Movie Review
The Tree of Life (2011)
NYT Critics' Pick
Heaven, Texas and the Cosmic Whodunit
By A. O. SCOTT
Published: May 26, 2011
The Day of Judgment, prophesied for last weekend, has apparently been postponed, but moviegoers eager for rapture can find consolation — to say nothing of awe, amazement and grist for endless argument — in “The Tree of Life,” Terrence Malick’s new film, which contemplates human existence from the standpoint of eternity. Recently showered with temporal glory at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Palme d’Or, this movie, Mr. Malick’s fifth feature in 38 years, folds eons of cosmic and terrestrial history into less than two and a half hours. Its most provocative sequences envision the origin of the universe, the development of life on earth (including a few soulful dinosaurs) and then, more concisely and less literally, the end of time, when the dead of all the ages shall rise and walk around on a heavenly beach.
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The Tree of Life
Terrence Malick's Film Asks Big Questions
Manohla Dargis's thoughts on “The Tree of Life” from the Cannes Film Festival.
Audio Interview: Brad PittMultimedia
Merie Wallace/Fox Searchlight Pictures
Jessica Chastain and, from top, Laramie Eppler, Brad Pitt and Tye Sheridan in "The Tree of Life." More Photos »
At the beginning and the conclusion — alpha and omega — we gaze on a flickering flame that can only represent the creator. Not Mr. Malick (who prefers to remain unseen in public) but the elusive deity whose presence in the world is both the film’s overt subject and the source of its deepest, most anxious mysteries. With disarming sincerity and daunting formal sophistication “The Tree of Life” ponders some of the hardest and most persistent questions, the kind that leave adults speechless when children ask them. In this case a boy, in whispered voice-over, speaks directly to God, whose responses are characteristically oblique, conveyed by the rustling of wind in trees or the play of shadows on a bedroom wall. Where are you? the boy wants to know, and lurking within this question is another: What am I doing here?
“Here” in this case is Waco, Tex., in the 1950s, a slice of earthly reality rendered in exquisite detail by the production designer, Jack Fisk, and the cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki. Their evident devotion to Mr. Malick’s exacting, idiosyncratic vision — the care with which they help coax his ideas into vivid cinematic reality — is in its way as moving as the images themselves, which flow and sway to equally sublime music. (The score is by Alexandre Desplat. He holds his own in some pretty imposing company, including Couperin, Brahms and Berlioz, part of whose great “Requiem” underpins an ecstatic celestial climax.) The sheer beauty of this film is almost overwhelming, but as with other works of religiously minded art, its aesthetic glories are tethered to a humble and exalted purpose, which is to shine the light of the sacred on secular reality.
Embedded in the passages of cosmology, microbiology and spiritual allegory is a story whose familiarity is at least as important to the design of “The Tree of Life” as the speculative flights that surround it. The world of neatly trimmed lawns and decorous houses set back from shaded streets is one we instinctively feel we know, just as we immediately recognize the family whose collective life occupies the central 90 minutes or so of the film.
The particulars of these people — Mr. and Mrs. O’Brien and their three sons — and of the place they inhabit are drawn from Mr. Malick’s own biography, but they also have an almost archetypal cultural resonance. This is small-town America in the ’50s: Dad’s crew cut, Mom’s apron, the kids playing kick the can in the summer dusk.
To some extent this tableau — words can hardly do justice to the honeyed sunlight streaming through kitchen windows and refracted through the spray of garden hoses, or to the loose-limbed rhythms of children at play — offers an idealized glimpse of a lost Eden. But it would be a mistake simply to bask in (or to sneer at) Mr. Malick’s nostalgia for the vanished world of his Eisenhower-era childhood.
