Review of The Tree of Life (2011) by Mario Z — 06 Oct 2012

It's like Malick's methaphyisical semen smeared all over multiple reels of motion picture.

It is a very noble thing what this man wants to do for his audience. He wishes us to stop being so uptight about everything and just enjoy the beauty of everything, or at least that's what I think he was getting at, this thing is so incoherent you can't be sure of anything. Maybe that's the idea, after all, if you want to say is as trivial as this you need to make it crass and boring, that way apologists can just fend off detractors with the classical "You just don't get it!".

The problem with this film is how painfully boring it is. Presumably, it is made up of multiple streams consciousness(?) of present day Jack, an architect. He remembers growing up in the 50s with his two brothers, his tough-loving and frustrated father and his angelical mother. He relives the painful process of growing up with his authoritarian and repressive father, who I think regrets chosing an utilitarian career of an architect as opposed to making his dream of musicianship a reality, and now wants to make himself believe that it was all worth it by preparing his childrens for the cold and cruel world by discipline, ordering them to show him affection. His approach results in a failure and the boys feel nothing but contempt for him, after all. All of this with very little dialogue and very annoying photography.

A plethora of images of galaxies, nebulas, stars, young earth, swivelling canyons and other such things that one'd normally see in BBC's Wonders Of The Universe (With classical music instead of Brian Cox's soothing voice, no less.), apart from being strikingly beautiful, tell us how insignificant is a life span on this particular dot in the cosmos is compared to the rest of it, but nevertheless is wonderful.

Last but not least are Jack's felliniesque dreamy sequences which make the least number of appereances in the film. At one point Jack is chasing an unknown woman through a desert when he comes across a battered doorway of a house long since gone. He contemplates it and finally wwalks through it. This particular moment in conjecture with a lapse of the Wonders Of The Universe stream where we can se a red giant star nearly devouring a lone planet, I think, carries some significance. Jack is an archictect, that is, a creator of material structures made by humans for humans. So, if all that he creates is for humans and humans are not forever, why does he make anything at all?

I'm certain most people have asked themselves that at any given moment, I think that's why this film is so liked. He preaches to the choir in a way that makes it look like a majestic portrait of human longing for meaning, and everyone dances around it frenetically like the chimps in 2001. But I think it's just an overdone film about something more or less banal with a cinematic style that annoys me very much.