The Tree Of Life

To begin this review I must explain my love of cinema. I have always been pretty easily distracted and hyperactive and the only thing that really grabs me is movies. I am a sucker for story and also the beauty of what I am watching. There are several movies I have seen recently that the critics have quite simply slammed: The Green Lantern, Sucker Punch to name a few. Obviously, in my reviews I have stated that I disagree with the critics, and my friends like to suggest that the reason for this is simply that I do not dislike any movie for any reason. Also, I do not know of a movie that I will not watch or love because of a certain style or genre. I love films from 2001: A Space Odyssey to Fight Club to Pi to A Clockwork Orange. I have no problem with art-house movies or Independent films. In fact, I like quite a few of them. It is with great pride in my love for movies that I declare.... The Tree of Life sucked.

Directed by Terrance Malick (The New World, The Thin Red Line) and starring Brad Pitt (Thelma & Louise, Cool World), The Tree of Life is about a man, Sean Penn (who spends probably ten minutes on the screen in a 138 minute film), who remembers his childhood with an abusive father, on what appears to be the anniversary of his brother's death.... I guess.

Penn's character Jack brooding over the past

The movie begins with the father (Brad Pitt) and mother (Jessica Chastain) finding out that their child is dead. The emotion conjured up by Pitt is phenomenal and is captured beautifully by Malick. Jump to present time and Penn's character, Jack,  then begins to think about the first time he knew he loved his brother and the flashback begins. Starting at Jack's birth, which he can apparently remember vividly, we are shown in extensive detail the raising of him and after you can stand it absolutely no longer, the second child is born.

Here is where there was a 10-15 minute sequence involving scenes that appeared to come from the History Channel's Universe series and morphs into scenes from Planet Earth. Seriously guys, it lasts for a significant amount of time. It lasts for so long that you think the projectionist is playing a cruel trick on you, and then the Loch Ness Monster shows up and eventually dinosaurs. Yeah, dinosaurs. It appears it is symbolizing the beginning of life and it was absolutely beautiful, but it had no place in a period piece movie like this. Especially considering that nothing like it happens again in the movie.

Father realizing one of his sons shares his love for music

From here we are subjected to the beginning of a story which sees the children learning that their father is verbally abusive towards their mother and beginning to abuse them as well. Jack soon learns that their father has formed a special bond with the younger brother in the form of a love for music, curbing the cruelty towards the brother, which in turn makes Jack very jealous. Beginning to take on traits of the father, he begins to act out and become violent towards the brother. This part of the film has all the components needed to tell an excellent story about love, betrayal, redemption, death and understanding. The only problem is that none of that happens. There is literally no story or coherent plot involved in this movie.

Real quick I'll explain what a story consists of. A story has a beginning, a middle, the climax, and then an end. The Tree of Life seems only to have a beginning. No plot was ever outlined, no questions ever answered, no resolution ever made. It was a two hour and eighteen minute excuse for Terrance Malick to beautifully film Brad Pitt, achieving absolutely nothing and leaving the audience confused.

There are only a few things that I noticed worth mentioning that brought the movie up in my opinion and they are all about the actual film production or the acting. The emotion in the movie was breathtaking. Brad Pitt gives an excellent performance which I'm quite certain will earn him a nomination.  Cinematography was beautiful, but also at times distracting from what would be the story, but since I stated earlier that there was no story, it seams plausible that Malick understood that the distraction was necessary.

But in the end you're left with too many questions to call this a good movie. You never find out what happened to the brother, how he died, or why. You don't get a clear idea of what conclusion Penn's character comes to about these thoughts of childhood. Everything is shrouded in symbolism (symbology) to the point of utter incomprehensibility.

I give The Tree of Life 4 dinosaurs out of 10 for being a brilliantly shot and acted film about nothing.