The Tree of Life (2011)

Director: Terrence Malick                              Writer: Terrence Malick
Film Score: Alexandre Desplat                       Cinematography: Emmanuel Lubezki
Starring: Brad Pitt, Sean Penn, Jessica Chastain and Fiona Shaw

The Emperor has no clothes . . . again. And I’m not shy about standing up and telling the world. This is yet another attempt at subverting film conventions for nothing more than the sake of doing it, a pretentious, pompous, self-important attempt at being “artistic.” I came to this film through David Denby’s terrific book Do The Movies Have a Future In it he very astutely identifies what is wrong with the film industry today, but he also mentions a few films made in the last few years that he thought were exceptional. Unfortunately, his choices show him to be in the thrall of the critical camp that believes the more unintelligible a film is the more artistic it must be. Well, I picked all of them up at his recommendation and at this writing it’s no surprise that all of them have eventually found their way to this blog.

The Tree of Life is not a movie. It’s an image collage. And like most collages, which take other people’s pictures from magazines and the Internet and use them to create an “original” piece of art, Terrence Malick has taken images from the Hubble space telescope, BBC’s Planet Earth series, and the International Space Station, thrown them together with some pretentious shots of people doing random things and randomly emoting and called it a film. Fair enough. He certainly has the right to do that, just as I have the right to call it crap. The thing is, this is nothing new. In writing we call it plagiarism. And unlike a film like Christian Marclay’s The Clock, which has a definite purpose in reassembling existing film, Malick apparently hoped no one would notice he was passing off someone else’s imagery as his own.

Experimentation with film imagery has been going on since the birth of cinema. Just one early example is the short film Lot in Sodom from 1933, but I’m sure there are many examples from the silent era as well. There is absolutely nothing new in Malik’s film. The entire piece has a distinct air of artificiality, just as similar attempts in art and music and literature are equally artificial. And this is incredibly ironic for a film that seems to want desperately to connect the characters to the history of life on earth. His painfully crafted shots of characters, like something from a pharmaceutical commercial, feel distinctly unreal. The immaculate houses that they wander through as they emote, do not look lived in. The front yards and streets and summer houses are not their own. They are interlopers masquerading as people, pretending to have emotions and daring us not to be “moved.” But we’re not. Like the blank canvas pretending to be a painting, or the dead silence pretending to be music, The Tree of Life is simply vacuous imagery pretending to be a film.

And I’m critical not because I don’t “get” what Malick is attempting to do. Oh, I get it all right, which is exactly the reason I hate it. I would actually love to see a film in which characters who are so deep in their delusions of god that they eventually become disillusioned at what is in actuality a random and indifferent universe that they so desperately want to impose order upon. But this isn’t that film. I would love to see a film about a family who genuinely struggles to make sense of the death of one of it’s own even decades later. But this isn’t it. And if I want to see gloriously photographed images of space and planet Earth, there are plenty of other vastly more interesting and entertaining documentaries I can watch. At the end of the day, however, there is one positive thing I can take away from The Tree of Life: I never have to watch another Terrence Malick film again.