In an overly crowded small cinema d’essai, I recently watched The Tree of Life. The only available sit was in the dreadful first row so the film really entered my brain and my neck. My sit neighbor gave up after few minutes, turning his attention to his smart-phone and an infinite reserve of twizzlers.
In The Tree of Life there are no borderlands or borders, everything is extremely open and experimental. One moment, we see proto fascist father Bred Pitt (who for the occasion lost all his “hotness), another moment we see Sean Penn trapped in designers’ dream house, and another moment we see supportive dinosaurs that in the name of animal solidarity don’t eat each other. (Imagine all this from the front row).
But Melick had a plan. Although, at first the lack of coherent narrative and hidden elements are very disturbing, later in the calmness of my overstuffed apartment, I could see better his intensions and a certain level of mercy for the audience.
This film is about men and how they manifest their sorrow and desires. The man in question is a boy, who has to deal with the quasi-Victorian family dynamics in 1950s Texas. The neighborhood is the entire world. The overly beautiful, caring, and playful mother strikingly contrasts with the father who wants to be called “father not dad.” The themes of coming of age, of dealing with death and with sexual desires are there but developed along a realistic continuum of acceptance.
The audience will recognize the same voice-effect of The Thin Red Line. Malick seems to like certain colors and he sticks to them. For The Thin Red Line, it was grey, red, and shades of brown. For The Tree of Life, it is green and blue. There is one film in the film that I can’t still explain but just take for his visual power as I would take a painting. It’s a sort of Kubrick’s dream perhaps about the eternity of life. Furthermore, the end of the film reminds of the end of theatrical play: all the characters meet in a sort of apocalyptical moment, perhaps to thank the audience to have resisted until the end.
