Valuable Movies: The Tree of Life

No, this is not a scene from The Revenant, but I can see where you'd make that mistake.

After watching Drive and feeling underwhelmed by that movie, I decided I wanted to immediately jump into another movie that I desperately wanted to see from my Need-to-See List. So, in two sittings on two separate days, I watched The Tree of Life, directed by Terrence Malick. It has been over a week since I finished the movie and I've been digesting the experience ever since.

There's some movies I watch where I feel like I have to prepare myself ahead of time. I may not exactly know what the experience will be like, but I do know that it will be totally different from most other movies and a truly unique to the picture I'm about to witness. The Tree of Life is one of those movies I felt like I needed to prepare myself for. Get plenty of sleep the night before, be in a relaxed mood, be mentally aware, all that kind of stuff.

This is definitely an experience of a movie. It does not play by conventional filmmaking rules so you do not examine it like every other conventional movie. It plays by its own rules and you have to follow them, allowing yourself to be led on a mystery. That does not mean I still cannot analyze and critique it for its Artistic and Moral Values, just that I have to frame my critique with a different understanding of what makes a movie bad or good compared to how I critique something like Drive.

Artistic Value (Rating: 4.5)

What is it? I don't know. Welcome to this movie's experience!

Most of my critique and appreciation of this movie deals with the Artistic Value because this is mainly a piece of high visual art. This movie is filmed with tons of fast paced edits cutting to a variety of scenes throughout time and space. We get so many visuals involving water and trees, then cut back to suburban life in 1950s Texas, cut to modern urban architecture, then back to flying views of volcanoes and outer space, and in between the movie stuffs in some glowing ethereal lights like an orange Aurora Borealis.

This movie definitely tries to fit a lot of visuals into the camera shot. Often, there are nice big fishbowl lense shots where the actor is the main focus, but there's tons of scenery around them to add to the atmosphere. This is so that, even if you may not fully understand the point of the visual, you at least know where you are and what is going on around the character. It also helps to establish atmosphere and mood, keeping the audience in a calm sense of awe and wonder.

Here comes the sun (doo-duh-doo-doo)

The cinematography is gorgeous, as are whatever effects were used to create the galactic and prehistoric pieces. There were many shots where I had to wonder whether a special visual effect or a practical effect was used to achieve the image. I like that mystery because that means that at least I felt connected to the movie and felt that this image is real, whether it was created on computer or created by props.

The Tree of Life is visual poetry, which can be both good and bad. A lot of the philosophy and questions that are posed in the movie are done through what you see on screen compared to what you hear spoken. And since it does not strive to particularly answer the questions directly, that adds to the poetic aspect of the final product. The reason why it can be considered bad to be visual poetry is because it is such high art that it can feel almost arrogant or self-confident. If movies are busy trying to impress their audience and speak such lofty philosophical jargon, that can turn people off from appreciating the artistry of the movie. Thankfully, the arrogance is kept low in this movie so that the poetic aspect can still maintain integrity.

Although sometimes it does show off.

I often criticize movies for being slow and too quiet. This criticism stems from a connection with the pace of the movie in question. If I think a movie's pace is too slow, it means that I think a movie is lingering on some visual or some idea much much longer than necessary. The reason it's longer than necessary is because the movie was trying to make some point or feed the audience some sort of information, but once it has accomplished either goal, it continues to linger on the point or image without continuing to develop the story or the characters. So, because The Tree of Life is a slow movie in terms of plot and development, it had a hard task of being slow with good reason while keeping my interesting.

The editing of the movie helped to keep the pacing quick enough to the point of keeping it interesting. The pacing of Drive is one of my criticisms or negative opinions about that particular movie because it made its point and yet lingered far too long. Here in The Tree of Life, even if you do not fully understand everything being said and seen on screen, it gives you enough to grasp what's happening then moves on to continue developing its point or move on to the next point of view. This pacing, especially in the first half, is what kept me engaged and interested in moments where I scratched my head and in normal circumstances may have turned the movie off.

