A dissenting opinion on The Tree of Life

Critics, to judge from the 4- and 5-star ratings, love Terrence Malick’s new film The Tree of Life. As far as I can tell, the audience I saw it with on Memorial Day loved it too. They didn’t applaud when the credits started, but they sat, as they had for the previous two hours and twenty minutes, in a reverential hush.

I didn’t really like The Tree of Life. One test might be whether I would see it again. No—or not without a pretty good reason.

I feel bad about not liking The Tree of Life, for a few reasons. (Spoilers below.)

First, Malick’s Days of Heaven is one of my favorite films of all time.

Second, Malick is a true cinema artist. The images he puts on the screen are stunning, and their effect can be so subtle that you would miss them on the small screen. Since this is the age of the small screen, that is a daring way to go.

Third, Malick makes very few films. Like Orson Welles, he is a perfectionist. When he does release a new film, I want to see it and I want to like it.

Fourth, the acting in The Tree of Life very good—fortunately, because the script is extremely minimal. The young boys seem natural, and Jessica Chastain as the wife rivals Liv Ullmann in what she can express through her face alone.

Fifth, the music is excellent.

Sixth, The Tree of Life reminds me of a few other films that I liked a lot: Days of Heaven, The Fountain, Tarkovsky’s Solaris, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and even Oblomov, of which I remember almost nothing but a long, heartbreaking final shot of a little boy running through a sunlit field. Yet I didn’t like The Tree of Life as well as any of these.

And seventh, the family in The Tree of Life is not so different from mine. The film focuses on three boys who are growing up in the 1950s in what is apparently a suburb of Waco, Texas. The youngest son dies at the age of 19, though offscreen and for unknown reasons. The oldest son appears later as a troubled and middle-aged Sean Penn.

I grew up as the oldest of three sons in the 1960s, in a small town in upstate New York, and I lost my youngest brother too—later in life, though still too young.

So what’s my problem? Why don’t I share the euphoria of so many professional film critics? Am I a Philistine who doesn’t appreciate gorgeous images? Has my attention span been shortened by email and video games?

No, I love gorgeous images, and I loved the ones in The Tree of Life, including the recapitulation of life on earth, and even the surprisingly tender (and improbable) encounter between two dinosaurs. And my attention span is long enough for watching Barry Lyndon and reading Proust.  But is it unreasonable to expect a little more story?

What happens in The Tree of Life? We see three boys grow up in Texas. Their father (Brad Pitt) is an ex-navy man who flies planes, or maintains them, or something. He gets a phone call that he can barely hear due to the thundering engines of the planes. His youngest son has died.

We go back to the dawn of time, and follow the earth from a ball of molten glop through the first stirrings of life, the first tree, and the strangely compassionate dinosaurs.

Then we return to the family in Texas, in the years before the youngest son’s death. The father is working as in a plant of some sort. He plays the piano, and we learn that he once dreamed of being a great musician. He is a strict father, and oppresses his family, including his warm and sympathetic wife. He angers his oldest son so that by the time he is twelve or so he wishes for his father’s death. In flash-forwards we see Sean Penn standing around moodily in glassy skyscrapers. He could be an architect of some sort. He has almost no lines.

The father, who has always prided himself on being tough and self-sufficient, loses his job at the plant. The family is forced to leave their home and go who knows where. And that’s about it.

Moment by moment, The Tree of Life is often ravishing. But is it well crafted as a film? And is it really that deep?