Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life,” despite its nearly 2½-hour running time, approximately 4 billion-year time scale, and shots of mortally wounded plesiosaurs, sun-drenched Texas suburban yards and cells dividing, is not a difficult film to understand. It is even, in its own way, a simple story: A beleaguered, ordinary family suffers a loss, and begins asking questions — of God, of each other and of the universe, which eclipses them in scale, even as it traps them in an inexorable narrative they have no control of but must act out regardless.
“Who are we to you?” asks the family’s matriarch, played by an incandescently lit Jessica Chastain, and that “you” — the pronoun that dominates almost every line of dialogue here — could be anyone, even the audience itself, who don’t watch “The Tree of Life” as much as they step into it, submerged in Emmanuel Lubezki’s naturalistic cinematography and the swirling, primeval CGI of “2001: A Space Odyssey” veteran Douglas Trumbull.
“The Tree of Life” introduces the O’Brien family, headed by Brad Pitt, whose carefully drawn ’50s-era patriarch is alternately impassive, cruel, impotent and haltingly kind. He is a god to his children, three brothers (Hunter McCraken, Laramie Eppler and Tye Sheridan) who fear him and seek his love in equal measure. One of these sons is marked for death, a fact we learn right away, and the rest of the film is more or less a meditation on how to live and make sense of a world whose fabric can be catastrophically rearranged at any time.
“He’s in God’s hands now,” a solemn priest tells the child’s mother. Bitterly, she responds: “He was in God’s hands the whole time, wasn’t he?”
But faith, or lack thereof, is only one way Malick’s characters find their way through childhood, encroaching adolescence and reluctant, often anguished adulthood. The natural world — cruel in one place, unfathomably gentle in another — is as much a mystery and talisman for Malick as any higher power. “The Tree of Life” depicts, often without explanation, waves, winds, sunflowers, grass, falling water and even the rings of Saturn.
The O’Brien boys move through their childhood as it were a second Eden, soaking in the nostalgic glint of suburban streets, lawns and houses. Scenes — a pack of kids plunging laughing into the clouds of DDT that trail a pest-control truck; the sight of the oldest O’Brien son walking through a neighbor’s house, on the verge of a discovery; a dead boy, pulled from a swimming pool — play in a fragmentary way, turning like shards of memory, threatening to break through into the present.
This is deliberate: “The Tree of Life” is structured in a sense as a reminiscence. Sean Penn plays the family’s spooked oldest child as an adult, years later. An architect, surrounded by the glass and steel of the modern Houston skyline, Penn looks into the corners of boardrooms and elevators as if searching for a portal, or a way back. (The film’s hallucinatory climax could be read as granting that wish.)
Since his earliest films, in the 1970s, Malick has been asking bigger questions than Hollywood typically likes to ask: What is innocence, and when is the moment that we lose it? Is there a purpose that we’re given or, worse, that we can betray? But even Malick has shied away, in the past, from pulling the camera as far back as he does here, to encompass basically all of human time and space. It is, on the face of it, a ridiculous, laughable, impossible mission. But see this film before you say it can’t be done.
“Who are we to you?” asks the family’s matriarch, played by an incandescently lit Jessica Chastain, and that “you” — the pronoun that dominates almost every line of dialogue here — could be anyone, even the audience itself, who don’t watch “The Tree of Life” as much as they step into it, submerged in Emmanuel Lubezki’s naturalistic cinematography and the swirling, primeval CGI of “2001: A Space Odyssey” veteran Douglas Trumbull.
“The Tree of Life” introduces the O’Brien family, headed by Brad Pitt, whose carefully drawn ’50s-era patriarch is alternately impassive, cruel, impotent and haltingly kind. He is a god to his children, three brothers (Hunter McCraken, Laramie Eppler and Tye Sheridan) who fear him and seek his love in equal measure. One of these sons is marked for death, a fact we learn right away, and the rest of the film is more or less a meditation on how to live and make sense of a world whose fabric can be catastrophically rearranged at any time.
“He’s in God’s hands now,” a solemn priest tells the child’s mother. Bitterly, she responds: “He was in God’s hands the whole time, wasn’t he?”
But faith, or lack thereof, is only one way Malick’s characters find their way through childhood, encroaching adolescence and reluctant, often anguished adulthood. The natural world — cruel in one place, unfathomably gentle in another — is as much a mystery and talisman for Malick as any higher power. “The Tree of Life” depicts, often without explanation, waves, winds, sunflowers, grass, falling water and even the rings of Saturn.
The O’Brien boys move through their childhood as it were a second Eden, soaking in the nostalgic glint of suburban streets, lawns and houses. Scenes — a pack of kids plunging laughing into the clouds of DDT that trail a pest-control truck; the sight of the oldest O’Brien son walking through a neighbor’s house, on the verge of a discovery; a dead boy, pulled from a swimming pool — play in a fragmentary way, turning like shards of memory, threatening to break through into the present.
This is deliberate: “The Tree of Life” is structured in a sense as a reminiscence. Sean Penn plays the family’s spooked oldest child as an adult, years later. An architect, surrounded by the glass and steel of the modern Houston skyline, Penn looks into the corners of boardrooms and elevators as if searching for a portal, or a way back. (The film’s hallucinatory climax could be read as granting that wish.)
Since his earliest films, in the 1970s, Malick has been asking bigger questions than Hollywood typically likes to ask: What is innocence, and when is the moment that we lose it? Is there a purpose that we’re given or, worse, that we can betray? But even Malick has shied away, in the past, from pulling the camera as far back as he does here, to encompass basically all of human time and space. It is, on the face of it, a ridiculous, laughable, impossible mission. But see this film before you say it can’t be done.
