"Where were You? You let a boy die. You let anything happen. Why should I be good, when you aren't?"
I've never truly understood what a so called "drug movie" is, but that changed completely when I saw The Tree of Life for the first time yesterday. I first heard about the phenomenon when I was watching a documentary about Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, and from that I leaned that people apparently used to do drugs before watching this 1968 sci-fi masterpiece, in order to get an even greater kick out of the drugs. My saying that I think The Tree of Life is that kind of movie doesn't mean that I urge everyone who reads this review to go out and get high on drugs, I'm just merely trying to explain how trippy and weird the film is. It contains a bunch of beautifully shot scenes overlapped by transfixing songs and philosophical narration, but other than that, even trying to define what The Tree of Life is about is completely impossible.
Tarrence Mallick, the man who wrote and directed The Tree of Life, is well known for his very stylistic and artsy way of creating movies. I've never been a big fan of his work myself, and to say that I liked this film would be a lie, because of how incredibly boring I ultimately think it is. It's Mallick's most abstract and most existential project ever, and even though it benefits a little bit from his incredible ability to make his films look visually astonishing, the lack of storytelling and plot coherence in the over all product drags it down immensely. Sure, beautiful forests, lakes and trees are nice to look at for a few minutes at a time, but then again, it's not that impressive either. The same thing goes for curtains rustling in the wind, closeups of characters who are looking all existential and thoughtful, children playing, people crying and planets exploding, which is all that this movie consists of.
As I mentioned before, you can't deny how beautiful this movie's visuals are. In my opinion there's a limit to how much of one element you can cram into a movie before it becomes too much though, and The Tree of Life surpassed that limit within 15 minutes. From that point on, the scenes that consist of nothing but waterfalls, planets and mountains did exactly the same for me as the explosions and fireworks in Transformers III did; they annoyed and bored the shit out of me. By the time I saw the twentieth set of slowly rustling curtains and the thirtieth closeup of a boy playing with his brothers, I wanted nothing more than to stop watching this movie and go sleep. That's how boring this movie is. The whole thing about God's plan and how one of the young boys begin to question it when he witnesses the loss of innocence is interesting enough, but the fact that it goes nowhere and just fizzles out killed it completely for me.
A lot of diehard Mallick fans have accused people who don't like this movie of being too impatient and incapable of understanding quote on quote 'good movie making'. I personally understood 90% of what The Tree of Life had to say, so in my case 'not getting it' isn't the problem, I just think it's a bad movie. I understand that Mallick wants to make his audience think about stuff like the meaning of life and death, regret, sorrow, ambition, childhood and traumatic events, but this movie tried to do that in a very convoluted and incoherent way in my opinion. I'm a big fan of great storytelling and symbolic plot devices, but in the case of this movie, the existential and philosophical aspect got totally out of whack way too fast. There's no real story arch in The Tree of Life, and I spent way more time trying to figure out which of the three boys from the countless flashback scenes was the one that was gonna grow up and become Sean Penn's character, than I spent thinking about my childhood and how fragile life is, which probably is what Mallick would have preferred.
Speaking of the characters, I have to admit that most of the cast did a good job in this movie. Jessica Chastain and Brad Pitt did great at portraying a standard Tanzanian couple from the 1950's, and the actors who played their three children were surprisingly good as well, even though they probably had no freaking idea what they were doing while the movie was being filmed. I don't know whether Sean Penn did a great job or not though, because of how little he has to do in the movie. He has one line of regular dialogue, and the rest of it is delivered as narration in form of whispered oneliners. I've seen an interview with him in which he explains how he's got no idea what he's even doing in the movie, and according to IMDb's trivia page, an entire separate movie can be made from the footage of him staring out of windows and into the camera that was cut from the actual movie. The final 15 minutes of the film is where he has the most screen time, and I have to admit that I've got no freaking idea what's going on in these scenes. Penn is just wandering around looking at his younger self on some beach, and then the movie ends. Come again, please?
The Tree of Life is a beautiful and well acted movie, and I imagine that Mallick was very keen on creating something that would take the world by storm in the same way that 2001: A Space Odyssey did, when he was writing the screenplay for it. Even though the two movies differ in a lot of ways, they also have a lot of things in common; things such as the beautiful visuals, the classical music, the existential and religious undertone and their incredible small amounts of dialogue. 2001 is a much better over all movie though, and I won't be surprised if The Tree of Life is all but completely forgotten in a few years. Mallick's vision, his beautiful camera work and the good performances by most of the cast are the only interesting and entertaining elements in this movie, and when compared to all the negative things I had to say about the pretentiousness of the rest of it, The Tree of Life ultimately isn't worth anything but a frustrated facepalm. (2/6)
The Tree of Life IMDb page here
The Tree of Life trailer here
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