The Tree of LIfe (*½ / ****)
Starring: Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain, Sean Penn
Director: Terence Malick
The road to The Tree of Life wasn’t an easy one. I’ve been pretty quiet in posting reviews over the past couple months. Regrettably, I missed scores of films in that span (then again, it was the summer movie season). However, this was the one picture that never left my radar, not to mention the persistent buzz surrounding it. Virtually nothing but praise for director Terrence Malick’s visual style, and the performances by that unholy trinity of Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain (who’s seemingly in every other movie on the planet right now) and Sean Penn. It had basically all but locked its Best Picture nomination.
After finally witnessing this spectacle for myself at the end of August, my immediate reaction was: So, what on God’s green Earth was the hype all about? All I got out of it was a mundane loss-of-youth-innocence storyline mixed with a National Geographic special, the latter which is responsible for its inexcusable two-hour and fifteen-minute running time. I’ll be the first to say that my family has ribbed me mercilessly in the past for not liking “smart” movies, but even I can recognize a dud under such a guise when I see one.
The performances from the three leads are nothing to write home about; it’s pretty much Pitt hamming it up as the excessively strict father, Chastain, the mild-mannered housewife, as the Jeff to his Mutt, and Penn wordlessly brooding in a downtown high-rise and in strange “mystic doorway” dream sequences. Neither are worthy of any type of thespian accolades.
It’s young Hunter McCracken who winds up stealing the proceedings as Jack O’Brien, the eldest of Pitt’s three sons, who becomes the focus of the story as he begins to act out against Mr. O’Brien’s iron fist, but even he’s restricted by the script’s shortcomings. Jack dares defy his father, who duly apoplectically lashes out (at one point getting quite physical), and that’s pretty much it.
It’s a wonder that we don’t see the adult Jack in an orange jumpsuit due to living with this oppressed rage (granted, it probably would’ve made things more interesting); in fact, the worst response we see from him is developing a fifties-nostalgic mean streak that amounts to hanging out with a gang of equally lily-white neighborhood boys who engage in egregious activities such as breaking the windows of a dilapidated shack and launching into the stratosphere a frog that’s lashed to a bottle rocket. There’s also an uneasy scene in which Jack convinces one of his kid brothers to shoot himself in the hand with an air rifle. (Without a hint of irony, young Jack does grow up into Sean Penn, who’s never exactly been the poster boy for temper control.)
Pretty much the only thing Tree of Life truly has working in its favor is the spectacular cinematography by the always-reliable Emmanuel Lubezki, who could take a tire fire and turn it into something Rockwellian. He subtly injects beauty into the homey but drab suburbs of 1950s Waco, Texas. You can feel the balminess of those warm summer nights and the mosquitoes buzzing around you. It’s not enough to trump the confusing storytelling, though, which is supposedly about the cycle of life and its origins; at least that’s what the title indicates, but it’s all so disjointed. I mean, is there any purpose whatsoever to the inclusion of a segment involving badly-animated CGI dinosaurs, and how it ties into scenes such as when the young protagonists experience their first glimpse of death when one of their peers drowns at a public swimming pool? Someone out there undoubtedly has the answer, but I’m not among them.
Despite its multiple flaws, It’s impossible to hate The Tree of Life. It does have its little moments (such as Jack, to his parents’ consternation, distorting a classical piece playing on the record player). And yes, moviegoing is always a crapshoot, but it’s nonetheless irksome when a film is all but praised as the Second Coming and it doesn’t even live up to a shred of that claim. It’s possibly a telltale sign that it ultimately only enjoyed a limited arthouse release despite all the early incessant awards buzz. It’s an exercise in psuedointellectualism that gives a temporary ego boost to anyone who gets it before it fades from their subconscious.
© 2011 Jane F. Carlson