Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life is gorgeous to look at. It's also a gargantuan work of pretension and cleverly concealed self-absorption masquerading as spiritual exploration. If God really is in the details, it's true that Malick does care about craftsmanship: He's clearly poured thought and care into the images and the editing, and the sections of the film in which characters are actually allowed to interact -- instead of just issuing forth in ponderous voice-overs as images of cosmic tadpoles and Ansel Adams-style calendar shots fill the screen -- manage some degree of dramatic intensity.
But through much of The Tree of Life, Malick, characteristically, doesn't seem to care much for people at all. Desert rock formations, rushing streams, sunflowers waving gently in the sun, and all sorts of cradle-of-life folderol are the things that really rock his world -- he cuts to them whenever he needs to try to explain the inexplicable, which is often. This is a movie about spiritual searching, about reckoning with the nature of God and his frustrating insistence on allowing suffering in the world. We know that because the movie's characters tell us what they're thinking, repeatedly, in voice-over: "How did she bear it? Mother." "Lord -- why?" Never trust an actor's face to convey complicated feelings when you can just dub in words.
We know at the beginning of The Tree of Life that we're dealing with a family who has suffered tremendous grief. After an opening containing shots of those aforementioned sunflowers and a girl cuddling a goat, we see visual fragments, like bits torn from a scrapbook, of a seemingly once-happy family: There's a mother (Jessica Chastain) twirling about in '50s sundresses; a stern, sensible-looking dad in a wiffle cut (Brad Pitt); and two or three cavorting little boys (it's hard to count them, they're moving so fast) enjoying idyllic 1950s American suburbia.
Which can't be idyllic forever: We learn that one son, one of those little boys (who has since grown into a young man), has died. The family is torn by grief. Mother is wearing 60s-style mourning clothes. Cut ahead, many years later: Sean Penn is working in some giant, slick glass building; it's apparently the anniversary of his brother's death, and you can tell he's sad because he's scowling, but mostly because he tells us so, once again in voice-over.
Here is where Malick takes a breather to ponder the origins of life: It begins, apparently, with a shiny, glowing, pinky-blue light-up mussel floating in black space. Next, there are some bubbles of primordial ooze and some jellyfish. Dinosaurs appear (and they are pretty good dinosaurs, the one thing in Tree of Life that impart a genuine sense of wonder). At the conclusion of this planetarium show, we're returned to '50s Waco, Texas, to learn more about that family.
Dad is tough on the boys, schooling them in proper table manners he doesn't observe himself and rousing them early on Sundays so they can all head to church where he, formerly an aspiring musician and now some sort of a would-be inventor stuck working for the man, plays the organ. Mom is the one who looks on in silence, protecting the boys when she can, occasionally dipping a toe into the family sprinkler to rinse bits of cut grass from her bare feet (because the water spurting forth from that sprinkler sure looks good in the sunlight).
Malick is at his best when he lets his guard down, which is rarely -- there's nothing casual about him as a director. But in this section of the movie, Malick (who both wrote and directed) does manage here and there to set aside his highly attuned aesthetics enough to capture some of the texture of family life, particularly as it was in the '50s. In one sequence a DDT truck breezes down the street with little boys following behind, jumping up and down gleefully in the puffy clouds of white smoke it leaves in its wake. At one point the older boy (the characters don't call one another by name, but his name is Jack -- he's the one who'll grow up to be Sean Penn, and he's played, with sure-footed serious-mindedness, by Hunter McCracken) betrays the trust of his younger brother (Laramie Eppler) by injuring him slightly with an airgun. Later, he attempts an apology by kissing his brother's hurt arm. The brother makes a big show of brushing the kisses away, but the two eventually reach the kind of uneasy, unbreakable truce that sometimes interlaces siblings for life. It's the movie's finest moment.
They have another brother who's mystically absent through most of the movie, maybe because he's not the protagonist nor does he die. Some kids have all the luck. But then, The Tree of Life isn't really about people as much as it's about "life" in some broad, waving-of-the-arms sense. There certainly is a lot of filmmaking going on here: Malick grabs our attention with diminutive jump cuts; he often shoots characters in three-quarters profile, so we're left to wonder what their faces might be saying; he invents dream images (like a slightly airborne Chastain pirouetting among the trees) and inserts them in unexpected places. There's also lots of majestic orchestral music, courtesy of Alexandre Desplat, Bach and, presumably, God.
And then there are those visuals: A father fondling his newborn babe's translucent toes. Dreamy, idyllic suburban '50s streets that look as if they've been shot not with the most technically advanced movie camera money can buy but with something better, the Brownie camera of memory. Those sunflowers, standing bright and hopeful. Emmanuel Lubezki, the movie's cinematographer (he also shot The New World), knows how to do it, all right.
But Lubezki -- as he's proved in Children of Men, Great Expectations, Sleepy Hollow, and any number of extraordinary-looking films that he's worked on -- knows how to do other things, too. Like shoot a scene so that the emotions of the characters are more compelling than their surroundings, no matter how beautiful those surroundings may be. It puzzles me that people think of Malick as a strong visual filmmaker. His movies are often gorgeous-looking -- that was true even of The New World, which probably tops even Tree of Life in the pretentious snoozefest department.
But strong visuals don't necessarily equal strong visual storytelling. If Malick could tell a story mostly with pictures -- and faces -- why would he need so many voice-overs? There are some good performances here, to the extent that Malick allows us to focus on them: Pitt, in particular, captures the essence of preoccupied dadness. As he schools his boys in the art of respecting the line dividing their property from a neighbor's, or takes them all out to eat at a local diner, he's both distanced and affectionate in the way many of us may remember our own dads to have been. Chastain has less latitude: She's cast in the role of beatific mom-symbol, and it constrains her.
Malick is widely considered a filmmaking genius, and it doesn't hurt that The Tree of Life is only his fifth movie in 38 years. He's also known for waiting for things to happen rather than forcing them to happen: He's particularly fond of the magic hour (who isn't?), and has been known to turn the camera away from actors if a surprise bit of flora or fauna catches his eye. Those who love his pictures -- particularly the movies that followed Badlands, with its relatively straightforward approach -- see his meticulousness as a kind of hyperfocus, a way of seeing into and beyond the reality of the world around us. But for me, Malick's slavish attention to detail is more a kind of ADD distractibility, where every flickering butterfly passing by, every dust mote dancing in the sun, is supposedly loaded with so much meaning that in the end, nothing has any weight. With The Tree of Life Malick is doing what lots of directors do as they get older and ponder larger issues. I'm sympathetic, at least, to his intent. But he's trying to answer big questions by making the biggest movie possible. Where is God when you need him? The one place he forgets to look is in his characters' eyes.
Editor's note: This review appeared earlier, in a slightly different form, in Stephanie Zacharek's Cannes Film Festival coverage.