If ever you have the urge to subject yourself to something akin to waterboarding, but don’t have a water board handy, then go see “Tree of Life.”
This Terrence Malick-driven life crusher may very well be the most self-indulgent story (if you can even qualify it as having a story in it) ever put to celluloid.
Perhaps the person who edited the trailer should have directed the movie, because that trailer is compelling. Who could resist Brad Pitt as Mr. O’Brien, his beautiful wife, Mrs. O’Brien (Jessica Chastain), and their strapping young sons in a dusty 1950s-era Waco, Texas, set against flash-forwards of one of the sons all grown up (Sean Penn) with the ultra-modern city of Dallas at his feet? With a great cast, beautiful photography by Emmanuel Lubezki and a dazzling trailer, moviegoers were going to get quite the epic piece of cinema. Instead they got colorful trash.
The O’Brien family is going about its business, raising their sons. The eldest son bears the brunt of dad’s frustration in life, and then takes it out on his siblings. Smash cut to the 1960s and a telegram arrives to announce that the middle son is killed presumably in Vietnam – though you wouldn’t know as there is so little dialogue in this cinematic wasteland that it’s really anybody’s guess.
That’s perhaps the biggest problem: We don’t get to see these great actors acting. Penn in particular is rendered nearly mute – and not for his political propensities, either. The only reason to even consider this modern-day “Ishtar” is to experience Lubezki’s camera work, the lovely sound by Erik Aadahl and the sometimes detailed look through young Jack’s point of view of what it is like to lose one’s innocence. Aside from these moments of pleasure, the audience is forced to spend literally hours watching a family running through sprinklers, feeling the tops of tall grass with their hands, doting on one another, playing with flashlights, wandering through the streets and traipsing through the house without a care in the world.
Want more? Well when the adult Jack (Penn) asks, in younger Jack voiceover no less, how his brother came to him in the first place, Malick decides to take the audience to task and start from the beginning: swirling clouds of rainbow gas that lead to morphing shapes, that lead to swirls of matter and planets and water and swimming life-forms and yes, dinosaurs. Some 20- to 30 minutes later, after the dinosaurs and scenes of frosted-over tundra come to an end (though it felt like an ice age), Lubezki’s camera finally settles on the O’Briens. That the journey ended at the porch of this painfully boring and preening family makes one want to go back in time and live with the dinosaurs.
“Tree of Life” boils down to an allegory of the Book of Job in which the question is put to God: Why do the righteous suffer? In this case, the righteous is any audience member having to endure this film.
“Tree of Life” will have a limited release May 27.
[[In-content Ad]]