Is 'Tree of Life' One of the Greatest Films Ever Made?

[JLTucker]

I like to think so. It's certainly the best thing I've seen in at least a decade.

It's an emotionally exhaustive visual dissertation on what it means to be human, how life and death affects us all, and how insignificant we are in the grand scheme of things. Trauma and circumstance affects our memories and how we perceive life. It invokes all of the questions that many ponder when a loved one has died. Why did this happen? Why did God let it happen? Did he know? Where was he? Yes, the movie purports that God exists and you can interpret one scene as God answering the grief stricken mother. But what makes this beautiful is that even a staunch atheist such as myself can marvel at what the movie is trying to say during this scene: we all share the same emotions, regardless if we're religious.

How many of you have seen this extremely divisive movie? What are your thoughts on it?

[Stark]

I have a lot of thoughts on this film, because I found it very engaging and provoking. However, one of the elements I found particularly compelling was the perspective of the film; I feel that it is framed as a series of reminicses of childhood by a man well into middle age, where memories don't follow a rational path and often have little or no context. The personal perspective, the very subjective and self-mythologised nature of what we see as we watch poor old Sean Penn struggle with his past really recalls the way we tend to think of our own pasts; not a DVD box set, but more of a clip show. Isolated vignettes that mean nothing to anyone but us, and which the very act of remembering has changed over the decades.

[CaptHawkeye]

I felt the same way about it, it was largely focused around a man's mid-life crisis stemming from his family's buried pains over the death of his brother. I have trouble putting that awesome "formation of the universe" scene in context with the rest of the movie though.

Something about Terrence Mallick's films I really like. I particularly liked his tendency in the Thin Red Line to randomly inject a line of character's thoughts in the middle of a normal conversation between people.

[JLTucker]

I felt the same way about it, it was largely focused around a man's mid-life crisis stemming from his family's buried pains over the death of his brother. I have trouble putting that awesome "formation of the universe" scene in context with the rest of the movie though.

I see it as either God answering her or she imagining what his answer would be to her questions about why her son died: "Lord. Why? Where were you? Did you know? Who are we to you? Answer me."

Basically, his answer is that he created the universe, the earth, and that led to the creation of her and her family. Then we see that death has been around since the beginning of life, which is why the dinosaurs are there. I've also read that there's a direct mirroring of that scene with Jack and his father. Jack has a chance to harm his father but gives him a reprieve like that one dinosaur did for the other.

Something about Terrence Mallick's films I really like. I particularly liked his tendency in the Thin Red Line to randomly inject a line of character's thoughts in the middle of a normal conversation between people.

It's funny, really. After seeing The Thin red Line, The New World, and Tree of life, I went back and saw Days of Heaven for the first time. I didn't like it. It obviously has his stamp on it, but his craft wasn't nearly as honed then as it is now. It wasn't special. It was quite boring, actually.

[Ziggy Stardust]

To be perfectly honest, I thought "Tree of Life" was a gigantic steaming pile of overly pretentious shit. Essentially, all style, no substance. A lot of pretty camera-work and some technical niceties covering up an incredibly shallow plot and almost banal grade-school caliber message about the "human condition" (or whatever you want to call it). He has an infuriatingly low opinion of the audience's general intelligence (the movie very repetitively smacks you over the head with certain themes and messages, and he repeatedly breaks one of the first rules of filmmaking - 'show not tell' - with idiotic voice-over narrations telling you how ERMAGOD HOW SAD all the characters are. I mean, when there is a 5 minute close-up of Sean Penn looking sad out a window, why do we need a voiceover of Sean Penn's voice saying "I'm sad"?), and it was really the quality of the acting and Emmanuel Lubezski's cinematography that made any of it at all enjoyable to watch.

Visually, the movie was amazing (thanks to Lubezski), and Brad Pitt did a great job carrying the childhood flashback scenes. Otherwise, I thought it was a painfully dull and uninteresting movie that Malick overproduced the living shit out of almost to the point of ruining some great acting performances.

