Director: Terrence MalickWriter: Terrence Malick
Stars: Brad Pitt, Sean Penn and Jessica Chastain
Some films are clearly designed to be experienced and felt rather than watched.
The difficulty with this approach is that, while you can lull people's opinion and warm them to your film by using classical narrative and flow, when you give them an "experience" you're effectively splitting the crowd into those that have a predisposition to "get it and love it" and those who are completely bewildered by it.
The Tree of Life, which I'm sure will be one of the least consensual films this year, is one such case. You see, what writer/director Terrence Malick treats us to here is a sequence of more or less disjoint pictures of a family's life. Without giving too much away, the film starts with an event that ruthlessly throws a family into disarray and doubt. The editing is stylish, there's not much in the way of dialog and the image is suitably washed out and grainy, all making for a promissory start.
But then the film plunges into an half hour over-indulgent montage of nature scenes showing the Earth's evolution since the dawn of Creation that make you wonder if you've been switched over to a National Geographic omnibus. These are admittedly breathtaking images and they purport to meaningfully show how minute a human's cares are in the grand scheme of things, but they just brought the whole film to a screeching halt and literally sent a good dozen people running to the door and out of the theatre. Not good.
The film then comes back to show earlier stages of the family's life and how their inter-relations played out. It has to be said that both Jessica Chastain and Bradd Pitt do a convincingly good job as the the loving mother and the stern yet ultimately well-meaning father, as does newcomer Hunter McCracken who plays Sean Penn's angst-ridden teenage version. Incidentally, if you plan to watch the film because of the Mr. Penn, don't bother because he gets precious little screen time (and no real dialog) and does nothing more than longingly look at the sky.
While the strength of the cast and ultimately of the characters means you eventually do get to care for them, the whole thing is presented in such a fractured form that the story never wins you back, as proven by the fact that people's attention in the theatre drifted as the movie progressed, leading to occasional chatter and giggling. In the end it was unsurprising that, after 2 and a half long hours of film, people actually cheered when it was finally over...
I'm sure the artsy crowd is going to lap it up and I did draw some enjoyment from experiencing it, but it's not something I would ever bother watching again.
My score: 6.0 / 10