Winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes last month could perhaps go down in history as one of the least remarkable things about Terrence Malick’s new masterpiece, The Tree of Life. While the ongoing, often contentious debate about whether the film is spectacularly well-crafted or simply spectacularly pretentious is certainly unsettled—perhaps both are to some degree true—Malick must be given enormous credit for creating a film on a level of vision and creativity never before seen. In fact, the diverse and controversial reactions are a testament to just how much this film challenges the conventions of traditional filmmaking, exploring new territories of technique, style, subject, and plot. There is, quite frankly, nothing about the medium that The Tree of Life does not boldly hope to reinvent—for better or for worse.
Yet the vision of this film goes even further, which is what makes it truly outstanding. Malick’s ambition is, quite frankly, so great that he not only seeks to reinvent cinema, but also aspires (and in many ways succeeds) to do what the entire history of cinema has attempted: to capture the human existence, on film.
What I mean by this is that The Tree of Life somehow manages to take all of the infinite aspects of what it means to ‘be,’ and somehow projects them through a single individual: Jack O’Brien, brilliantly acted by Sean Penn. While Penn hardly speaks more than a few sentences through the entirety of the film—most of the characters don’t—and is only portrayed over the course of a single distracted afternoon, the weight and depth of Jack’s life, background, and fundamentally human trial of existence is extraordinary. Through a fluid, broken, stream-of-consciousness series of flashbacks to his 1950’s childhood—artfully integrated with complex, surrealist, and metaphorical shots of life, earth, beauty, and history—Malick paints a true picture of the human individual.
In its quest to capture existence, this picture forms three distinct layers, and Malick notes each carefully. The first and most immediate, the present moment in which Penn’s character exists, is contrasted with the memories and backgrounds that make him human, as well as the vast, nearly mystical history of life on earth and within the cosmos.
The first layer is fleeting and ephemeral. Jack’s life as an architect in 21st century Dallas is both defined and outweighed by his past, just as all of our lives are, which leads directly into the second and most substantive of the three. In these flashbacks, we see not only the quintessential childhood—stern-yet-adoring father (Brad Pitt in an Oscar-worthy performance), kind-yet-repressed mother (Jessica Chastain), suburban family home, and the emergence of the many trials of adolescence—but also the struggle of a family to define itself against the world.
As the story of the O’Brien’s is told much as one would remember their own childhood, through a series of semi-connected, often-incomplete vignettes, every emotion within it seems to belong to the viewer as much as to the characters. The vision of Waco in the 50’s (certainly not a coincidence that it’s where Malick spent his childhood) is all at once full of nostalgia as well as great trauma. And true to form, Malick spells out nothing in an explicit or sequential manner, and as a result, the omnipresent sorrows, joys, and questions underscore every single moment.
Finally then, surrounding and interspersed among the dynamic reflections and remembrances is the final and most ambitious layer that seeks to contextualize the individual with the history of life on earth and the unanswered questions that it presents. Far from accessible, this massive and courageously imagined set of sequences can be excruciatingly long and confusing, but fundamentally awe-inspiring. Malick’s vision of the cosmos begins with a flame-like, mysterious, and reoccurring shifting light (inspired by a reflection on Jack’s childhood bedroom wall), progresses into an eerie and sci-fi-esque narrative of life on earth from the very beginning of the universe, and ends with a heavily surrealist set of encounters between Jack, his younger self, his family, and presumably everyone he’s ever met in a series of mystically beautiful and diverse locales. Moreover, the existential, metaphysical, and spiritual themes that they invoke reveal glaringly just how philosophically rooted the film is (Malick, unsurprisingly, concentrated in Philosophy at Harvard).
Despite the dripping metaphor though, little can be easily interpreted, and like many of Malick’s other films, this layer refuses to follow the modern expectations of rapidity. However, the images he creates are more stunning and glorious than almost any other film I’ve ever seen. Every shot is taken with the upmost care to present something unique and marvelous.
This, in the end, is the truth about The Tree of Life. While it undoubtedly asks far more from its audience than most films, at times bordering on the unbearable (several people walked out on my showing), the final product is more than worthwhile. I’m sure there will be viewers who simply cannot stand this film and I know that the format that Malick creates is without a doubt not meant for all. Yet that does nothing to change the fact that The Tree of Life is one of the most profound and poetic films ever made.