Star child: Brad Pitt as the cool, practical and intense patriarch of Terrence Malick's Tree of Life. Images courtesy of Cannes Film festival and Fox Searchlight.
Early this morning in Cannes, Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life was finally unveiled, some three years after the completion of principal photography. I arrived about forty-five minutes early to ensure a good seat. (They shut off access to the Lumiere entrance about twenty minutes before the start time.)
As was instantly reported the final image, coming some one-hundred and thirty-three minutes later, occasioned some fairly profane and extended derision; the most aggrieved party was a guy just a few feet from me who started the protest calls and did not let up.
Let the debate begin. The movie is a fever dream, wholly immersive in the elastic, supple and continuously alive to what it means to be alive. It’s a deliberately fragmented and highly impressionistic piece, elliptically shaped around the daily lives, private disappointments and tragedy of a Texas family living in a Waco suburb in the Fifties.I will see the film again a little more than a week from now when I return home.
My immediate feeling is Malick overreaches from time to time; the movie is naïve (especially about racial interaction in fifties Texas) and occasionally pretentious. It’s also hypnotic, enthralling, audacious and absolutely unmissable.
It has immediately raised the pulse of a steady though hardly spectacular sixty-fourth edition of the festivalThe fact the movie exists is something to celebrate. It’s a rebuke to the system. Tree of Life is another of the director’s ruminations on the state of being. Imagine the contested epilogue of Spielberg’s A.I.: Artificial Intelligence extended to one-hundred and forty minutes. The movie marks a strong formal and stylistic connection to the director’s standing preoccupations—a moral inquiry about nature of man, the death of innocence, nature undone and veritable spoiled Eden.
Since his return from a twenty year absence from making movies in the late nineties, Malick has not opened but turned inward. It reminds me of Orson Welles beginning with his European exile and Jean-Luc Godard’s second narrative period in the late seventies and early eighties. Malick has almost fundamentally forsaken a popular audience in order to refine and purify his art. His style is predicated on silent movie rhythms, a visually complex rhyming of image and soundtrack that proves gorgeous, free and abstract.
Tree of Life is a fugue, a seamless and sometimes mercurial weaving of sound and image that is often breathtaking to behold. Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography is tactile, vivid and pure. Jack Fisk’s production design is also wondrously evocative. Malick is applying hand-made principles to an industrial model often impervious to this kind of private, solitary engagement with the content and form.
Following the tragedy that grounds the movie’s contemporary time frame, Malick tracks the foundation of life on earth with a splash of luminous colors, a throbbing soundtrack and eerie, anthropologically detailed renditions of dinosaurs.He’s retained the formal device he introduced in The Thin Red Line, whipsawing between dovetailing or even contradictory narrators. Their interior consciousness, private reflections and private quest locates a collective voice that luxuriates in dreams, desires and fears.
An architect, Jack O’Brien (Sean Penn), glides between memory and dream, summoning a stark though largely compassionate portrait of his ruthless father (Brad Pitt, in a controlled and sensational performance) and his gorgeous mother (Jessica Chastain, also impressive) while growing up with two younger brothers.
O’Brien is a former Navy officer turned entrepreneur and self-made dreamer, an aesthete who gave up a promising musical career in order to raise a family. The images sing and gather a tremendous cumulative force. They’re not isolated. They also have the necessary emotional pull, like a gorgeous moment when the mother holds in the verse palm her first son’s tiny and delicate foot.
The film has a lot of pertinent connections to another late work by a major international filmmaker I caught yesterday. I'll wait to get into that. Right now, it’s just necessary to let it all sink in and consider how imposing and beautiful a piece of work it is. One of the final words spoken, by a narrator, is, “I give you to him.” Malick has returned the favor here. We are all the beneficiaries.
Jessica Chastain and Pitt with the young actor Hunter McCracken.
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