What do you get when you take two of the best American actors in Hollywood: Brad Pitt and Sean Penn, an offbeat director (Terence Malick) and a story about the death of a child in 1950s Texas combined with the allegory of the creation of the universe and the questioning of God and man's place in the universe? You've certainly got something grand in scale. This would be the best characterization of Terence Malick's truly epic contemplation of life in Tree of Life.
If you are looking for plot, then you have come to wrong movie. This surreal film is non-linear and fragmented in nature much like most people's memories, as well as the concept of time. It goes back and forth between middle aged Jack O'Brien, who is an architect (Sean Penn), and his remembrance of his childhood back in Texas. Throughout most of the film, you can see Sean Penn's character metaphorically searching for his brother who drowns at the tender age of 19 as the director shows shots of him walking up and down the beach. In the middle of the movie, there are images of the creation of the Universe combined with Jack's own whispered existential questions. Malick manages to bridge cosmic connections between these creation shots and the intimate portrayal of the Texas family with the harsh, violent tempered father (Brad Pitt) and the passive, permissive mother (Jessica Chastain).
One of the best parts of the movie would definitely have to be the visuals. Tree of Life's camera work, comprised mostly of lyrical longer shots coupled with quick, jump cuts, is breathtaking. The creation scenes, the dinosaur scenes, and all of the other visual displays, which weren't made with the use of CGI, creates a movie with the scale and scope of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and Disney's Fantasia while the Midwestern home scenes display an haunting intimacy of a brooding family drama like Mystic River or Road to Perdition.
The sound work is also spectacular. The film's use of a classical score, much like the score in 2001: A Space Odyssey reinforces the film's grand visuals. Secondly, the voice-overs, which echo Jack O'Brien's philosophical questions about the universe, add to the creation of the cosmos scenes as these child's whispers in the human-less void establish man's own search for meaning and for God in a world and a chaotic universe, which existed before us and will exist without us. Without this voiceover work, we would have to bridge between the epic and the intimate.
Brad Pitt's portrayal of the violent tempered father is worth noting. Much like in Inglorious Basterds he proves to be quite adept at playing the cruel Southern man. However, he also textures his performance so that although he seems cruel he has a humanity that is also present. Jessica Chastain, who is seventeen years his junior, manages to temper his vinegar with her own unique sweetness. Her beauty and her jubilant youth helps us through the more difficult portions of the movie.
Overall, this is a movie well worth seeing. Although many people may find it exactly an easy movie to watch due to its non-linear and surreal nature, it is a movie that asks fundementally important questions and leaves the viewer to ask their own questions. It has an introspectiveness that is matched by few contemporary movies: mainstream or indie. It also left me feeling like I had just sat through a symphony instead of watching a movie. I would recomend this movie to people who love film and for people who are willing to ask themselves philsophical questions.
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