Review: The Tree of Life (2011)

Terence Malick has put some beautiful things on the big screen in his time. I can think of no other filmmaker who makes the natural world around him seem so rich, so beautiful, so full of life. I gather his secret is that his movies are only partly in his head when he starts making them. The things that bring his films to life are the things that happen around him when he’s there, in the moment, in the wild – the wind in the grass, say, or the sun shining on a tree, or a small animal going about its animal business without giving any thought to the nearby humans going about their human business. He patiently waits for nature to inspire him, and he puts it on film, all with a little help from mind-blowingly talented cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki.

But when you have already immortalised the beauty of so many places, from the shores of Virginia and fields of Texas to the Dakota badlands and the Solomon Islands, where do you take your audience next? In his latest film, Malick takes us on a voyage through time and across the universe. We watch single-celled organisms evolve into dinosaurs. We see majestic nebulae, erupting lava and gaseous orbs. And it is stunning. I defy you to show me another film whose imagery is as sumptuous. Accompanied by sublime classical music, these sequences can move you in profound ways. The cinematography in the scenes set in and around the protagonists’ Texas home is almost as beautiful. The shots don’t linger – you’re treated to a fresh awe-inspiring vision every few seconds.

Visually, The Tree of Life is simply breathtaking. I can’t praise it enough for that. And that’s why it breaks my heart that the film doesn’t quite live up to its potential as a whole. Its imperfection has nothing to do with Malick’s obsession with mood and tone. I’m completely down with the idea of making a film that is all mood and tone, like The New World, where the role of the characters is secondary to that of the look and feel and sound of what Malick put on the screen.

The problem with The Tree of Life is that it tries to achieve something else, something more than just mood and tone. Regardless of his intention, in making the audience spend so much time with his characters Malick lulls us into thinking that he is going to tell us a story. He isn’t; not really – not in the same way he did in Badlands or Days of Heaven. In The Tree of Life, the characters look, feel and sound like real people, and we do develop an emotional bond with them. But watching and listening are not the same as knowing – we’re missing the traditional elements of a story that help us to make sense of the characters.

Of course, you could argue that this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Who says that filmmakers need to tell a story anyway? Isn’t it valid for Malick to work towards a different goal? He does, after all, say something about what it means – and how it feels – to be a father, a mother, a son, a brother. In some respects he is capable of getting much closer to finding the human truth in those relationships than any traditional filmmaker could – and often with a gesture as slight as a glance, a touch or a smile.

But he didn’t need to make a 139-minute film just to do that. I think what Malick is trying to achieve, rather than tell us a story, is meditate on how dear and fragile life is. Something like that. And I think it’s because he brings God and Job and Biblical dullness into the equation that his film, though beautiful, loses some of its intellectual or spiritual appeal for those of us who regard God as an irrelevant, superfluous fantasy. The film drags quite a bit. I haven’t seen so many people leave a cinema mid-film since Soderbergh remade Solaris. They’re philistines, sure, but it’s still a big ask to make people sit through all the floaty meditation without giving them the narrative payoff that cinema has taught them to expect.

Judge The Tree of Life on its greatest moments and it’s a masterpiece; judge it as a whole, and it leaves you frustrated.