So there are movies you watch where the entire theatre gasps at the end and wishes it hadn't ended, and you see people just looking at the screen, not talking. As they file out, they begin to talk about what a great film it was, etc.
THIS DID NOT HAPPEN WHEN WE SAW THE TREE OF LIFE.
Instead, after several people left the theatre to see how long it was going to be (some two and a half painful hours), someone blurted out, "oh, thank god that's over." This pretty much sums up the communal reaction to the film. A group of people sat in a theatre waiting for what was promised- a beautiful masterpiece, a stunning blah blah blah...; instead, what they saw was a lot of volcanoes and gauzy garments and reproducing cells and dinosaurs stepping on other dinosaur's heads, all swirled into some sort of pastiche- yeah, that's what it was, a pastiche. While that was going on there was a story about a family, but most of that was not really told as a story, but rather as another pastiche on top of or simultaneous to the other pastiche.
Oh, it could have been marvelous, I mean, you sort of got the idea from the big whispered philosophies of the mother- there are two kinds of approaches to life... a way of grace and a way of nature, and the wife seemed to be the one who could see these truths, but it didn't matter in the end because they all ended up in some sort of heaven (which was more of a sandbar).
The problem was that it wasn't marvelous. It has the epic feel of 2001 A Space Odyssey, but unlike its predecessor, it really doesn't work. If you've never seen Stanley Kubric's film, it's worth a try. It has at least a few memorable moments and if you get the whole evolution of man into ubermensch kind of thing going on, well, that helps.
But The Tree of Life fails to reach this level of coherence. It's sort of like a mash up of A Space Odyssey with Legends of a Fall and A River Runs Through It and a National Geographic episode on the earth/life. If you try (as my fellow theatre sufferers did) to put all this into some sort of coherent message or plot, forget it.
The plot is made incoherent by an overwrought sense of artiness that fails to help bring anything into focus. We learn a great deal about one of the sons in the family, and a bit about another, who, I think... died in the first plot scene, but otherwise, nothing. In fact, one of the brothers (not Cain or Abel) is so left out of anything, he is pretty much just a third entity without any purpose for being there. Our main character, later grown up to be Sean Penn who I think is an architect, is the Cain type, who wants to kill his father, and tortures his younger brother (a universal theme), only to lose him later on. Working into this loosely told story is a constant questioning of God and a reverberating reference to the book of Job, where God asks where were you when I created the world, and the characters in the movie turn this around, asking, where were you, God?
But as they experience this pain, they are supposed to come to see such questions as human, all too human, and if you can get past the pain, you'll see that it's all part of the circle of life. This kind of message was clearer in Lion King.
While you are trying to piece all this together, there are other boys in the neighborhood who get plopped into the action, including a kid with a patch of hair missing, like he'd been burned, but we never know how or why or whether it really matters to anything else in the movie.
Now, as we watched this mess, my wife was sure I would walk out of the theatre saying, wow, that was awesome. She was very relieved to hear me say that there goes two and a half hours I'll never get back. And I was not alone. Whoever writes these reviews of such movies with such glowing reviews should have their critics licences revoked. To be fair, there were some beautiful shots in the movie, and some film student will probably be amazed at the use of light or see the tremendous cinemetography, but if you are looking for a coherent work of art, steer away from this mess!
