THE TREE OF LIFE

This film won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.  Director Terrence Malick has only made five films in forty years and is considered even by the standards of reclusive, eccentric directors to be very reclusive and eccentric.  In 1973 there was Badlands, in 1978 there was Days of Heaven, in 1998 The Thin Red Line, in 2005 The New World, and now this.  Instead of Malick's signature idiosyncratic style being applied to seemingly conventional stories (young lovers on the run, young lovers on the run, WW2, Pocahontas) this film is Malick's style applied on top of... Malick's style.  Almost completely formless, its like being 'felt at' for two hours and twenty minutes.  The well-conveyed and diverse feelings are accompanied by classical music and spectacular images of things both mundane and cosmic, of history both personal and celestial, but just like certain pieces of divine natural beauty, say a double rainbow, the film is ultimately weightless.

Plot?  Uh... Lets see.  Sean Penn is a man living in a city.  He has a house and wife.  He works in some sort of gigantic, hellish open air office that could be shot differently and turn up as an art gallery or super sexy spy's office in another type of picture.  He remembers his childhood, when his father Brad Pitt was too mean to him and his mother Jessica Chastain was too nice to him.  In his childhood, he has two brothers, and they live in small town Texas sometime in the 50's or 60's.  Unconnected vignettes from this period form the bulk of the story.

Very early on we learn that one of Sean Penn's brothers died at age 19, and we see the day of the funeral, but the rest of Penn's story seems centered either a few years before that or decades later.  I'm not even sure which brother died.  I'm also not sure if any of the characters in this movie have names.  The credits listed a whole bunch of names but I don't really recall them being spoken.  Jack maybe?  That's a common one.  You will hear a lot more of people calling each other by titles: mother, father, brother, son.

You will hear copious voice-overs and very little actual dialogue.  Hearing characters thoughts, not bland immediate thoughts like 'where's my keys' but grand philosophical pondering like 'why are we here', is a trademark of Malick's films but here with so little actually going on for the characters to think about they end up just mulling over the same damn questions ad nauseum right from the start.  Save for a few sequences, I don't think I've ever seen a more joyless film about childhood, not even Where The Wild Things Are.

Relief, and serene beauty, comes during mostly wordless sequences where Sean Penn imagines the birth of the universe, the birth of life on earth, some dinosaurs having a good time, the death of dinosaurs, his own birth, and then the death of the universe.  Special effects in an art house picture?  Douglas Trumbull, who gave us possibly the greatest effects of all time in 2001: A Space Odyssey, came out of retirement to basically do the same thing again.  Planets form and vast waves of space-stuff crash across the banks of time and space and it's fun to watch.  One dinosaur, a Nessie type beached on a shore, looks astonishingly real while two other creatures that run through a shallow river look much less convincing.  This movie could have used more dinosaurs and fewer voice-overs.

Calling this movie 'abstract' would be a serious understatement.  The characters are almost completely archetypal, especially Chastain who plays the boys' mother as some sort of Earth Goddess personified with such staggering elemental purity that the Oedipal complex she will inspire in her children seems inevitable even by the standards of Oedipal complexes; Pitt is fleshed out a little more, with his organ-playing at church and his job at some kind of factory involving metal and walkways and patents and differed dreams of being a musician.  Pitt is essentially performing as the platonic ideal of the word 'stern' and any details we get to humanize him are much appreciated.

The film's composition is striking, with every shot feeling like it was slaved over to make sure it was bathed in just the right amount of heavenly light with the precise amount of breeze to send voluminous white curtains dancing through the air.  I remembered a few sequences fondly in the days after the movie, particularly the cosmically and dinosaur-ally oriented scenes, but still stronger is the memory of wondering throughout the entire film 'when the bloody hell will they get to the point?'