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REVIEW – ‘Tree of Life’: Decoding mysteries of life, death

This review is an attempt to make sense of a movie that ordinary viewers may find puzzling and ambitious, even pretentious and exasperating. Which is how people react to works that are personal and philosophical. Many movies today would rather that audiences leave their brains at home before going to the cineplex. But Terrence Malick's "The Tree of Life" demands otherwise. It is a thoughtful magnum opus that requires careful attention to details and an eye for the big picture—for full understanding and appreciation.

At an official screening of this much-touted film, a few fairly intelligent ladies were ready to watch the movie in its entirety with this writer, seduced by the reports of its winning the grand prize at last summer's Cannes Film Festival and by the casting of Brad Pitt. Then one by one before the movie is halfway through, they started to leave the theater, mystified (read: bored, confused).

Why? Could be, the film has no plot. It is experimental. Stylistically, its free form recalls Kubrick, Tarkovsky, and Antonioni. It has a dream-like quality, whether it is showing the hypnotic beauty of nature or the mundane reality of family life.

The picture is book-ended by an amorphous image of a slow-growing light, a flame. In the beginning, there is darkness, then light. Is it the alpha and omega of all existence? Is it the birth of the sun? Is it God? The film ends with this same image.

For over half an hour, the first full sequence is a series of shots that seems to have been borrowed from National Geographic or the Discovery Channel except that photography here is truly professional and polished. Images dazzle the eye—of nature and light in no particular order: the macroscopic vistas of the universe, the Milky Way, total solar eclipse, meteors floating in space, then the microscopic abstractionisms of cells and organisms. Nature is calm, nature is finicky, then it throws a mighty tantrum.

The sequence continues with underwater sights then images of boiling lava, a volcano spewing awesome smoke and ash. When this long nature spectacle winds up, we see a strange, quaint animal rising and moving away. Turns out to be a dinosaur, which clues us in on the idea that the earth is young, at least in the cosmic sense. It is about to harbor new life forms: plants, trees, animals, and finally people. As in the Genesis.

The titular tree is a metaphor for all these. It grows, it is life-giving, and it is beautiful. It may also die. An early scene shows a father and mother admiring their new-born. The tree of life begins. There is birth. Trees (and plants) are recurring sights in the picture—just outside the house and in the neighborhood. The father (Pitt) is shown teaching his boys how to plant, and later leading a tree-planting activity. The mother (Jessica Chastain) has given birth to two other boys.

The father puts Brahms on the turntable and later plays Bach's famous Toccata and Fugue in D Minor on the grand organ while growing son stands by his side, engaged. Stanley Kubrick treated his audience to classical strains as well but in addition, he used popular tunes that defined the era. Malick steers clear of '50s pop music to avoid distractions and also to suggest the timelessness of his story.

Not all father-son concerns are refined, naturally. Father is shown teaching his boy how to box. He is a martinet and, in a moment of anger, lunges at the son at the dinner table. Like nature, the father can be quiet and giving, but he can also be rough, cruel and volcanic. For her part, the mother offers the boys succor and consolation, a nurturing element. In any case, both parents are tender and loving but in the "tree of life," they have separate characteristics.

In only his fifth film, Mallick has chosen this small family of five (parents and three sons) to tell his human story of the tree of life, rooted in a Texas suburb in the early '50s when the world was innocent, naïve, and simple, as though nothing earth-shaking was happening. Malick has a reputation for meticulousness and perfectionism, no wonder this Oxford and Harvard graduate and philosophy professor, former script writer and script doctor, and writer for Newsweek, Life, and The New Yorker has made only five films since 1973, or an average of one film per decade, the most successful being "The Thin Red Line," released in 1998.

The story of the O'Brien family led by the father (Pitt) and narrated by the now-grown eldest son (Sean Penn) reportedly is also the story of Malick's early life. Penn as a boy is played by a non-actor Hunter McCracken, who is nonetheless highly effective. In any case, the filmmaker captures the timeless quality of the era—in the characters' relationships, their surroundings, and the brooding quietude of the family business. The wide, well-manicured lawn, still visible in American neighborhoods in these more complicated times, offered children and families a place to romp on and have fun. Water hoses and swings then instead of PS3 and mobile phones. But they had bliss.

Then death strikes. Sorrow, stirrings of discontent, danger. What could the hurt boy be thinking when after a clash with the old man, he is standing by the family car with the father lying and partly hidden under it, fixing the engine beneath? Could he be contemplating mischief? Grave, destructive conduct, such as may be expected from a young human volcano seething with growing resentment for a person he loves? Nothing untoward may arise from this moment but it portents of danger. An early scene shows the family grieving and another shows a carefree day in a community swimming pool marred by the accidental drowning of a neighborhood boy.

It must be mentioned that Penn's character pops in an out of the picture—in the present or the afterlife, whatever. First we see him in his modern glass-and-metal skyscraper office alone, pensive and looking forlorn. Later, we see him walking on a desert emotionless and then joining his family and the old community on a beach, silent and mysterious as though in a communal sleep-walk or maybe a reunion in heaven, the beach being merely a symbolic setting with its earthly boundary and water that stretches to eternity.

What to make of it? I would rather not venture into the deeper, more spiritual intentions of the filmmaker, but the images tie them all together to state or reinforce the themes and create mood. More than anything, the film is a visual show. Images like those of wind-blown window curtains and the mother floating midair are suffused with lyricism. Voiceover narration is so soft, so low it is often unintelligible, almost inaudible. It takes effort to understand the murmured words. When we are finally allowed to get the message loud and clear, we get the drift. "Life goes on." What is important in life is love; otherwise it will be just a series of images or nothings (I am paraphrasing here).

These two ideas give weight to what the entire film and the random and seemingly unrelated images are all about—the deadly beauty and mystery of life and nature, and the dynamics of love and family. Fifty, a hundred years, from now, Terrence Malick's "A Tree of Life" will still stand as a solid cinematic achievement, like a sturdy, majestic tree that grows taller and bigger with the years.