"THE TREE OF LIFE" — ★★★★ — Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain, Sean Penn; PG-13 (some thematic material); Broadway
A masterpiece creates an original world. Therefore it's unlikely to fit the world of the spectator. "The Tree of Life," the demanding new film from writer/director Terrence Malick, will stretch every viewer's boundaries. It's a flawed but impressive experiment, the sort of shoot-the-moon gamble that cinema can't do without.
This is the famously reclusive, perfectionist Malick's fifth film in four decades, yet with that slender output he's carved a unique niche. He explores solidly American material with introspective lyricism and lush, tactile images of nature rather than straightforward plot and dialogue.
"The Tree of Life" is a tapestry of human and natural strands whose main thread follows three brothers growing up in midcentury Waco, Texas. It is also a meditation on creation and death and how one family fits into the cosmos. Malick marshals gorgeous special effects and stunning nature photography to show the origin of the universe — stars exploding, oceans forming, cells dividing, dinosaurs roaming. He follows with intimate scenes of family life that have an almost documentary quality. By turns down-to-earth and transcendental, his film settles into no genre, unless you call it the coming-of-age story of the universe.
Repeatedly, worlds collide. The film contemplates the line between dream and reality, counterpoints suburban lawns and prehistoric rain forests and contrasts the personalities of a warring parent and child. Brad Pitt plays the father, Mr. O'Brien, a disciplinarian who demands to be called "sir." Jessica Chastain is the tender mother, a radiant creature without a name. We follow the O'Brien boys through the rituals of childhood: meals and baths, church and school and languorous evenings at play. The characters' speech is as oblique as half-overheard conversation. Much of the film is narrated by muted interior monologue. The soaring classical soundtrack speaks for them.
Mother is the boys' playmate, confidante and spiritual tutor. She instructs them to follow the path of grace through life and "love every blade of grass, every ray of light," rather than pursue the way of nature, which "finds reasons to be unhappy." At one point a butterfly settles onto Chastain's hand as if she were St. Francis welcoming a bird. She flies through the air herself in one surreal snippet. Mr. O'Brien is a creature of the earth, fixated on the dead spots in his lawn and walking with a heavy tread. He wants his boys to be tough and manly, well prepared to face the challenges of adulthood. As he tries to instill the "fierce will it takes it takes to get ahead in this world" his firstborn, Jack (Hunter McCracken in an extraordinary debut), comes to loathe him.
For all their antagonism, neither man has come to terms with the sudden death of Jack's brother R.L. (Laramie Eppler), his father's favorite. We see recurring images of votive candles being lighted by Pitt and Sean Penn, who plays Jack as a troubled adult. Pitt paints a portrait in full, a man of art and science, hot-tempered yet loving in his way and full of veiled disappointment. McCracken is immensely touching, adoring his mother, resenting his father and gradually growing apart from his roots. Penn plinks a single morose note in his limited screen time, and his final scene of reconciliation, a banal beach reunion, is unworthy of what came before. His character could have been called Angst Man; if he'd been edited out of the film altogether nothing much would be lost.
Time and again Malick shifts his focus from his characters to cathedral-like trees, ancient sandstone canyons, or a beach with a lounging dinosaur, landscape views that put human concerns in a cosmic perspective. Malick generally prefers enigmas to answers.The film is bookended by views of an indistinct, shifting aura of light. Is it the instant before the Big Bang? An angel? The spirit of cinema? Each viewer must decide what it all means.
This much is certain: Malick loves every ray of light.
"The Tree of Life" is rated PG-13 for some thematic material: running time:138 minutes.