The reclusive director Terrence Malick didn't show for a press conference to reveal his new film The Tree of Life at the recently wrapped Cannes Film Festival. Unusual in this day and age of endless ego-fuelled self-promotion and back-patting. Malick isn't a usual artist, and this isn't a usual film, his fifth in a mysterious but oft-admired career. He took home the top prize at Cannes after polarizing the audience amongst boos and cheers alike.
The Tree of Life isn't easily loglined in so many words or less. This non-linear work is intended to wash over our senses and create a mood rather than tell a story with beginning, middle, and predictable end as will every other film currently screening. To root out a traceable plot-line, Jack O'Brien, an architect in Huston and played by Sean Penn, reflects back on his family and upbringing in Waco, Texas in the 1950's, remembering snippets of the good and bad times, memories as sensory-experiences in short bursts of impressions. This is storytelling we recognize; suburban Mom and Dad have three sons, a house and yard, and a 50's inability to relate emotionally to their boys or each other. Father, Brad Pitt, is a strict, frustrated, yet loving disciplinarian, while Mother, Jessica Chastain, a young and playful enabler not yet familiar with the women's lib movement. These dualities, grace and nature, also love and faith, define a path which shapes the boys' lives and the film itself. But adult Jack isn't just pondering his own childhood and how it made him who he is, but who are all of us, and how did we come to be? In an effects sequence supervised by Douglas Trumball of 2001 fame, we see possibilities of how all came to be; a big bang, primordial ooze, dinosaurs...yes, CG dinosaurs...we go way back then fast forward in hyper-speed, stopping to examine human life lived by the O'Briens mid-century and on.
Malick may have meant for his film to not be broken down, to not be explained in a formal fashion. I've done it a grave disservice in attempting this. There are frustrations, however, I can pinpoint. Sean Penn is quite underused here, given so little to work with. Visual sequences and metaphors are occasionally overused or heavy-handed, such as fields of breezy sunflowers, uptilted shots of great oak trees, a venetian mask dropped into water (giggles at that one during my screening), yet all are gorgeously filmed by cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki.
The Tree of Life is a cinematic dwelling on the meaning of life, impressionistic and spiritual, observing and cerebral. Box office returns and test audiences be damned, Malick's film will be debated long into the future after superhero and buddy-comedy trifles fall away. This rarity in today's cinema is so deeply personal to the filmmaker, such an original work of art, is what we think nearly inconsequential? I'm cheering, nevertheless.
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