The Tree of Life is a 2011 film directed by Terrence Malick and starring Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain and Sean Penn.
I first saw this film on a date with my then-girlfriend. About half way through she asked me “what is this movie about?” I meant to reply, “I don’t know,” but I had a Freudian-slip and instead said, “I don’t care.”
And that pretty much sums up my reaction to this film.
The best scenes by far are the ones involving Brad Pitt’s character, “Mr O’Brien”, interacting with his three sons. These are without doubt the scenes that make the most sense. I like that Mr O’Brien is never portrayed as an ogre. He is very hard on his boys but you understand why. He wants them to grow up strong, and not abandon their dreams like he did. You also get the feeling that this is just how he was raised he has no other notions of what a man or a father should be.
This brings me to the central theme of the film which is Nature vs Grace. Mr O’Brien represents Nature, while their soft, welcoming mother, played by Jessica Chastain, represents Grace. At the beginning of the film we’re told Nature or Grace is a choice, however as the film goes on we realise it’s not that simple (nothing about this film is simple…but I’ll get to that in a bit). Eldest son Jack (Hunter McCracken, later played as an adult by Sean Penn) says toward the end of the film that influences from his mother and father “wrestle inside him” and always will.
I think my initial mistake was trying to figure this film out. Once my brain recovered from the ensuing meltdown I decided to watch it again but treat it like a painting. I just sort of looked at it, and didn’t really try to make much sense of what was happening before my eyes. I enjoyed it much more this way.
That said I don’t actually enjoy this film that much. The biggest issue for me is that by making the film so incredibly obscure, Terrence Malick manages to make all the characters strangely distant. I just wasn’t invested in any of them. There’s the trademark Malick voice overs, but it has nowhere near the emotional impact of say, the soldiers meditating on life and death in The Thin Red Line. It really doesn’t have much impact at all.
I’ve heard this film referred to as ‘pretentious’, but I don’t think it is. I just think that without any kind of real narrative, it just sort of fails to achieve what it seems to set out to do. It’s actually a lot more like a really long music video than a film.
The visual stuff is all very cool and some of it is downright beautiful. But my favourite moment is actually a very small scene where Jessica Chastain is walking along a street with her sons and as she pauses for a moment, a butterfly lands on her outstretched hand. There's something really amazing and spontaneous about it. That single visual gave me a much more profound sense of Grace than any other single moment in the film.
Still, as I mentioned before, my reaction again this time around was just to sort of shrug and think “well, it looked nice, but I still just don’t care.” Terrence Malick reminds me a lot of Stanley Kubrick. If I was going to compare this film to any other, it would be 2001: A Space Odyssey. Both are oddly meditative, visually stunning, and really, really strange.
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