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The Tree of Life

By Jesse Kornbluth
Published: Nov 13, 2019
Category: Drama

In 2011 “The Tree of Life” won the Palme D’Or for Best Picture at Cannes, but even with Brad Pitt and Sean Penn in the film, it didn’t lure crowds into the theaters. “The Tree of Life” is intellectually compelling and emotionally overpowering. Not exactly popcorn entertainment.

There’s no plot; the story reveals itself, incompletely, in fits and starts, and if you drift off or leave the theater for more caffeine, you might miss an important moment. You won’t think Aaron Sorkin had anything to do with the dialogue; these characters talk more in voice-overs than they do to one another. And talk is the least of it; the unfolding images lead you deep into the film, and yourself. And most of the music is classical.

Years after seeing it, I’m still haunted by this movie. Its images float through my dreams. When I look at our daughter, I sometimes think of the children in Malick’s film. [To buy the DVD of ‘Tree of Life’ from Amazon, click here. To buy or rent the streaming video, click here.]

It’s a family story. But Brad Pitt is embittered. He should have been a classical pianist; instead, he made the practical choice and gets a regular paycheck, and that enrages him. Men no better than he got lucky and made fortunes; the best he can hope for is that his kids grow up strong and successful.

Grief lives in this house; one son has died. That’s not just an easy plot point. Malick, who had a tough father and grew up in Texas, had a brother who killed himself at 19 and another who died after a car crash. Malick also went to Harvard and was a Rhodes Scholar; at Oxford, he began a thesis about the concept of world in Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein. So you don’t get a literal family story here. You get the beginning of the world, dinosaurs, gorgeous images — and a small boy at the center of the film asking big questions: Where are You? Why are we here?

All that’s the background, the context. In the foreground, we watch children at play. These are moments so beyond anything I’ve seen in films that they’re breathtaking — even though all the kids are doing is running around or playing in the bathtub or getting into typical kid trouble. Real life, closely observed. Innocence, celebrated.

Films are rarely this ambitious, and, most of the time, we don’t want them to be. With good reason: we’re scared to know what we think, we desperately don’t want to look up at the stars and confront how very small we are. “The Tree of Life” goes there, and stays there. It’s a forced meditation. And it shreds you.

It shreds you even though I suspect the “answer” that Malick is driving toward is glorious and inspiring — I look at the many scenes of people touching, holding one another, affirming the most basic connection, and I conclude that the film is a hymn to the beauty of the world and the power of love.

“Someday we’ll fall down and weep, and we’ll understand it all, all things,” Pitt says. At the end, Sean Penn — the boy, now grown — drops to his knees. In awe? In gratitude? In, just possibly, understanding? I don’t know. I do know “The Tree of Life” had me on my knees.

And not just me. Here’s Roger Ebert:

Malick’s film is a form of prayer…. What he does in “The Tree of Life” is create the span of lives. Of birth, childhood, the flush of triumph, the anger of belittlement, the poison of resentment, the warmth of forgiving. And he shows that he feels what I feel, that it was all most real when we were first setting out, and that it will never be real in that way again…..

Really? That good? That important? Only you can know.

In December, if you’re in New York, let’s go to the movies together.