Man I feel sorry for the big league critics that actually get paid to write reviews and have some expectation people will read them…wait, no I don’t. I’d love to be those guys. However, I will say that every once and a while a movie comes along that is so hard to review, I’m stumped as to what to say about it. Tree of Life is one of those movies.
Actually, I’m recommending it but not for everyone. There’s a lot of people out there that will absolutely hate this movie (in the NY independent theater I saw it in, the old school NY, Woody Allen crowd that likes to pretend they like art booed it at the end), but a select–and selective–few are going to be floored by its contrasting mix of personal drama and grand sweep. The personal drama is supplied by the story of one Texas family’s (led by a shockingly good Brad Pitt) growing pains in the 1950’s and the grand sweep is supplied by trips into the afterlife and the creation of the universe complete with some very soulful dinosaurs. I’m telling you, if the idea of 2001 a Space Odyssey slamming up hard against an episode of Mad Men set entirely in the Draper home sounds like something you can’t pass up, this is your movie.
What Works: Oh man lol, I shouldn’t even break the movie into parts like this. It’s not really even a movie so much as a visual poem where each scene bleeds into other scenes and beautiful imagery provides most of the dialogue. I would say Brad Pitt’s performance definitely delivers and he creates a real character in a Terrence Malick movie (something no one has truly done since Martin Sheen in Badlands). Also, the battle between brutal nature (Pitt’s authoritarian father and the cosmos) and grace (Jessica Chastain’s barely verbal mother and humanity) works better than it has any right to, showing us how that battle wages in the family’s oldest living son years later.
What Doesn’t Work: Whew…I have no clue. Some viewers will say the movie is pretentious (a blanket term whenever someone doesn’t like an ambitious film) but the sheer scope of it will of course make some feel that way. I will say that the same thing the movie does could have been achieved with about twenty to thirty minutes of footage shaved off. It doesn’t need to be quite as long for us to get the message and all of the beautiful imagery.
What I Would Have Done Differently: I’m not sure I’m confident enough as a writer and an artist to make something this abstract or poetic. My hands touching this movie would have changed it into something less successful…but I still could have edited a bit.