of grace
or the way of nature. Grace
is loving,
giving and forgiving. Nature
is
self-serving, indifferent, uncaring.
Thence we set out on a quest to see this much heralded
universal truth
worked out in the lives of her family, which I surmise is meant
to serve as a
microcosm for the whole race of humanity.
Agony and ecstasy for the following two-hours-plus do a
dance across a
wide expanse of territory both palpable and ethereal.
A powerful
tale shimmers
beneath the surface of this production – from the gifted hand of
writer/director Terence Malick, for whom I have great regard.
(His “Days of
Heaven” is one of my all-time favorites.)
If only this tale had managed to come fully to the
surface and play out
without undue distraction. His
work here
is sensitive and inspired, but his reflections about
self-discovery,
divine/human encounter, wonderment and the loss of innocence do
not come forth
with quite the sharpness or boldness that I would have liked. A flawed attempt at a
masterpiece,
surely! Malick evidently
thought that
the drama itself was not substantial enough, that it needed to
be submerged in
a vast deep blue sea of cosmic explosions, volcanic eruptions,
windblown
landscapes, busy ocean waves, and natural wonders. Even some prehistoric
animals put in brief
appearances.
The acting is
the most
inspired feature. Jessica
Chastain plays
the mother, and she is luminous in her portrayal of a 1950s
stay-at-home wife
in conflict with the domineering husband/father upon whom she is
economically
dependent, exuding a quiet understanding of her three
preadolescent boys that
her husband learns almost too late that he does not possess. And she does it all with a
very scanty use of
dialogue. Brad Pitt is
completely
plausible and potent as the husband. And
not the least in the casting is Hunter McCracken as the oldest
and
preadolescent son Jack, whose odyssey of body and spirit is the
pivotal one in
the film. He is nothing
short of
marvelous.
The film
actually has four
parts. The first one,
out of sequence,
takes us into the later life of the household, when an untimely
death is
visited upon them. It
lasts about twenty
slow minutes, before we are hurled into the second part, when
most of the
previously mentioned cosmic phenomena take place, suggestive of
Creation in the
making and the dawn of life on earth.
Almost forty minutes of the footage has passed when the
third and
longest part gets underway – the flashback to Jack’s earlier
struggle leading
to his eventual rebellion. This
is by
far the most immediately affective of the four parts, as out of
focus and
disrupted as some of it is. I
thought
the scenes in which the boys interact in the absence of the
grownups were the
most moving in the entire picture.
The
fourth is a quite confusing glimpse into the soul wrestling of
the grown-up
Jack (Sean Penn). In
this last phase of
the tale things gets quite blurry, especially with regard to the
sense of time
and place. The strange
family reunion we
witness (Is Jack daydreaming it or is it for real on some level? Not clear!) does make for a
feel-good ending.
The major
problem for me
with “The Tree of Life” is the frenetic style of the editing. The scenes shift at such a
nervous pace that
much of what is being said gets garbled in the ambitious,
overactive cinematic
process. So much of the
characters’
thoughts are voiced over, but it is not always easy to tell
whose thoughts we
are hearing or to whom they are being directed.
As beautiful and mysterious as the images are by
themselves, I found
much of them ultimately laborious and distracting to sit
through. In fact, that
is exactly what the movie seems
to do – endlessly belabor, pushing the running time far past the
two hours that
would have been adequate. I
had the
feeling that the cinematographer and the film editor believed
that anything
they could do they should do.
I wanted very
much to be
carried away by this movie, before I saw it; it sounded so
inviting to my
mystical nature and my personal taste.
When I was not carried away, I went back for a second
viewing, still
hoping that something special was there that I had missed, but
to no avail. While it is
not a total failure, I still
think it falls short of a masterpiece.
It does stir some profound chords, which may translate
into more
uplifting music for some viewers than they did for me. I do not begrudge anyone
that
experience.
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