The Tree of Life: worth the wait?

In 1979, after directing two of the greatest American movies ever made, Badlands and Days of Heaven, Terrence Malick disappeared. He moved to Paris, stopped directing, and began writing a screenplay on the origins of life on earth. For twenty years, he was the JD Salinger of American film.  On July 8, The Tree of Life, the film he began working on all those years ago opens in London.

There’s no denying its beauty, every frame a poem, lovely, enigmatic. Staring at Jessica Chastain’s face is a delight, her skin luminous, her lips sensual, her jaw line an American landscape worthy of Dorothea Lange. Her dresses make me swoon, make me wish I lived in small-town 1950s Texas. And yet...

Malick, who graduated from Harvard with a summa cum laude degree in philosophy, wants to explore the big questions. The film opens with an obscure quote from the book of Job, recreates the birth of the universe and shows us empathy among dinosaurs. But mostly it features a Texas family with a stern father and a loving mother. The father, played by Brad Pitt, authoritarian and borderline cruel to his children, represents “nature.” He wants his kids to be tough, fearing that otherwise they will never flourish in this dog-eat-dog world. The ethereal mother, who barely talks, represents “grace” or God or love. Umm. Tender mother, dictatorial father, haven’t I heard this story before?

This movie would be better off as a coffee table book, the photography more evocative than the film itself.   Each individual shot maintains a certain ambiguity, allows the viewer to make his own interpretation. But the film, with its overwrought voiceovers soon becomes didactic. It imposes a heavy-handed opposition of father vs mother, nature vs grace, struggle and competition vs love and God. If you want to be profound, if you want to say something new, you have to do better than that. This movie ends up being a two hours and 19 minutes Mother’s Day card. In Badlands, Malick told the story of two teenagers on a killing spree and left us thinking about love and violence and celebrity and America. In The Tree of Life he aspires to plumb the nature of the universe but just left me thinking of pretty dresses.