The Tree of Life

Like Halley’s Comet, Ter­rence Malick’s The Tree of Life feels very much like the kind of cos­mic spec­ta­cle that most good, law-abid­ing cit­i­zens will get to see just once in their life­time. The term ​‘mas­ter­piece’ feels inad­e­quate, both as down-the-line hyper­bole and because it infers that the work we’re watch­ing is oper­at­ing on the same for­mal and tech­ni­cal lev­el as that shiny, lov­able mass we like to call ​‘cin­e­ma’. And as you’ll realise very ear­ly on, that’s just not the case.

It’s a film which, famous­ly, cost more mon­ey to make than this sort of film ordi­nar­i­ly should do. It’s also a film that feels torn from the heart, an unqual­i­fied tri­umph of per­son­al artistry that puts the abid­ing inter­ests of its mak­er into crisp focus and over­lays them with a rous­ing orches­tral flurry.

Yes, Mal­ick may have come dan­ger­ous­ly close to per­fec­tion in the past with his rhap­sod­ic stud­ies of inno­cence lost and found – Days of Heav­en, The Thin Red Line and The New World – but this new film feels like the purest and most per­fect expres­sion of his unique cin­e­mat­ic worldview.

It already arrives on these shores in a bliz­zard of hype and debate – the sub­ject of both vicious crit­i­cal pans and breath­less decrees of stul­ti­fied awe. It’s a hot pota­to, for sure, but the pas­sion and ruth­less artic­u­la­cy with which most have defended/​attacked it stands as a tes­ta­ment to a type of cin­e­ma which, to under­stand, enjoy and, hell, con­nect with on a pro­found spir­i­tu­al lev­el, does require a small leap of faith.

The 1950s: the O’Brien clan of Waco, Texas, are an extra­or­di­nar­i­ly aver­age bunch, and it’s the very hum­drum nature of their activ­i­ties, aspi­ra­tions and per­son­al inter­ac­tions which sup­plies this film with its uni­ver­sal philo­soph­i­cal reach. Brad Pitt, mak­ing for a supreme­ly melan­choly pres­ence as father of the brood, deliv­ers a per­for­mance so guile­less, so full of soul, that you can’t quite believe it’s him.

His lov­ing wife, played by radi­ant new­com­er Jes­si­ca Chas­tain, is the free-spir­it­ed Yin to his sup­pressed tough-guy Yang, and the large part of the film is com­prised of ornate, stand-alone snap­shots of their lives, specif­i­cal­ly the way they go about rais­ing their three errant sons. Emmanuel Lubezki’s rest­less cam­era snakes around their house and across their front lawn, visu­al­ly stock­pil­ing emo­tion­al minu­ti­ae at the expense of straight scene after straight scene.

Ini­tial­ly, these evoca­tive frag­ments feel form­less: they nev­er coa­lesce into stand-alone anec­dotes, actions are often shorn of reac­tions, noth­ing is manip­u­lat­ed into con­ven­tion­al dra­ma. But con­text is para­mount, and Mal­ick doesn’t just want us to con­sume these moments on their own terms.

There­fore, he escorts us on a swift excur­sion to the ori­gins of the uni­verse, an occa­sion visu­alised as an elab­o­rate infu­sion of colour and sound that’s rem­i­nis­cent of the abstract hand-paint­ed short films of Stan Brakhage and Len Lye. Some have sug­gest­ed com­par­isons with Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, but this film is far more attuned to human experience.

As stars grad­u­al­ly align, we bear wit­ness to the first stir­rings of life, the first fam­i­ly, and even – via an eccen­tric stand-off between two dinosaurs – the first instance of phys­i­cal com­pas­sion. In this light, the seem­ing­ly mean­ing­less exploits of the O’Briens take on an unbear­able fragili­ty. The Tree of Life is a glo­ri­ous ode to the improb­a­bil­i­ty of exis­tence, a film of immense sin­cer­i­ty, which asks us to cher­ish the sim­ple process­es of liv­ing and loving.

Sean Penn also has a sup­port­ing role set in the present day. He’s the weath­er-beat­en eldest son who’s now ful­ly grown and work­ing as a hot­shot archi­tect. The film is framed as an amor­phous blur of per­son­al mem­o­ries, mak­ing the frac­tured for­mal approach feel total­ly nat­ur­al. Some have accused it of car­ry­ing an evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian under­tow, but that is sim­ply not the case.

Every­thing we see and hear in this film is refract­ed through per­son­al per­spec­tives and jux­ta­posed against grand celes­tial back­drops. Any reli­gious con­tent is the result of Mal­ick mak­ing sure that we’re see­ing the world through the eyes of his char­ac­ters. The pol­i­tics, the sen­ti­ments, the ide­ol­o­gy – all are theirs.

In true Mal­ick form, The Tree of Life does not advo­cate or refute reli­gion as much as it offers a third way. Heav­en exists, it says, and you can find it here on Earth. It’s the fields, it’s the streams, it’s the struc­tures, it’s the sen­sa­tions, the peo­ple, the sun­shine – it’s the whole damn thing. There’s no way to like The Tree of Life in parts. It’s all or noth­ing. To put it in the ver­nac­u­lar of the film itself: every sec­ond counts.