Unintelligent Design

Give 20th
Century Fox credit for releasing Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life as a movie and not as a glue-trap for year-end
awards. Five films into Malick’s eccentric 40-year career, it’s understood that
he intentionally brands himself as art-minded. Indifferent to the usual
commercial concerns of mainstream filmmakers, Malick has always exercised the
privileges of erudition, which lend each of his films the aura of a cultural
event. But that doesn’t mean The Tree of
Life is a great movie—despite the pole-vaulting ambitions of its title.

Just when you
get accustomed to Malick’s precise hand-held camera movements and sly jump-cuts
that give elegant spontaneity to the illusion of a family’s idyllic-then-tragic
life in a small Texas town, The Tree of
Life shifts style and tense to observe the beginning of the cosmos, then
pre-history, then shifting again to examine the infinitesimal origins of cells.
Those huge leaps are not immediately coherent, but Malick does them with such
domineering confidence that viewers will accept his grandiose allusions to
phases of life and the construction of time—his belief in his own visual
poetry.

Perched on a
cliff of near self-parody, The Tree of
Life dares to reveal Malick’s idiosyncratic—and humorless—interest in
existential occurrences. He uses America’s past to showcase mankind, nature and
time. The Texas O’Brien family (Father Brad Pitt, Mother Jessica Chastain and
three boys well-cast for remarkable genetic similarity as their sons) supplies
a story context for Malick’s personal speculation on spiritual themes. His
previous movies grew from the germ of mid-20th century pop ideas: juvenile delinquency (Badlands), the industrial revolution (Days of Heaven), war (The Thin Red Line) and colonialism (The New World). Being of the movie-brat
generation, Malick related those subjects to familiar genres and iconography
that he expanded into what critic and Malick-scholar Gregory Solman accurately
termed phenomenological epics.

As an artiste,
Malick collates spiritual signs, questing for meaning; an ambition that
achieved its fullest expression in the historical, political, sexual, racial
paradoxes of The New World. But The Tree of Life is little more than a
grab-bag of generational preoccupations: outerspace explorations and inner
space doubt. Starting with a scriptural quotation from the Book of Job, Malick
depicts a nuclear family’s disillusionment still evident in son Jack O’Brien’s
adulthood (played by Sean Penn), whose modern anomie is depicted in familiar
cold, gleaming industrial settings that contrast warm, lyrical boyhood memories
of his father’s frustrations as businessman, artist and parent. Malick
digresses with etudes on Intelligent Design, where CGI scenes of prehistoric
animals, mitochondria and phallic fish are meant to reflect later aggression in
human behavior. But these aquarium/observatory tropes get mixed-up with
Malick’s own quasi-profound (quasi-religious) reaching: dividing Father and
Mother as Nature vs. Grace in voiceover counterpoint. The son’s eventual
questioning of authority (“Why should I be good if you aren’t?”) is either
blasphemy or just the ultimate 1970s youth-rebellion—with no small amount of
New Age sentimentality. Koyaanisqatsi,
anyone?

“Tell us a story
from before we can remember”—one of O’Brien sons requests of his
mother—typifies Malick’s storytelling impulse. Always undeniably romantic and
nostalgic, he will transcend nostalgia through specific adolescent fetishes:
key instances of private pleasure, lonely perceptions, secrets. These are often
pop myths (like the dinosaurs and planets), but they can also be psychic myths,
as when Young Jack (played by Hunter McCracken) spies on arguing couples or
sneaks a woman’s lingerie, leading to a signature Malick surmise, “What have I
done? What have I started?” and equating sex, guilt and sin. Malick falls back
on these surmises as a reflex: montages on sibling rivalry, filial resentment
and a clever, expansive sequence where the O’Brien boys imitating a street
drunk becomes a confrontation with the infirm, then with criminal-class
unfortunates. Frankly, these meanderings cause Jack’s symbolism to go
berserk—from Job to Judas to Cain to Abel. Malick’s poetry loses sociological
and political grounding. That’s what distinguished David Gordon Green’s George Washington; Green had the timely
good fortune (and Charles Burnett influence) to add substance to Malick’s
method of reveries.

Pauline Kael
memorably derided Days of Heaven as
“a Christmas tree; you can hang all your old metaphors on it.” The Tree of Life is overloaded with pensées—Malick’s visual metaphors—but
the grand ideas bloat its human drama, making it banal, as when alienated Jack
wanders among ferns outside impersonal office towers. It’s less effective than
Alain Resnais finding weeds sprouting between the concrete of city streets in Wild Grass, a whimsical, instantaneous
image revealing nature, progress and idiosyncrasy. Everything Malick attempts
in The Tree of Life was already
achieved in Jan Troell’s Everlasting
Moments, a memoir that used a wife’s photographic talent to probe human
relations and social progress. And Robert Altman already perfectly revised
American family heritage in the vivid, expansive memory sequence of his Sam
Shepard adaptation, Fool for Love.
Those films achieved cinematic poetry naturally by focusing imagination,
history and destiny.

In The Tree of Life, Malick
prioritizes self-conscious artistry over any coherent concept of family,
society or the origins of life. Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki’s clean light
is pretty but inexpressive; it plays into Malick’s vain idea of cinema as a
kinetic picture-puzzle. Yes, some of these images refer to D.W. Griffith’s
strong and fluid visions of man-in-nature and Jean-Luc Godard’s ironic view of
society’s spiritual decline in the midst of divinity in Nouvelle Vague, but much of The
Tree of Life is not transcendent; it looks like greeting card homilies.
There’s not enough specificity to all this self-conscious “beauty.” For
example, Chastain’s performance is mostly exquisite mime since Malick neglects
to articulate Mother’s consciousness, spending more time with Young Jack’s
rebellion and McCracken’s menacing glower. But this could also be due to
Malick’s great leap backwards—undisciplined poetic storytelling that leaves out
connections between primordial instinct and the modern cultural habits and
biological drives that exist eons later. It’s as if Malick was making up for
time lost to his ’70s peers and sought to combine the stoner astonishment of 2001: A Space Odyssey with the inherited
family depression of Death of a Salesman.

The Tree of Life

Directed by Terrence Malick

Runtime: 138 min.