THE TREE OF LIFE: Starring Brad Pitt, Sean Penn and Jessica Chastain. Directed by Terrence Malick. Rated PG (Mild themes). 138 min.
Reviewed by Peter W. Sheehan
THIS movie won the Palme d’Or at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, and attempts no less than to film the meaning of existence, viewed through the experiences of a Texas family, living in the US in the 1950s.
The movie opens with a quotation from the Book of Job, and immediately takes you to a Christian family grieving, when it hears about the death of one of its own.
The film has a grand, epic reach. It literally journeys to the creation of the world, and through the history of the universe.
The small town life of Waco, Texas, becomes a backdrop of a film, that explores the dynamics of a family touched by its loss.
The history of this family shows intense sibling rivalry and disturbed adolescence, but the film is a deeply meditative piece that looks to change our perceptions of the meaning of life.
The film’s core message is that God is a divine being who takes from life, as he gives to it, and this is a movie about how God asks one family to suffer greatly.
Its imagery is beautiful.
The film sweeps you across time, and some of its scenes leave you exalted.
At the same time, however, the movie aims too high by trying to collapse all of the complexity of humanity into single frames of meaning.
The film has been likened to a symphony with several movements.
It plays through life, and literally sweeps you along, philosophically, and emotionally.
This is a highly ambitious movie.
It is almost entirely impressionistic in its impact, often surreal, and it arouses deep reflections with nearly every image it creates.
Said to shine a light on both secular and religious reality, the scope of the themes the movie attempts to tackle is enormous.
Although its photography is outstanding, the film is low on narrative thread.
Artistry exists in nearly every frame, however, and the philosophical questions it raises have no easy answers.
Terrence Malick places the competing forces of this family into the context of the universe, and uses different levels of meaning – psychological, religious and spiritual – to enliven and inform each other.
In narrative terms, the story is complex.
Sean Penn plays Jack, a weary middle-aged executive who is devastated to learn of his brother’s death.
The film transports the viewer back to the 1950s where Jack was a boy in mid-Western America.
His father (Brad Pitt, in a compelling performance), was a stern disciplinarian, and religiously, very authoritarian.
The news of the sudden death of Jack’s younger brother, of whom he was jealous, is bought to his distraught, long-suffering mother (Jessica Chastain) by a telegraph boy, who simply walks away.
Jack’s volatile father lives his life according to his own needs, while his mother is a person of unconditional acceptance, and forgiveness.
Her smothering love is seductive, while her husband’s sternness is rejecting.
The contrast of mother and father establishes saintliness against something much darker.
Just as Job was tested through suffering, God is testing Jack’s family, with all of its faults.
Jack respects and rebelliously fears his father, but for each member of the family – mother, father and sons – the movie never strays too far away from its absorption with the meaning of the question, “why has the loss happened, and what does it mean?”
This is cinema on a huge scale.
The film has a redemptive final sequence that is problematic, but moving.
The word “Amen” fills the sound track, as the members of the family find each other again on the sands of an ocean, and embrace.
God’s test of this family means that they have to search for happiness in whatever God gives them, and not in what he takes away.
This is a fascinating, flawed, and bold piece of creative film-making.
It is a highly personal and meditative piece of cinema that explores the meaning of life through images that adhere to “the tree of life”.
It might fail to tell a coherent story, but artistically it is richly imaginative, and its imagery is stunning.
Peter W. Sheehan is an associate of the Australian Catholic Office for Film and Broadcasting.
