The Tree Of Life - Movie review

The Tree Of Life
U/A; Drama, Art-house
Dir: Terence Malick
Cast: Brad Pitt, Sean Penn, Jessica Chastain, Hunter McCracken, The Universe
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There are three possible reactions to The Tree Of Life. The first is love for the sake of it.



Many will recommend it to you on the basis of glowing reviews on the Internet, and the fact that this movie bagged the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year.

Critics will wax eloquent to you about Terence Malick's impressionistic style, the movie's indelible mise en sc ne, and how it grows on you like a fine wine (or, well, a tree).
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Not wanting to seem like a philistine, you will nod along and, in turn, do the same. Add it to your 'Movies I Like' list on Facebook, discuss it with friends and so on.

The second is outright hate. Unsuspecting viewers, lured into theatres by the words Brad Pitt, Sean Penn and Cannes, will walk in expecting a tearjerker about an estranged father-son duo.

They will not expect a formless, improvised movie that has the attention span of an imaginative 6-year-old.

They will not expect a movie set in 1950s American suburbia about the O'Brien family to have a scene featuring two dinosaurs, wherein one lies injured on the side of a shallow river, and the other kicks it a couple of times before trotting away. They will search in vain for a narrative, for some semblance of a story, and find nothing.
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This is a polarising film, and if film critics at Cannes could boo it, so could Indian audiences.

There is a third possible reaction, however, to this film, and that is awe. Awe at Malick's uncompromising vision and his nearly contemptuous disregard for linearity or conventionality.

Awe at his persistence in developing the concept for this film over decades and spending nearly three years filming after studio execs told him he was 'crazy'.

Awe at the jaw-dropping visuals Malick shows us: the birth of the universe (the Big Bang, with subtle visual cues that draw parallels to the process of fertilisation in humans), stars colliding, oceans rising and falling, microbes multiplying, cells undergoing mitosis and meiosis and so on and so forth.

What does it all mean? The story starts off with the O'Brien family mourning the death of a son at only 19. Jack (Sean Penn), an architect who works in a tall, swanky building, calls up his father and confesses that he still thinks about his dead brother.
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We are then transported to Jack's childhood where we watch him learn to take his first steps, speak his first word, feel jealous of his new baby brother for hogging his mother's (played by a luminous Jessica Chastain) attentions and eventually grow up to become a sullen teen.
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We watch his father (Brad Pitt in a powerhouse performance), an inventor who gave up music for practical reasons, discipline Jack and his brothers with a firm hand.

He's violent and abusive, while Jack's mother is kind and almost child-like. This is a film about life - anybody's life - and all that comes with it: love, laughter, growth, anger, sadness, pain and death.

The Tree Of Life is a difficult movie to watch. It demands constant attention and a deliberate desire on the viewer's part to suspend all established expectations from the medium of cinema.
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Yet, for all its gravitas, one can't help wondering if Malick has indeed made a highly personal (Jack is partly Malick's own alter-ego) and philosophical cinematic portrait or if he's just being self-indulgent.

Surely there is a way to put across the whole 'life goes on' philosophy in a manner that's less random? But hey, that's life.u00a0