The Tree Of Life is an ambitious film about a lot of different things. It starts out with a quote from the book of Job, which for those unaware, is a part of The Bible which discusses God's punishment to those who don't deserve it. It continues with a short speech from Jessica Chastain on the two paths available to the people inahbiting Earth, the way of Nature, and the way of Grace, each to be resembled in the two parents of the family that we're about to follow.
After an opening scene in which the parents find out that one of their sons have died, we get sent into a flurry of images meant to resemble the creation of the Universe through big bang, followed by images depicting the first cellular life forms taking place and so forth. We see the Universe and Earth develop into the world we know it as today for about half an hour, and this is the part that usually pisses people of. It's honestly quite beautiful, and while it might not be part of the plot of the film, it isn't something uncommon in more artsy-films. About forty minutes into the film we return to the Texas family and we reach the main story of the film. The parents are having their first baby and from this point we literally follow the lifes of this family until finally seeing them move away from the house that the kids grew up in, all in the same car.
I really don't know where to go after describing the plot of the film. I absolutely loved the film and it's one of the best cinematic experiences I've had this year. Like the afterglow of some drug, it has stayed on my mind almost constantly since I finished it, leaving a feeling I can't quite describe as anything other than joy and happiness. It saddens me to see so many negative opinions surrounding this movie with the word pretentious being tossed around in almost every criticism of it. Having people explicitly state that they hate a film is always odd to me, seeing how myself, and I believe many others, will often chalk their dislike of a piece of art onto something else than the art being bad. "Maybe I didn't get it? Maybe it'll grow on me? Maybe there's a time and place for it, and I'll come to appreciate it in a couple of years?". But with The Tree Of Life, people have already given up on it.
This is why I don't think I'll ever recommend this film to anyone. The Tree Of Life seems to be an incredibly personal experience for every person that decides to watch the film, be it an experience of anger, detesting the film, or an experience like mine, with nothing but positive opinions of the work.
Seeing the three boys growing up, seeing them play together, creating their memories and building the life that they were to live for the rest of their days in those small moments was incredible to me and achieved something that I believe Boyhood from last year attempted to do: bringing us back into a life that we might have forgotten that we had and loved, reviving those memories that now feel distant and almost foreign but which still remain in the back of our heads.
The Tree Of Life is ambitious, and I can't say that I believe Terrence Malick actually succeeded in making an all-encompassing film that captures the essence of life better than anyone has ever done before, or better than anyone ever will, but there's something here, something that grabs me so deep inside and invokes feelings I didn't know that film could invoke inside of me. I want to cry, I want to scream, I want to hug the nearest family member I can see because I suddenly remembered all those times when I could have but never did.
Malick's most admirable feat with this film is, in my opinion, how it puts a perspective on how small we are. It makes you attached to this run-of-the-mill family only to end the film at this almost religious climax with a scene which I assume is meant to be a metaphor for reaching heaven and the after-life, but it suddenly feels so real and puts everything in such a perspective. Seeing the meteor crash into Earth and creating a shockwave that probably extinguished all kinds of life on the planet at the time and having it look like a drop in the ocean that is outer space, while it most likely was the biggest event of their lifes for everything sentient on Earth at the time, is a wake-up call.
The film ends and I see my face reflected in the dark computer screen. I'm not part of the family that I lived with for the past two hours, I'm me. Normal-guy Anton, who needs to go to bed because he has work in the morning. Everything feels so miniscule, so unimportant, life is much bigger than making enough money to go out to drink with your friends on the 25th. Life is more than writing good reviews about the coolest films out there and hearing the most obscure music.
Maybe I wasn't as mesmerized by everything that happened, maybe I wasn't completely locked in to everything that was going on or even incredibly invested in some of the scenes, but in the end I still felt like I've taken a huge kick in the gut and it's a feeling I can't shake. Maybe I'm overrating my experience for various reasons or maybe this film really touched me on a spiritual level, in a way that no other film ever has succeeded in doing? Who knows. It is after all just a film. A film about life, death, religion, God, the after life, Earth, space and the Universe, and I'll never be able to put into words, what this movie made me feel and think.
The Tree Of Life [2011]
dir. Terrence Malick
8.5/10
Anton Öberg Sysojev
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