[JLTucker]

Do you think the film is a meditation on Jack's childhood, Ziggy? Perhaps the voice overs are his way of using meta-cognition to help him come to grips with not only his past but closure regarding his brother's death? From my experience discussing the movie, it seems most people I talk to who hate it just haven't taken to time to understand it or can't (I'm not saying you don't understand it). I've yet to hear someone say Malick repeatedly broke "show don't tell," especially when heaps of moviegoers couldn't connect the creation sequence to the narrative or even the climax on the beach at the end. You're the first to say he told but didn't show.

What do you find shallow about the plot?

Edited for clarification

[Stark]

Lol, thread shitted on post four.

HAWX, I see the universe business as putting the meaning of what we're shown in context. Our parents are our models for god; god created the universe. As everything in the universe is shaped by past events stretching back for millions of years, so are we shaped by our parents who were shaped by theirs. Some of the most compelling scenes are the brief looks into Brad Pitts own childhood clip show - showing the landscape that shaped his bitter and insecure self and showing that others can perceive this in the way he lives his life. Not only that he's a sad person, but that people can literally see his bible-toting dad looming over him.

For me, one of the elements that really helped me engage with the film was the use of texture. The film (and the landscape) of his childhood is bright, washed out, pristine. As he grows older and becomes more aware and less naive, we see the world more as it really is. In a spiritual way this worldliness or cynicism is shown to draw him away from the meaningful things in life so much that by the time we find him in middle age he's completely unable to connect to the world at all.

[JLTucker]

For me, one of the elements that really helped me engage with the film was the use of texture. The film (and the landscape) of his childhood is bright, washed out, pristine. As he grows older and becomes more aware and less naive, we see the world more as it really is. In a spiritual way this worldliness or cynicism is shown to draw him away from the meaningful things in life so much that by the time we find him in middle age he's completely unable to connect to the world at all.

That's good insight. When I read this I was reminded of Older Jack waking up on the anniversary of his brother's death and being withdrawn from his wife or girlfriend. There's a shot of her where she has that look on her face that screams "Here we go again. He can't seem to deal with this."

[Stark]

We're shown him being totally unresponsive to his actual life, and drawn by the call of other things he has neglected. I think this is clearly because despite his childish resistance and hatred, he followed his fathers lesson rather than his mothers; his reaffirmation of his mother's positive morality is shown to be a profound thing.

There are several sequences in his childhood where he is shown being told to ignore or ignoring things - this is the 'out of the house' element to the way he was raised. Don't look at or consider these things, he is told. Unfortunately he ends up not considering the things that were really important to him.

[Flagg]

I saw it a few months ago and while I liked it, it didn't impress me much since I barely remember what it was about. Maybe it needed more asplosions and Batmen.

[Stark]

Maybe you're just too young.

I found the strong religious symbolism in the movie to be very interesting, because everything is shown from Sean Penns' perspective. This explains not just the changing tone and film style as he grows up, but the mythologised things we see; can his mother really fly? Does he really have memories from before he was born? Or are these memories that have been shaped over fifty years of life, and reflect more about him than the past? This experiential perspective is pretty good stuff; in the film's emotional climax he imagines his mother literally set free by his acceptance of her life lessons and morality, and is this some magical afterlife or simply the way he expresses his own internal struggles?

[CaptHawkeye]

I took the interpretation that the scenes were his own thoughts and ruminations on the past. At the height of his depression he fantasizes scenes about the end of the Earth and the sun fizzling out. I think he sort of realized after that point that his father's self-destructive loathing and distrust of the world thus leads to nothing. You can be part of the solution or part of the problem.

[Stark]

I liked how understated his acceptance of the positive morality was; he calls his dad. He apologises. He cares for others. And that simply, he is put back in touch with the emotional and spiritual life of his youth. Had he been punishing himself, by imagining his dead mother as in purgatory for her 'failure' to lead him to live his life well? Is this why he imagines her set free by god? Its powerful stuff?

