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REVIEWS
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The Tree Of Life REVIEWED BY LEE MARSHALL
A cinematic symphony more than a classic narra- tive film, Terrence Malick’s long-awaited The Tree Of Life has moments of breathtaking visual and aural beauty, but in the end it has us longing for the days of Badlands, Days Of Heaven or The Thin Red Line, when the Texan auteur also knew how to spin a good yarn. In his previous films, a sense of wonder at the mysteries of nature, the human spirit and the cosmos was always there in the background, lifting, contrasting and sometimes ironically critiquing the main story. In The Tree Of Life, it very nearly is the story — and the result is a cinematic credo about spiritual transcendence which, while often shot with poetic yearning, preaches too directly to its audience. If ever a whole film were on the nose, this is it. The reputation of Malick, the presence of Brad
Pitt (who also co-produced) and the packaging of the film as a unique cinematic experience — though not, it should be noted, a 3D one — will help at the box office. And the mixture of boos and applause which greeted the film’s Cannes press premiere suggest some media reactions will be more upbeat than this one. But if it is true, as some reports suggest, that the film’s budget exceeded the $32m initially announced, breaking even is going to be a struggle. The Tree Of Life is a more focused film, and a better one, than Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain — but that pompous New Age saga’s poor box-office performance is probably a good benchmark for a film which requires a serious leap of faith, and poker-straight faces, from its audience.
COMPETITION
US. 2011. 138mins Director-screenplay Terrence Malick Production companies River Road Entertainment, Plan B Entertainment, Brace Cove Productions International sales Summit Entertainment,
www.summit-ent.com Producers Sarah Green, Bill Pohlad, Brad Pitt, Dede Gardner, Grant Hill Executive producer Donald Rosenfeld Co-executive producers Steve Schwartz, Paula Mae Schwartz Co-producer Nicolas Gonda Cinematography Emmanuel Lubezki Editors Hank Corwin, Jay Rabinowitz, Daniel Rezende, Billy Weber, Mark Yoshikawa Production designer Jack Fisk Music Alexandre Desplat Main cast Brad Pitt, Sean Penn, Jessica Chastain, Fiona Shaw, Irene Bedard, Jessica Fuselier, Hunter McCracken, Laramie Eppler, Tye Sheridan
The quotation from the Book Of Job that intro-
duces the story signals the fact we are in Biblical territory, in the field of parable rather than the muddy swamp of narrative realism. In the first of the film’s four movements — to use a musical metaphor which is touched on more than once in the story — fragments of the lives we will be fol- lowing are woven together impressionistically, linked by Malick’s familiar poetic, rhetorical voiceovers: characters (not always identifiable at first) talk about the two opposing life forces, strong but selfish nature and vulnerable but self- less grace, which are soon identified respectively with the stern father (Pitt, solid in the role) and the radiant, loving mother (a bravura perform- ance from Chastain) of the 1950s suburban family we begin to follow. A tragedy — the death of their 19-year-old son
— is announced via telegram; we cut to a city scene, where a drawn and intense Sean Penn drifts between his boxy modernist steel and glass house and the skyscraper where he works, apparently as an architect. We work hard at first to connect these plot scraps — the task not being made any easier by the almost complete absence of dialogue. The second part of the film, designed with the
help of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner special-effects veteran Douglas Trumbull, is the most audacious: an impressionistic cinematic his- tory of the universe in around 20 minutes, from its beginnings in cosmic dust to the appearance of life on Earth. Smoky nebulae, gushing lava, the corpuscular pulse of flowing magma, sunrise and star-rise, amoeba and jellyfish, hammerhead sharks and CGI dinosaurs all feature in a virtuoso performance which stands in the same relation to the rest of the film that a flashy guitar solo does to the main melody.
It is only after around 55 minutes that the main
narrative kicks in. We are back with the family we met earlier, but years before that telegram. Three boys are born to a couple who live in a classic American suburban house with a lawn outside dominated by a spreading oak tree. Dad, a former air-force officer, works in a factory and hopes that certain patents he has taken out will make the family rich, though his real passion is classical music (he plays the organ in church). Mom is a housewife and home-maker. Gradually conflict develops between the
authoritarian father and his eldest son, Jack (an excellent, intense debut by young McCracken). We are in Oedipal territory here, and in case we do not get the message, Jack is given on-the-nose, character-defying lines like one he delivers to Pa: “I’m as bad as you are — I’m more like you than her.” By now, we have realised the Sean Penn charac-
ter, who has taken to wandering anguished in his designer suit through rocky deserts, is Jack in adulthood. The film’s short final movement has him greeting all those he has known on a beach, in a valedictory dream sequence which does pack a certain elegiac punch. The camera is always moving, panning, gliding
away, as if impatient to get to the imminent truth that lies behind this shabby reality — a truth that finds its expression in the soundtrack of trans- cendental choral or stately orchestral music by composers from Respighi and Mahler to Taverner and Gorecki. The problem is, we need a little shabby reality every now and then. That’s how cinematic poetry is earned.
SCREEN SCORE ★★ May 17, 2011 Screen International at the Cannes Film Festival 15 n
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