To call The Tree of Life (American auteur Terrence Malick’s Palme d’Or winner at this year’s Cannes Film Festival) “ambitious” is a bit of an understatement. Here, Malick attempts to decipher the meaning of life (yikes!) through a dreamlike narrative structure shuffling back and forth between the present day and 1950s Texas. It is told from the point of view of a typical Sothern family, punctuated with National Geographic-like sequences tracing the evolution of mankind; the film is anything but lightweight. In fact, it’s such a demanding and commanding watch you simply can’t take your eyes off the screen, even if its ambiguous narrative threatens to tear it all apart. There’s less dialogue here than there are sound bites narrated by three protagonists who coo their lines throughout the film, so keep your ears peeled and eyes wide open (the visuals are mind-blowing).
The film tells us that there are two ways to lead life: By way of Nature and by way of Grace. And in 11-year-old Jack’s (Hunter McCracken) life, he is able to explore both through his relationship with Mother (Jessica Chastain, representing Grace) and Father (Brad Pitt, representing Nature). While Father tries to show Jack the weary ways of the world through discipline, skills and knowledge), Mother is more attuned to the emotions of the world (through understanding, love and mercy). While the two figures are forever at loggerheads, their unrequited love for one another is what keeps the family together.
The film criss-crosses time as we travel to the present day where we see an adult Jack (Sean Penn) trying to make both sense of his place in the world and peace with his father. While the structure here seems a tad piecemeal at first, Malick manages to wrap it all up quite nicely by film’s end when the whole family comes together in an imagined Jerusalem with the all the characters, past and present able to cross paths again for a deeper understanding of the world by way of forgiveness and unselfish love.
The Tree of Life can be difficult even for avid Malick fans as this is his most non-linear film yet—imagine the best moments from The Thin Red Line (the flashback sequences with all those spiraling camera angles) fused with a newfound European New Wave sensibility, amped to the power of infinity. Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezski, who collaborated with Malick in his last film The New World, imbues the mise-en-scenes with such fluidity, it’s as if you’re transported into an alternate reality where every moment is a waking dream. It’s also no mean feat that Malick manages to merge a totally disparate 30-minute sequence tracing the birth of mankind and the universe with the use of powerful nature photography and optical images (courtesy of Douglas Trumbull, who worked on Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey) with the rest of the film, accompanied by a soaring orchestral libretto (Zbigniew Preisner’s “Lacrimosa,” originally composed to mark the death of Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski). The Tree of Life is nothing but life-affirming and transcendental. This is a work of art of the highest order.