"When you watch The Tree of Life, you’re seeing a vision of a family’s life experienced with an other-wordly, unfathomable sense of perspective. Writer/director Terrence Malick’s latest film is elusive, engrossing and just all-around big. There are discernible leitmotifs that run through the film, like the intrusion of chaos into order, the gentle realization that form does not always conform to essence, and the fleeting presence of radiant, context-free hopefulness.
“But the sense of spirituality that characterizes The Tree of Life is nothing if not pantheistic and all-accommodating. It’s an open container of meaning, which is partly why the film a minor cultural rift when it was first released last year. Some dismissed The Tree of Life by saying it was loaded with pretentious assumptions, specifically accusing of him of assuming the position of God in his film. Others said that the film’s vision of faith was too simplistic and that the film just regurgitates/reinforces Judeo-Christian imagery. So many of the film's most staunch defenders foolishly tried to combat this short-sighted criticism, but defending The Tree of Life against such claims is patently unnecessary: the complexities inherent in Malick’s film are defense enough.
“For example, in the opening image of the diametrically-opposed ways of grace and nature, Malick sets up and then exponentially complicates the notion that lived spirituality is inseparable from idealized faith. The two states of mind are opposite sides of the same state. The film’s protagonists are thus not totally in control of their memories, nor are they totally passive participants in the film’s dream-like reverie of past events. The Tree of Life presents the past as it might have been, not as it objectively occurred. We see events through the eyes of man-made Gods, the mother and father (Jessica Chastain and Brad Pitt) of two children. One boy is dead while the other boy, now a man, wonders when it was that he first believed in God. And he seeks Him out again. And so does his mother.
“So, when one of the two boys asks, ‘Where do you live?’ he’s living the answer: in memories, in the past, in the design that unites the two and in dreams of simplicity and twilit beauty. God is fallible because he is us but He also exists outside of us. According to the film, the fact that we cannot always be united is what alternately motivates us towards and pulls us away from our faith. There is both great faith in doubt and in the presence of God in Malick’s latest masterpiece. It’s alternately a mirror of actively evolving ideas of the past and a flood of emotions that create its own order out of the inherently chaotic. Wow." ~ Simon Abrams (originally posted March 4, 2012)
Note: The Tree of Life ranked #1 in the 2011 Muriel Awards.
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