Review: The Tree of Life

Trying to write something meaningful about a Terrence Malick film is getting into serious dancing-about-architecture territory. For a director who clearly puts so little stock in words, a written review seems like a woefully inadequate medium for commentary. But as I am unable and unwilling to start performing reviews through interpretive dance, plain old words will have to do.

Throughout his meandering 40-year career in film, during which time he has only directed five full-length films, Malick has been gradually stripping his work of narrative and character development. Although his films have always exhibited a dreamy quality that prioritises visual communication above all, debut Badlands and its follow-up Days of Heaven maintain strong elements of plot, the latter even coming off as positively Shakespearean, in a floaty sort of way. But his 1998 "war" movie The Thin Red Line and 2005's The New World saw Malick's more abstract themes - a vague but insistent yearning for the spirit of the natural world foremost among them - come to the fore.

The Tree of Life feels like the culmination of this steady drift away from storytelling and towards a sort of visual poetry. At once intensely personal and unabashedly grand, the film sets the day-to-day life of a small-town Texan family against the vast, unknowable scope of the universe, its creation, and the nature of everything that exists within it. Simple.

This split between intimate scenes of family life and portrayals of our planet's fiery birth might seem incongruous. Malick moves in mysterious ways, the twining limbs of his tree providing a link between the smallest events and the very largest. His widescreen vision of the universe is certainly arresting in a visual sense. Tectonic plates sizzle and grind against one another; oceans are born and in turn incubate the multicellular organisms that spiral along the sea bed. Stars burn, forests bloom and dinosaurs roam.

We're introduced to this eon-spanning maelstrom before we ever set eyes on a human character. Nevertheless, it's Mr and Mrs O'Brien of Waco, Texas and their three sons that put it all into perspective. Their life together in a quiet 1950s suburb (depicted so specifically that it is likely drawn from Malick's own memories) is at once idyllic and riven by conflict. The father (Brad Pitt) is the square-jawed embodiment of the do-it-for-yourself American ideal of Darwinian strength. A day's work for a day's pay; relying only on the sweat off your brow. He tries to pass his world view on to his sons, who he subjects to a strict regimen of traditional discipline, physical competition and rough affection.

The mother (Jessica Chastain) is the lamb to her husband's lion, a creature of seemingly unending compassion, childlike and empathetic. While Mr O'Brien mutters stern reprimands at the children across the dinner table, Mrs O'Brien is playing with them in the garden and waking them up with ice cubes down the backs of their pyjamas. If they seem symbolic rather than real, that's because they are - this 50s childhood is all channelled through the memory of their eldest son Jack in later life (Sean Penn), still torn by the incompatibility of his father's "way of nature" and his mother's "way of grace".

As such, Jack plays a major part in the film's family scenes, and Malick's direction beautifully fleshes out all those hazily remembered details of childhood through simple, striking moments, from gangs of children playing in the streets in the twilight just before dinner to Jack obsessing over every detail of his father's face and hands as he plays the local church organ. Jack's experience of growing up also provides a microscopic test bed for all the giant ideas floating around, as he flits to and fro between his parents, tries to reconcile the growing anger he's harbouring, and even deals with guilt and confusion after rifling through his neighbour's underwear drawer. These tiny domestic dramas mix Oedipal frustration with visions of unblemished love, with Jack and his brothers trying to find their way through the middle.

The film makes its own views clear through the judicious application of the Book of Job, the thrust of which rests on man challenging God on why the good suffer along with the wicked. The answer, the film seems to say, is to embrace a way of life that transcends the slings and arrows of fate; to see grief and joy as inseparably joined in the titanic, shared experience of life. While Mr O'Brien's vision of self-reliance gradually crumbles into a ruin of disappointment and failure, his wife's way of life proves resilient through surrender, culminating in the yielding of her most precious treasure to the Everything: the life of her own child.

The film's ending has proven its most divisive moment. The final scenes, which show characters walking down a celestial beachfront, have been criticised as an empty piece of aesthetic doodling, tantamount to the meaningless beauty of a perfume ad. While the comparison is understandable at the visual level, the scene really makes sense as a proper conclusion to the messages of a shared experience, of transcending the whims of grief and fear. These scenes are The Tree of Life's pearly gates, only instead of white marble they're made of all the versions of ourselves and all the things we've seen and done, together in one place.

It's a profoundly spiritual vision, but not in any sense that will pander to fundamentalists. Although many of the film's messages are conveyed through Christian allegory, they could resonate with any number of philosophical, religious or scientific viewpoints. In fact, Malick's larger depictions of the world's biological development seem rigorously scientific, at least to this layman.

The film's performances are roundly excellent; Pitt and Chastain are magnetic as the opposing forces at the centre of the universe, and the children are played with the naturalism that's so vital if the audience is to buy into their physical and emotional awakening. Even so, the performances are barely worth commenting on, so ingrained are they in the film's imagery and themes.

The Tree of Life resonated with me in a way that seems specific to Malick's films; there simply isn't space here to fully plumb its depths. But that doesn't mean I would recommend it to anyone. If you're looking for a great Sean Penn/Brad Pitt movie, don't bother. If you're looking for an immersive story, stay away. If you tend to think art films are pretentious and boring, you'd probably be better off loading into a giant slingshot and firing yourself into the heart of the sun. But if you're interested a beautifully conceived collage of life, one that shows but doesn't preach, that shares but doesn't explain, that mourns and celebrates all at once, The Tree of Life might make a lifelong fan out of you.

Interest Score: Butterflies/10

Satisfaction Score: A baby's toes/10