David O'ConnellThe Tree of Life
June 23rd 2011 04:42
Flawed in its conception, just like The New World (2006) before it, Terrence Malick’s latest metaphysical yearning, The Tree of Life is a frustratingly uneven venture into the ether of past and future time; a fragmentary, elliptical patchwork of kaleidoscopic imagery remotely attached to a paltry, unsupportive narrative.
Ostensibly the story of a 1950’s family afflicted by the grief of losing one of their own, much of the journey is filtered through the eyes of adolescent Jack (Hunter McCracken). His mother (Jessica Chastain) is affected most deeply by the loss of an elder son to war, but like the future version of Jack (Sean Penn) we are intermittently shown, verbal interplay is hardly required to enhance narrative momentum. It’s as if Malick fears the illuminating power of dialogue to besmirch the inferences we’re left to make from an endless series of intense close-ups and lingering looks that clarify the pain festering in these tortured souls. Jack’s increasingly erratic father (Brad Pitt) sadly suffers a clichéd portrayal by the end; his version of tough love is borne of fiscal stress and internalised grief, alienating his family who he begins to physically act out against.
Beyond it admitted visual magnificence, The Tree of Life is dramatically inert, a framework of ideas unable to be filled by anything of dramatic substance. The film remains frustratingly unsustained by the wisp of thematic refrains playing around its edges like susurrations or ghostly echoes of what Malick’s bloated original version, at a reported eight hours, may have more comprehensively embraced. Hypothetical content does not a classic make: this truncated version, made palatable for mass consumption, feels self-indulgent in the extreme.
Playing with the malleable concept of time, Malick allows echoes of pre-human existence to reverberate to the surface; in one segment volcanic eruptions and dinosaurs become clumsy manifestations of the earth’s beginnings. Best suited to a TV nature documentary these inserts were a huge creative risk; that they cultivate only an impression of being silly, extraneous and severely misguided proves almost ruinous to the film’s credibility.
In abandoning a more traditional narrative form, Malick is placing undue faith in the weight of his themes to carry the burden that dialogue cannot. But for the same reasons that The New World became mired in its dreamy reveries, The Tree of Life merely offers half-whispered voiceovers passing themselves off as profound illuminations of its characters’ mental ruminations.
There is a single moment that feels significant enough to be a turning point; a moment in which Malick might be turning away from his incessant internal contemplation to develop an idea beyond subservience to raw visual elocution: it occurs after a divide between Jack and his increasingly perturbed father becomes clear. Jack prays to a divine force to kill him, to remove him from their lives. A genuinely spine-tingling moment, it too dwindles away, subsumed by the slew of figurative close-ups and fetishised images of sunlight piercing tree-tops, fusing man and nature with their soundless grief.
This isn’t the first time a composer was hired by Malick only to have his work jettisoned in favour of an outpouring of source music. On this occasion Frenchman Alexandre Desplat, who has become one of world cinema’s most sought after musical voices, has suffered the same fate experienced by James Horner on The New World. The lone great gift of the film is Emmanuel Lubezki’s work behind the camera; it’s consistently stunning, providing immediacy and a luminosity that resounds within every frame.
The Tree of Life will no doubt be an eternal source of frustration to many, as it was to me; stocked with breath-taking, arresting images, it disappoints in every other way. Aesthetic beauty, alluring and darkly romanticised as it may be, is simply not enough to convince me of Malick’s fragile conceptualisation of what constitutes cinematic richness in a non-visual sense.
What's worse than the drama's unfocused nature is how, finally, it becomes enchanted by the director’s forthright theological bent which unites the universe and informs us of how suffering is the only way to grace. These final scenes, in which Penn’s future incarnation of Jack is re-summoned after a lengthy absence to converge with other souls in divine exaltation, borders on ludicrous absolution, finally christening the film with a subtext writ large over every oblique, semi-cognisant gesture preceding it.
If all this is not the meaning of life, it’s at least Malick’s stirring of his own soul for the answers to life’s most profound mysteries. Though not an ideal without merit, his formally experimental construction of ephemeral snapshots lacks anything approaching elucidation. Some will champion the film's cause for just this reason, for the absences that promote wild speculation about its true thematic essence. But for me, none of it rings true; this borderline pretentious visual poem is constructed with painstaking care, no doubt, but with all of its clarifications - if they exist at all - lost in the editing suite.
The Tree of Life is released in Australian cinemas on Thursday, June 30.
| 72 |
| Vote |
subscribe to this blog
Comment by Bryn
Horrorphile
Tarkovsky he isn't.