Terrence Malick joins Brad Pitt, Sean Penn and Jessica Chastain to talk about life, God, guilt and everything.
The double movement of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy (the exploration of being in time and in turn of the times of being) finds, in ‘The Tree of Life’, a beautiful reflection in its bipolar structure, which tends to match the flows between the intimate and the cosmic. As a college student, Terrence Malick left his doctoral thesis on Heidegger unfinished, and it seems he has spent 30 years finishing it off in the form of a vaguely metaphysical poem about the origins of time, or about what it means to start telling a story when you barely there is light that brings us out of the darkness.
The overblown ambition of the film, which was born with the masterpiece label etched on its forehead, is likely to undermine its goals. When ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ (1968) embarked on an astral journey into the future riding on the back of transcendence, Kubrick’s icy style managed to freeze his claims in an unfathomable mystery. The beautiful images of the melancholic-mystical segment of ‘The Tree of Life’ fail to crystallize into any enigma, they do not know how to exist by themselves without depending excessively on their earthly manifestation, which is where Malick puts all the meat on the grill.
It is easier to tell the story of God than to convince atheists that God exists. And Malick probably manages to convince us of this with the simple story of a typically American family in the Eisenhower era, told through the eyes of a child growing up. There are few surprises in the story (the authoritarian patriarch is really a failure who does not know how to relate to the world, the mother is a warm and eternal refuge, the initiation rites follow the classic patterns), but Malick explains it nonetheless. as if it were new, listening to the voices of the conscience of his characters as if they were those of his own memory, banishing the nostalgia of his gaze towards the past, betting on an aggressive, dithyrambic discontinuity to organize the verses of a world that is encloses in its sinister beauty.
The great virtue of the Mannerist Malick is that the lyricism of his style is born from an open-hearted sincerity, there is not an ounce of imposture in him. The problem with ‘The Tree of Life’ is that it believes that you have to travel back in time without time to explain how fragile we are, when what Malick, a convinced pantheist, is demonstrating is that God exists more than ever in grass and leaves of the trees, that contemplate how we are wrong again and again.
For those who wonder about the meaning of life
DATA SHEET
Address: Terrence Malik Distribution: Brad Pitt, Sean Penn, Jessica Chastain, Fiona Shaw, Kari Matchett, Joanna Going Original title: The Tree of Life Country: USA Year: 2011 Release date: 09-16-2011 Gender: Drama Screenplay: Terrence Malik Duration: 139 minutes
Synopsis: An impressionistic story of an American Midwestern family in the 1950s, following the life of eldest son Jack, through the innocence of childhood to the disillusionment of his middle years, as he attempts to reconcile a complicated relationship with his father (Brad Pitt). Jack (as an adult, played by Sean Penn) feels like a lost soul in the modern world, searching for answers to the origin and meaning of life, while questioning the existence of faith. Through Malick’s unique imagery, we see how, at the same time, raw nature and spiritual grace construct not only our lives as individuals and families, but all life.
Source: Fotogramas
Camila Luna is a writer at Gossipify, where she covers the latest movies and television series. With a passion for all things entertainment, Camila brings her unique perspective to her writing and offers readers an inside look at the industry. Camila is a graduate from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) with a degree in English and is also a avid movie watcher.
