Daze of Heaven

The Tree of Life

**** out of ****

Directed by: Terrence Malick

Starring: Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain, Hunter McCracken, Laramie Eppler and Sean Penn

Running time: 138 minutes

For those of you who aren't keeping a tally, this is my 100th post on The Screening Room. And, boy, do I have an incredible film to mark the occasion.

There are only a small handful of directors who can create a film with the title The Tree of Life without extending their reach or pretension, and Terrence Malick is one of them. The reclusive American artist, best known for his World War II epic The Thin Red Line, is a name that means zip to mainstream audiences. But, his small yet revered filmography and his stature as an evocative, expressionistic filmmaker that is more concerned with how story is defined by patterns of image and sound rather than through a cohesive narrative, means that every project of his becomes a cultural event for film buffs.

His latest film, the recent winner of the Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, encapsulates the best attributes of Malick’s work, meaning it’s a film that’s easier to describe with adjectives than with nouns.

The film opens with a whispered voice-over from Mrs. O’Brien, the saintly small-town mother played by Jessica Chastain. “There are two ways through life. The way of nature and the way of grace. You have to choose which one you follow.”

This quote becomes the defining conflict for her son, a doe-eyed preteen named Jack (newcomer Hunter McCracken), who is caught between these two halves. Jack and his two younger brothers (Laramie Eppler and Tye Sheridan) are growing up during the 1950s in the midlands of Texas. Their father (Brad Pitt) goes by the way of nature: he is a failed musician, whose stinging regret for the things he hasn’t accomplished makes him determined to live vicariously through his boys. He is a strict disciplinarian who nurtures his children with pride and punishment, demanding the best from them.

Mr. O’Brien is the face of nature and the struggles and demons that come attached to it, while Mrs. O’Brien embodies grace. She is a sunny mother, although naïve—her husband pointedly remarks about her slightness on occasion—who raises her children in a different way, through prayer and plenitude.

The Tree of Life is about the battle between religion and reason just as much as it is about the binary that separates this family. It is a film both intimate in its approach to character, while transcendent and exhilaratingly grand in its depiction of everything else, from the creation of the world to the beauty of the neighbourhood where the O’Briens reside.

The scenes are small in action but have an overpowering aura surrounding them—can this be reminiscent of Biblical territory, as the tiny property of man tries to explore his relationship with a higher power?

Filmgoers uninitiated by Malick’s cerebral approach may find a lot of the film and the connections between certain moments perplexing. For instance, why does the family storyline suddenly move into a colourful interpretation of the Big Bang and the creation of the cosmos, full of rushing waters and fiery blasts of light?

It is a challenging parallel to explain concretely, but the theme of creation and destruction is a central aspect in The Tree of Life. By delicately chronicling the early days of how the O’Brien sons grew from babies into boys, and by later depicting how their stable family fabric crumbles, Malick frames a battle between the possibilities of creation and the vast soullessness of nature that threatens to tear it all apart.

Adding to this thematic element, one could frame the film as a series of mementos from Jack as an older man (played by Sean Penn). He works in a colossally tall glass skyscraper in a giant metropolis—the unlimited potential of the building’s architecture sums up creation—but his family, who are no longer with him, are fading, fragmented memories that still wrestle inside of him.

With such a careful, cautious perfectionist behind the camera, the technical aspects are all masterful. No cinematographer working in film today is as innovative as Emmanuel Lubezki. (His Oscar loss for Children of Men still hurts and his camerawork here will hopefully make the Academy atone.) Filming most of the action outside, Lubezki ensures that the camera doesn’t move as much as float, capturing the fluidity of youth, and the dreamy movements and colours that can pervade one’s memory when they harken back to an earlier time. Immaculate set design from Jack Fisk and a hymnal score by Alexandre Desplat appropriately adds further grandeur.

The cast is remarkable, as well. With a riveting intensity and a slight vulnerability, Brad Pitt has never expressed a wider range as a leading man. Chastain is also a revelation with a terrifically, expressive face—vital considering how her character says very little. Hunter McCracken debuts as the young son who is enveloped by his loss of innocence, and he is sublime, with a haunting, ashen face that darkens his tender spirit (the young actor also lets his body language do much of the talking).

Due to the writer/director’s private nature, we will likely never know how personal this tale is for him. Malick was a young boy growing up in Waco, Texas, at the same time as the young characters in the film. Even though its personal sympathies will remain a mystery, The Tree of Life is an audacious, glorious symphony of sound and image, and an endlessly fascinating coming-of-age tale. It is a daunting but glorious work of art that beckons to be seen and seen again.