The first half is wonderfully enchanting, with so many various shots and angles that you do not care that you're essentially being dropped smack near the end of the story in the beginning. The characters played by Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain first appear at older stages in their characters' lives, then during the rest of the movie we see scenes of them as young lovers and then as young parents. There are different leaps back and forth in time, almost giving the movie a dream-like quality where the dream is constantly shifting or changing but your mental awareness for the story maintains focus and awareness.

Though you always wonder how your house moves itself to the salt flats.

The second half takes on a more conventional narrative, or more specifically the third quarter of the movie does, which focuses on the childhood of the Sean Penn character. Instead of such dramatic leaps in time, we are treated to a straightforward progression in time and we linger longer on moments and stories that in the first half would've been told in passing images. This is where the movie drags more and actually began to lose me because it clashed so much with the first half. When you're introduced to a unique visual and storytelling style that is full of mystery and poetry, you begin to assimilate that style into your reception of the movie. Then we get dropped back into more standard plot development, even if the cinematography and editing remains somewhat stylized. I think the movie should've stuck to what it was doing, especially since in the final quarter it returns to the highly stylized visuals.

The narrations are also one of the positive and negative attributes of this movie. The narration allows the characters to express their inner thoughts, which is made especially cool when the dialogue is phrased in a way that the character can be speaking internal thoughts about their parent, God, or both. The use of narration also allows the images to continually move in rapid fire motion while maintaining particular focus on developing the character that is narrating. The negative aspect to me, which may seem like a nitpick, is that it's essentially all done in whispers. I cannot really recall any of the narration being spoken at a normal volume level, it was all quiet and raspy. At first, you don't really notice and it keeps you calm, but after so much narration continuously being done at this pitch and volume, it eventually gets grating to listen to. I love Bob Ross, and I enjoy when he does gently whisper, but he also fluctuates his pitch and volume so that it is not constantly at one level like it seemed like this movie was going for.

Moral Value (Rating: 5)

How Brad Pitt hugs all of his children.

Much of this movie's dialogue is like prayer, where the character is alone and communicates to God. They communicate lots of great questions as well as their interpretation of their life experiences based on those questions. We examine what is true love, what is the meaning of suffering, what is the purpose of life and death, what is right and what is wrong, all through tough questions posed by characters in vulnerable moments. Again, the movie does not directly answer the questions, but explores avenues towards answering those questions through the visuals and storytelling.

I found myself relating to a lot of the struggles in the father-son relationship that gets explored in the third quarter of the movie. The son's attempt to understand a tough love father figure, and how that father figure plays into the son's relationship with God, spoke to me directly, as did the boy's struggles when puberty began and the impact that time period had on his relationship with his mother. It was true and genuine, at least in my own viewing of it.

 There are consequences to the negative things that the people do, even if those consequences are not immediate or seen on the surface level. Once people experience these consequences, there is acknowledgement of wrongdoing and repentance, so that they can change for the better. The beautiful thing about the struggles in this movie is that it does involve a happy ending. We experience reconciliation and love at the end after all of the pain and anguish that the characters go through beforehand. This makes the emotional stakes and the suffering of the characters pay off in the end, to me. This also helps to punch up a positive morality in this movie.

...I got nothing. It's just a picture of this movie's family unit.

The MPAA rating for this movie is PG 13, which is only really because of the life experiences that the characters go through. There's images of spousal abuse (mainly verbal) and scenes of the tough physical type of fatherly parenting that we either remember or imagine growing up with in the past. The Sean Penn character, as a boy, goes through puberty and does some wicked acts out of curiosity and malice that he cannot seem to control. There are some images of a man having a seizure and convicts being thrown in police cars, but nothing is explicit or graphic. I can see this movie only really being viewed and enjoyed by adults. Not that there is much that is inappropriate for kids, but only because adults will fully appreciate and grasp the life experience of the characters. Even then, the movie is so different from a standard movie viewing experience, and the quality of the high art poetry is so high, that even some adults may not enjoy sitting through this whole movie. It is strange, challenging, and definitely worth exploring and staying with til the end.

Overall Value Rating: 4.75 out of 5