The Tree Of Life

    365 Films

Entry #71

The Tree of Life (2011)

Directed by Terrence Malick

The Tree of Life’s release on Memorial Day weekend of 2011 was one of the few in recent memory that could be most aptly described as an indie film event.  Indie being applied rather liberally here considering the name above the title is one of the biggest movie stars on the planet, but you get the idea.  The hype began sometime after the release of The New World when it was announced that Terrence Malick had begun pre-production on a film called The Tree of Life that was set to star Mel Gibson and Colin Farrell (those two names were either grouped separately or together, I can’t quite remember which).  Then the casting merry-go-round made another cycle and now the names being thrown about were Heath Ledger and Sean Penn.  The subsequent death of Mr. Ledger cancelled that option, so Brad Pitt hopped on board and the movie was all set to go.  Terrence Malick usually operates under a mystery of a riddle wrapped in an enigma level of secrecy, and naturally, the rumors about The Tree Of Life began to fly fast and furious.  The first was that this was a project Malick had originated and even assembled a small crew to shoot some preliminary footage for back in the late 70’s (known back then as Q).  Then the initial plot information surfaced and it was revealed that the film revolved around a Texas family in the mid-50’s and the present day adult life of their eldest son.  That’s when the dinosaur bomb was dropped, then something about the creation of the universe, and then something about the end of the world.  The Tree of Life was turning into an epic of an unimaginable scale and perhaps the closest living 21^st century relative to Stanley Kubrick’s’ 2001.  What’s most startling about the film is that while it does contain all of these elements and encompass a vision of the world astonishing in its ambition, it is also devastatingly intimate.  The center section of the film focuses primarily on the coming of age of young Jack (Hunter McCracken) and is told in a fragmentary, memory-induced style that hurls images in your face at the speed of human consciousness.  These images are the world as Jack recalls them so it makes sense that they float through his mind like the butterfly that suddenly lands on Mrs. O’Brien’s arm.  Actually my new working theory is that this section of the film is a combination of Jack and Mrs. O’Brien’s memories.  I don’t think that really changes anything so I’ll just smile, nod, and move on.  It is here that we see the accuracy with which Malick has seemingly plundered his own life to evoke something universal about the human experience.  I can’t for the life of me figure out how in the hell a man who grew up over 1500 miles and 40 years from me was able to capture such specific memories from my childhood and my experience and put it on film.  It’s one of the promises that the medium makes but so rarely ever delivers upon: to make the universal out of the personal.  Then again, the film is almost like a Rorschach test for viewers (I think that’s the second film on this list to which I’ve made that comparison, as you can see, I like those films) and I think Malick’s ultimate masterstroke is moving beyond any comprehensible and definitive filmmaking crutches in order to tell his story.  That’s not to say the film is free from criticism, but I do feel that in order to admire and critique, one must search for a new vocabulary to talk about The Tree Of Life.  I have obviously done a very poor job of expressing this vocabulary, but it’s not for a lack of effort I can assure you (or maybe it is).  This is perhaps the most experiential mainstream film ever released and to watch it is to become absorbed and immersed in another person’s life only to realize that you are in fact, recalling your own.  By creating a work that references centuries of art from the visual, literary, and musical realm, Malick has created the most fully realized (thus far) vision of his filmmaking obsession with the individual and the cosmic infinite.  The moments portrayed in The Tree of Life are not just of this fictional family; they are of your family, and mine as well.  It is now, it is then, and it is eternal.