NUMBER 5 FILM OF 2011
TREE OF LIFE
There were reports when this movie came out said that theaters were warning movie-goers that this movie was a little different. I also heard they withdrew it from screens after audiences were complaining that the film was boring and nothing happened. I even remember an interview excerpt with cast member Sean Penn, offering his opinion that his own character could have been given something more to do by director Terrence Mallick.
Trying to reason with this movie, to bring it down to a level where it has a definite purpose, would be like an attempt to ask the Lord or whatever supreme deity you believe in to take existence as a whole and try to "dumb it down" for the masses to understand within 2 hours. And like Job or my namesake in those Bible stories, reasoning with the divine is pointless.
Tree of Life uses the film medium to contemplate the universe and try to place a comprehension of the infinite into an intimate human context. If untethered from any kind of story this movie would be more at place in a museum gallery or experimental film festival. I'm sure Brad Pitt being present helped increase the general interest as well. But this film does have a story, it just isn't remotely linear. It subsumes any human conflict or petty struggles of a protagonist to a logic of a divine presence that is incomprehensible. Every moment in this movie is made to make human struggles insignificant compared to a bigger picture. But with that dramatic cloud hanging over the movie, the effect is that the most tender life-affirming and death-accepting moments are given the air of a divine cosmic order. A baby's foot, a rejected patent hearing ruining a man's dream career, a tragic call drowned out by airplane noise, and all forms of nature big and small. These are all weaved into an immense tapestry that makes the only real character the overseer of all this wonder. But the most interesting moment to me was a split second where an elderly father (not close to being a main character) is having a likely fatal stroke just in the corner of the frame. It's so subtle you hardly notice it, because it is part of this vast montage of a mother raising a child as innocently as she can. And the focus is not on the real tragedy of the dying father in the background, but the mother figure shielding the toddler from viewing that tragedy. The film continues and the grandfather is no longer there. We live, we die, some die abruptly, but everything is part of a bigger picture.
When people go to the movies they do not necessarily want to want to get popcorn and a soda and have the experience that is the sensory equivalent to hiking in a park and taking in completely natural surroundings, or even questioning the meaning of everything or the logic of whom may or not have created it. Tree of Life was so moving... using sounds, pictures, spirituality, and solemn performances to take cinema to very unique places.
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