The Tree of Life (12A)

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Dir: Terrence Malick With: Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain, Sean Penn

 

AMONG the awards Terrence Malick will never win are a gong for shameless self-promotion (his last interview took place in 1973) and a statuette for Stakhanovite-like output (he has made five films in 40 years). This is a director who allows his films to do the talking, and what heavenly murmurings are contained in his latest drama, The Tree of Life.

As a head trip, the Palme d’Or winner makes 2001: A Space Odyssey look about as ambitious as a weekend in the Lake District. It is a bullet-train ride through the ages, a rocket jaunt through philosophy, all the while being a picture that’s moving, beautiful and full of grace. While not every element works, this is cinema at its boldest, craziest and best. Watching what Malick can do with a film is like seeing a picture on the big screen after years of looking at movies through a keyhole. And yes, the reports are true -- there are dinosaurs.

The Tree of Life begins with a verse from the book of Job -- “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth” -- and from there the questions rarely stop. At the heart of Malick’s philosophical quest is the O’Brien family: dad (Brad Pitt), mother (Jessica Chastain) and their three sons. The O’Briens are a poster family for 1950s America: mum in the kitchen, dad at work. Their lives appear solid and secure. Life for the boys especially is one long endless summer of playing in the garden.

Malick, writer as well as director, wastes little time in showing that nothing can be taken for granted. Having presented the O’Briens as the epitome of ordinariness, he goes on to show how the everyday business of living and loving others is a fragile thing, part of a complex story that began long before us and will continue (we hope) long after. His principal question -- what does it take to survive in this world? -- has surfaced.

Pitt looks every inch the solid, go ahead man of the post war world. An inventor, O’Brien believes that to get on in life a person has to strive, never let your guard down, and, if necessary, bend the rules a little. His hard-headed attitude, his believe that only the toughest will survive, stands in sharp contrast to his wife’s outlook. If Mr O’Brien represents nature red in tooth, claw and ambition, Mrs O’Brien is optimism and gentleness personified, a woman much given to dancing barefoot in the park.

Much of the film is taken up with examining the family’s life in flashback after a dreadful event occurs. Malick doesn’t confine himself to one place and time, however. Unusually for the director of Badlands (also 1950s set), The Thin Red Line (World War Two), The New World (17th-century Virginia) and Days of Heaven (turn of the last century Texas), he enters the present day with a look at how one of the sons, Jack, is faring. Jack, now played by Sean Penn, is as much a product of the shiny present as his father was of the matt past. Clad in his designer suit, working as an architect, the elder Jack moves through a glittering city. Apparently together and going places, he is in fact lost to the past, unable to let his grief go.

The time travel doesn’t stop there. In what proves to be one of the film’s more memorable sequences, Malick sets the clock for dinosaur days. He times it well. Too early and this slide into the prehistoric past would have seemed ludicrous. It may still do to some. Yet by the point it occurs you too will hopefully be lost contentedly in Malick’s world, not always understanding or agreeing with him, but fascinated to see what he’s going to come up with next.

The images, conjured up with the aid of cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (Children of Men, The New World) are take-your-breath-away beautiful. They flit across the screen like butterflies or explode like a flashbulb. Though telling one family’s story, Malick is trying to make connections with all our pasts. Having a director trying to dabble with your soul is an unnerving experience, and likely some will dismiss it as high flown nonsense, but who would dare fault the man for trying.

Pitt, also a producer on the film, anchors the picture when it threatens to go adrift, moulding O’Brien into one of the great American Everyman characters. Penn is less successful, largely because he’s not around very much and when he does feature it is in the film’s problematic, overly sentimental end. Chastain is the most impressive of the three, the film’s soulful, indefatigable heart.

It’s the performances of the children, particularly Hunter McCracken as the young Jack, which are the real things of beauty in Malick’s extraordinary film. All those questions, and it turns out the answer, lies with some very simple creatures indeed.