An intimate epic of universal and personal origins, Malick's lifelong project has no equivalent in contemporary film. It is essential, life-enhancing cinema, says Gareth Evans.
Malick. When someone becomes their surname, is this a strength or finally an Achilles heel?
Five films in 40 years … who stands there, in the rarest of airs, with this most voyaging of film-makers? Kubrick, yes; Tarkovsky. And Spain’s Victor Erice. All with oeuvres as precise and seemingly unfettered (in their reach and expression).
But for us, now, Malick means something else. Whether it be in his astonishing debut Badlands, the lacerating pastoral of Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line’s metaphysical conflict zone or The New World’s civilisation-testing love story, Malick has crafted politically acute and philosophically profound narratives – myths almost – unsurpassed in their pantheistic attention to the beauty of the natural world. And all of these have unfolded from within the Hollywood studio system, and have featured many of its most commercially successful actors.
Now, Cannes-winning with The Tree of Life, his intimate epic of universal and personal origins, Malick has realised a lifelong project that has no equivalent in cinema. He structures his human storyline around a rites-of-passage 1950s Texas childhood recollection, hinging this on a terrible loss. However, in The Tree of Life, all times co-exist, whether in dream, living memory, the composition of cells or the persistence of the cosmic in the fabric of the daily. So Malick deploys images of the birth of things (the stellar, planetary and biological) that have never been framed cinematically within such a complete vision of underlying harmonic order. Crucially, and beyond the many struggles of the characters featured, he is seeking to express an enduring joy in the mystery of life. This is nothing sentimental, but urgently necessary. Adopting the perceptual understanding of a child in both narrative and making, he has, over his five features, moved closer than any other filmmaker to a form of cinema that embodies in the very fabric of the medium the experience and implications of being.
Essential cinema, The Tree of Life demands complete engagement. What it returns is a manifesto of priorities that one can set a course by.
A long-cherished project of Terrence Malick, The Tree of Life is his ambitious, awe-inspiring, Palme d'Or-winning film that centres on a family in 1950s Texas, yet also reaches for cosmic significance in the creation of the universe itself.
An impressionistic story starring Brad Pitt and Sean Penn, the film follows the life journey of the eldest son, Jack, through the innocence of childhood to his disillusioned adult years as he tries to reconcile a complicated relationship with his father (Pitt). Jack (played as an adult by Sean Penn) finds himself a lost soul in the modern world, seeking answers to the origins and meaning of life while questioning the existence of faith.
Years in the making, The Tree of Life is Terrence Malick’s Palme d’Or-winning hymn to the miracle of life. His powerful, personal film drew cheers and boos at Cannes, ... more >
Years in the making, The Tree of Life is Terrence Malick’s Palme d’Or-winning hymn to the miracle of life. His powerful, personal film drew cheers and boos at Cannes, but it is best enjoyed in quieter surroundings where you can reflect on its meaning and make up your own mind about its merits.
Jack O’Brien (Sean Penn), an architect in the modern day, broods over his childhood in 50s suburban Texas, his strict but caring father (Brad Pitt), his tender, ethereally beautiful mother (Jessica Chastain), and the death of his younger brother. As his memories unfold, so does the fabric of time and space, and the story of an everyday family is set against the history of the universe.
Malick’s visual detours are moving, meditative and - depending on your patience - maddening. But there is a stark and unusual beauty in the film’s depiction of the earth’s formation, of life and death in the Cretaceous, and of endless, undulating starscapes, sequences crafted by special effects legend Douglas Trumbull.
The epic interstellar imagery may evoke Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (where Trumbull first cut his teeth) but the interplay between the cycles of the natural world and the ebb and flow of human emotions is closer in tone to the languid sensuality of Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972), and Malick’s often experimental montages recall the consciousness-expanding imagery of Ron Fricke’s Baraka (1992).
In the live action segments, Malick’s direction and Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography are immersive and luminously beautiful, recreating the slow dream of childhood and the meticulous details of our earliest memories, as well as capturing frequently wordless yet always expressive exchanges between Pitt and the young cast.
Pitt delivers a strong performance as a man who senses that the universe is built on struggle, and finds his own efforts wanting. But behind the horn-rim glasses and flat-top crew cut there is tenderness and complexity, and a love that, years later, his son will reflect upon, and try to reconnect with, though a universe has come to separate them. < less
