Tree of Life (2011)

Terrence Malick is famous for his visually lavish style and his struggle to give the relationship between nature and humans a cinematic form. In Tree of life, he develops these characteristics in an extreme way, focusing on some sort of tension (I can't even spell out the nature of this tension, sorry). The film tells the story about the creation of Earth while at the same time being a family melodrama. How does he go through with that? This viewer is not convinced he manages to tie the threads together. I was left with the feeling that the director has a pretty specific idea he wants us to take home with us, be impressed with, shaken by. Even though it was fairly easy to guess what kinds of ideas he was occupied with (g/o/od & evil), the film did not succeed in making these ideas real. For me, Tree of life felt overblown and pretentious rather than ambitious. The cosmic perspective did not shed much light on the family story, despite the cinematographic attempt to make the cosmic Rivers and Movements part of the everyday life of a suburban family. In this way, the film was a failure. I kept thinking of what made Melancholia a much better film. I do understand that Malick's film is supposed to be a celebration of the beauty and the mystery of life, rubbing elbows with the tragedies that life contains. But the cosmic framework did not make me feel particularly celebratory. Instead, I thought about National geographic and ruminated on another eternal question: 'so what IS kitsch?' (answer: the ending sequence of Tree of life). I felt like a bad person as I was feeling my legs break into a restless dance towards the celestial, exalted end: my restless legs told me that the director tried to rub Religion into my face and that this stubborn heathen's heart remained unmoved.

Malick sets out to explore Eternity, Life, Meaning, Death, Love (etc.). In my opinion, his images often took shelter in the sentimental or the consolatory (esp. the last scene). His film did not work on the level of awe-inspiring Perspective, envisioning the genesis of the Earth and life on earth. in contrast with, for example, a film such as 2001: A Space Odyssey. Cheap metaphors very used - or maybe it was the treatment that made them feel cheap (a flickering flame, planting a tree).  The whispered voice-over drove me nuts. Listening to the characters' breathy philosophizing, I couldn't think about the religious dimension for a second, I simply remained irritated throughout the film. The questions asked by the film are legitimate: what the hell are we? What are we doing? What is the meaning of all this? The film, I felt, didn't care for the particularity of this type of question (even though one thread of the film was the parents who grieve the loss of a child), instead settling for the Grand Perspective in which humanity, along with all other forms of life, is rolled into one big glowing ball - earth.

The temporally more restricted scenes had a more direct and - for this viewer - honest feel (but sometimes the director dwells too much on things he knows will have a resonance with the viewer). Kids at play, church services, an unsettling experience, a father who teaches discipline. Interestingly, there is very little dialogue beyond the voice-over. This is a brave move. There is also very little to go by in terms of ordinary storytelling. The scenes are not temporally or dramatically ordered. It is emotion that ties them together - this,  I think, works rather well. The relation between a father, a mother and their sons. The father undergoes a gruesome form of change. The mother remains an elusive, feminine character. She is passive and ethereal and does not quite belong to reality (what to make of this? I am afraid that Malick is quite fond of showing off ethereal females from the point of view of a man's memory - cf. Thin red line). The kids react to their father's rash temper in several different ways. Here, Malick manages to focus on details. In a magnificent scene, the father sits down to eat with his family. Everything gets on his nerves. One of the kids speaks back to the father who tells the kids to be quiet but blabbers on himself (the kid whispers 'be quiet'). Daddy goes ballistic. A number of emotions are crystallized into this one scene: it is as if the scene stands for itself, rather than being a mere instance of Cosmic Drama.

I also liked the scene in which Sean Penn's character, an architect (the older version of a restless, unhappy kid), wanders through empty urban locations with hollow eyes. These scenes are haunting - endless space and shapes suddenly become very evocative, strange, dazzling - scary; everything that the cosmic scenes did not manage to conjure up.

The film's major flaw was, in my view, precisely what it is usually given praise for: the visuals. Grand landscapes, wide screens, huge perspectives --- drifting sunshine over suburban lawns, close-ups, extra-ordinary panning. For me, it was too much of everything, too spectacular - and in a sad way - impersonal and hollow (except in some view in the middle (the attic!) and the shots of the city).