[madd0ct0r]

so this film is actually worth watching then? I kept seeing it in the discount dvd piles, and was carefully steering the wife away from 2 and half hours of cliche emotion.

[Stark]

You know those people who come into the middle of a discussion of a complex issue and say 'oh, so is it good'? That's you. As the very first post says, people love it and people hate it. Try forming an independent idea, if that's within your capabilities.

Tucker has told me in the past that people (well, tryhard atheists) knee-jerk against the 'religious' imagery in the film, but I'm not convinced any such imagery exists. Poor old Sean Penn definitely thinks of some strange fucking things, but he's in his 50s thinking about his childhood. Since his mother can't actually fly and this is simply the childish sense-impression he has retained from an infancy he barely remembers, why should we accept any of the other 'religious' elements of the work as such? Is it even important if angels really exist, or that he crosses over into a spiritual realm containing everything that has shaped him? What's important, in my view, is why he believes these things, why he's having these experiences, and what that says about him - and through him, all of us.

[madd0ct0r]

no, it's not that. I didn't know anything about the film, having assumed it was usual rom-com schlock, and wasn't even sure if this was a real discussion, or someone starting off with irony and the rest following into satire. I'll check it out.

[JLTucker]

no, it's not that. I didn't know anything about the film, having assumed it was usual rom-com schlock, and wasn't even sure if this was a real discussion, or someone starting off with irony and the rest following into satire. I'll check it out.

How did you come to the conclusion that it may be a rom com and that my OP was laced with irony?

[Ziggy Stardust]

Do you think the film is a meditation on Jack's childhood, Ziggy?

I didn't interpret it as a meditation of childhood, per se. At least, rather I felt that the film's focus on childhood was a metaphor for memory, innocence, spirituality, etc. I at least found the film's message to be far more concerned with the nature of spirituality than strictly about childhood.

Perhaps the voice overs are his way of using meta-cognition to help him come to grips with not only his past but closure regarding his brother's death?

I'm not sure what you mean by "meta-cognition" in this particular context. In any case, the voice-over would only act that way if they added to the story in any appreciable way. The problem was that they didn't ... there was nothing in those voice-overs that any reasonable intelligent audience member wouldn't already understand. It felt as if they were added in at the last moment because they thought the movie might be too confusing without them. Are you familiar with the movie "Blade Runner" and the difference between the theatrical release and director's cut? The theatrical release had an unnecessary voice-over appended by the studio, and in many ways it is similar to the voice-overs in "Tree of Life:" they are not only giving you information that can be easily gleaned by the character's actions, but it serves to actively distract from the visual aspect of storytelling, which is the movie's strongest suit anyway.

I've yet to hear someone say Malick repeatedly broke "show don't tell," especially when heaps of moviegoers couldn't connect the creation sequence to the narrative or even the climax on the beach at the end. You're the first to say he told but didn't show.

I know I'm not the only one who thought that, I've seen a couple of reviews that more or less agreed with me, but in general we are in the minority in having disliked it. And though I know this is a meaningless appeal to popularity but hey, David Lynch didn't like it either.

----------------------------------------------------

Lol, thread shitted on post four.

Go fuck yourself. The OP is phrased as a question, and I answered it honestly. Just because you don't agree with my views on the film doesn't mean the thread is "shitted on." If you disagree with me, you can just address the particulars of that instead, or just ignore me entirely. Little smug one-liners shit on the discussion far more then dissension.

[JLTucker]

Lol, thread shitted on post four.

Go fuck yourself. The OP is phrased as a question, and I answered it honestly. Just because you don't agree with my views on the film doesn't mean the thread is "shitted on." If you disagree with me, you can just address the particulars of that instead, or just ignore me entirely. Little smug one-liners shit on the discussion far more then dissension.