In his view, rooted in an idiosyncratic Christianity and also in the Romantic literary tradition, the loss of innocence is not a singular event in history but rather an axiom of human experience, repeated in every generation and in the consciousness of every individual. The miraculous paradox is that this universal pattern repeats itself in circumstances that are always unique. And so this specific postwar coming-of-age story, quietly astute in its assessment of the psychological dynamics of a nuclear family in the American South at the dawn of the space age, is also an ode to childhood perception and an account of the precipitous fall into knowledge that foretells childhood’s end. It is like Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality” transported into the world of “Leave It to Beaver,” an inadequate and perhaps absurd formulation but one that I hope conveys the full measure of my astonishment and admiration.
The center of the film’s universe — Mr. Malick’s eyes and ears and alter ego — is Jack O’Brien. We first meet him, in the person of Sean Penn, as a middle-aged architect who lives amid gleaming skyscrapers and clean, ultramodern surfaces and who is haunted by the death, many years earlier, of his younger brother. The opening scenes take us briefly back to Jack’s youth, acquainting us with his parents (Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain) and allowing their grief over the loss of their son to cast a shadow of tragedy over everything to follow.
“Here” in this case is Waco, Tex., in the 1950s, a slice of earthly reality rendered in exquisite detail by the production designer, Jack Fisk, and the cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki. Their evident devotion to Mr. Malick’s exacting, idiosyncratic vision — the care with which they help coax his ideas into vivid cinematic reality — is in its way as moving as the images themselves, which flow and sway to equally sublime music. (The score is by Alexandre Desplat. He holds his own in some pretty imposing company, including Couperin, Brahms and Berlioz, part of whose great “Requiem” underpins an ecstatic celestial climax.) The sheer beauty of this film is almost overwhelming, but as with other works of religiously minded art, its aesthetic glories are tethered to a humble and exalted purpose, which is to shine the light of the sacred on secular reality.
Embedded in the passages of cosmology, microbiology and spiritual allegory is a story whose familiarity is at least as important to the design of “The Tree of Life” as the speculative flights that surround it. The world of neatly trimmed lawns and decorous houses set back from shaded streets is one we instinctively feel we know, just as we immediately recognize the family whose collective life occupies the central 90 minutes or so of the film.
The particulars of these people — Mr. and Mrs. O’Brien and their three sons — and of the place they inhabit are drawn from Mr. Malick’s own biography, but they also have an almost archetypal cultural resonance. This is small-town America in the ’50s: Dad’s crew cut, Mom’s apron, the kids playing kick the can in the summer dusk.
To some extent this tableau — words can hardly do justice to the honeyed sunlight streaming through kitchen windows and refracted through the spray of garden hoses, or to the loose-limbed rhythms of children at play — offers an idealized glimpse of a lost Eden. But it would be a mistake simply to bask in (or to sneer at) Mr. Malick’s nostalgia for the vanished world of his Eisenhower-era childhood.
In his view, rooted in an idiosyncratic Christianity and also in the Romantic literary tradition, the loss of innocence is not a singular event in history but rather an axiom of human experience, repeated in every generation and in the consciousness of every individual. The miraculous paradox is that this universal pattern repeats itself in circumstances that are always unique. And so this specific postwar coming-of-age story, quietly astute in its assessment of the psychological dynamics of a nuclear family in the American South at the dawn of the space age, is also an ode to childhood perception and an account of the precipitous fall into knowledge that foretells childhood’s end. It is like Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality” transported into the world of “Leave It to Beaver,” an inadequate and perhaps absurd formulation but one that I hope conveys the full measure of my astonishment and admiration.
The center of the film’s universe — Mr. Malick’s eyes and ears and alter ego — is Jack O’Brien. We first meet him, in the person of Sean Penn, as a middle-aged architect who lives amid gleaming skyscrapers and clean, ultramodern surfaces and who is haunted by the death, many years earlier, of his younger brother. The opening scenes take us briefly back to Jack’s youth, acquainting us with his parents (Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain) and allowing their grief over the loss of their son to cast a shadow of tragedy over everything to follow.
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