His problem with your post, and mine as well, is that it contained nothing but vitriol and exaggerations. You offered few examples to back up your criticisms. There wasn't much to respond to.

I'm not sure what you mean by "meta-cognition" in this particular context. In any case, the voice-over would only act that way if they added to the story in any appreciable way. The problem was that they didn't ... there was nothing in those voice-overs that any reasonable intelligent audience member wouldn't already understand. It felt as if they were added in at the last moment because they thought the movie might be too confusing without them.

By "meta-cognition," I mean that Older Jack is voicing his thoughts as a way to help guide himself . I'm sure many do it when they are learning something new, especially at school. By voicing our thought process, we can gain a new understanding. Older Jack is learning.

As for throwing in voice overs at the last minute, I believe that's simply false. Malick has been doing voice overs forever. It's there in The Thin Red Line and The New World. I want to say from my vague recollection that it happens in Days of Heaven as well. It's purposeful and there most certainly wasn't studio meddling because this movie didn't even get a wide release. Therefore, there would be no need to dumb things down to placate the masses. It's his style.

Also, I want to ask again: What do you find shallow about the plot?

[Stark]

Go fuck yourself. The OP is phrased as a question, and I answered it honestly. Just because you don't agree with my views on the film doesn't mean the thread is "shitted on." If you disagree with me, you can just address the particulars of that instead, or just ignore me entirely. Little smug one-liners shit on the discussion far more then dissension.

Hey shitbag, its only a 'one liner' when you snip the rest of the post out.

Frankly, I have no interest in engaging with your ideas, which is why ignored them and preferred to respond to others constructively. Since you resort to meaningless anecdotes and 'I read a review once', I have literally never met anyone who didn't hate this movie. The only people I've spoken to who engaged with the film are online. Luckily, I'm happy to form my own response to things, and I'm just sad it took so long for Tucker to convince me to watch it. He badgered me for months!

[Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba]

i'm late to this thread because i barely go on sdn anymore and I really need to get to fucking bed but stark prodded me so I thought I'd add what thoughts I have that aren't already summed up here

i will take my absolute bone tiredness as license to be as pretentious as i fucking like and i won't edit anything (this movie also produces strong feelings in me so there's that). how much any of this will actually relate to the movie or be coherent in any real sense will be for someone else to decide while i try to make it through class tomorrow and have dinner with my uncle and aunt without them cottoning to the fact that i am a queer homeless druggie (though i promise this review was written sober)

what's striking about most of malick's films, i think, is the way they use subjectivity, cutting to characters' thoughts, imaginations, flowing through conversations that have a certain level of unreality because the different characters are understood as actors in each others' minds, and contrast it against the transcendental, the nature all around them that they're only momentarily aware of but still subsumes them, usually bookending any individual character's story or moments of importance in their limited lives and perspectives

what's striking about tree of life in particular is that it's one of the few that focuses all of that into one character, as opposed to wandering between a few people's heads as his others tend to. like stark said, what's so unique about it is the way that it portrays memory, and how we remember and try to fit our memories to make sense of things and make it seem like there's some purpose or lesson or theme to our lives. it doesn't have dialogue, really, only characters speaking things to him as he remembers them, it doesn't have scenes so much as moments.

is the movie inherently religious? yes, i really think it is and you can't strip that from it. the movie constantly moves through penn's head, and as a meditation on death and his mind, it's about the brevity of human life. that's part of what i think the amazing universe-creation scene is about (when the bell chimes and it cuts to the galaxy edge-on as lacrimosa is first sung, it's one of the few movie moments that can still produce a physical reaction in me. i cannot watch that scene without getting a lump in my throat). the mother asks who they are, who she is, who humanity is to God, and to an extent we see just how limited our lives are, how small and brief in the context of this truly vast and incomprehensible and sublime tapestry that we struggle to figure out what the colour of the fiber over next to us is (does this analogy even make sense???)

but in that scene, to an extent, and in the ending, the movie promises salvation from that, that we can be emancipated from our tiny subjective worlds so completely determined by processes we had no control over from the evolution of our bodies and neocortexes to our mom's diet while we were in the womb to our parents and surroundings growing up. he manages to transcend and escape the pain and trauma that defined him. it promises that we can reach out to the infinite and actually really touch something, that we're privileged to really actually know this universe and somebody up there likes us

and i frankly don't believe that any of those things are true, and i think you can't just evaluate those as 'well these are only his subjective experiences' because it's by his personal transcendence of his brother's death that the reward of the movie comes about. i really don't think you can escape the profoundly christian nature of it and if there is no big light shining down that he can walk out of his cave to see, well

there isn't

is it beautiful? by god yes it is beautiful. those flickering moments at the start and before the universe sequence, when you stare into that red ripple and it's equally a cave and a fire and pretty clearly a vagina and this isn't just me and in some way you know that it's the source of it all, i felt all the movie was trying to say with just an abstract image

and can we still take some kind of ethics away from it? well, yeah. because the thing about his father is that, of course, in a way he was right. but in the end there will always be someone fiercer and luckier and harder than you. and if there isn't, you will get old and then there will be and you will be eaten. at some point you will lose your grip on the rope. so in the end your choices really are to let go, either by suicide like his brother, or, maybe even momentarily or ephemerally or illusory as it is, to try to give yourself up into it like he does at the end, love what you have and what you lack. a saying i'm often given to when something traumatic happens is 'what is a man but a particular set of scars'. this is a movie that communicates, profoundly and quite absolutely and more beautifully and singularly than very few others, that you can be baptised and escape from the sinewed canvas of your damage and be reborn, soft and pure and almost weightless. i dunno, i'm going to go all in on my hipster tangent here and reference another man who found transcendence in nature, a transcendence that i don't believe in but would really like to sometimes

'Is it a dream?
Nay but the lack of it the dream,
And failing it life's lore and wealth a dream
And all the world a dream'

haha the sun's up and the birds are singing on this end

peace guys

[JLTucker]

Tucker has told me in the past that people (well, tryhard atheists) knee-jerk against the 'religious' imagery in the film, but I'm not convinced any such imagery exists. Poor old Sean Penn definitely thinks of some strange fucking things, but he's in his 50s thinking about his childhood. Since his mother can't actually fly and this is simply the childish sense-impression he has retained from an infancy he barely remembers, why should we accept any of the other 'religious' elements of the work as such? Is it even important if angels really exist, or that he crosses over into a spiritual realm containing everything that has shaped him? What's important, in my view, is why he believes these things, why he's having these experiences, and what that says about him - and through him, all of us.

Well, my thinking is that because the mother is religious, she questions God and her faith, and that results in the creation of the universe, and there's a scene in the afterlife (my interpretation), it's shows how death affects a person's religious conviction. Then you have Sean Penn ask questions like "When did I first come to you?" or something like that.

[Stark]

Oh sure, because the characters are religious. You can't have a film like this get inside the experiential mechanism of their life and self image without exploring their beliefs. I just don't get the idea that the movie is 'bad' because its about a person who has 'religious' experiences or is 'unrealistic'. TBH I took the structure of the opening to be a statement against the empty religious convictions of the mother's community

[JLTucker]

Oh sure, because the characters are religious. You can't have a film like this get inside the experiential mechanism of their life and self image without exploring their beliefs. I just don't get the idea that the movie is 'bad' because its about a person who has 'religious' experiences or is 'unrealistic'. TBH I took the structure of the opening to be a statement against the empty religious convictions of the mother's community

Ah. I was speculating on AIM that if the atheist wankers on this forum saw it, they'd hate it because the movie has positive religious messages.

[Stark]

Tucker, can you talk more about your views on how his mothers faith (or not) was central to the universe? Are you speaking figuratively (ie, Sean Penns universe) or are you saying that it creates the space in which the film takes place?