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The Tree of Life review
:. Director: Terrence Malick
:. Starring: Brad Pitt, Sean Penn
:. Script: Terrence Malick
:. Running Time: 2:18
:. Year: 2011
:. Country: USA
:. Official Site: The Tree of Life
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The Tree of Life is a film that will somewhat be remembered as not fully accomplished: a major auteur's masterpiece that suffers from excessive perfectionism; An engaging metaphysical trip that bears too much resemblance to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey to impose itself as a true original work; a film that is like a delicate meal made with fresh and rare ingredients, based on a subtle recipe aiming at perfection but ending up being overdone; a movie for which we had high expectations that were not met.
After having made us wait for a full year (the picture was originally set to debut at the 2010 Cannes film festival but was delayed in the cutting room with no less than 5 editors working on it), The Tree of Life disappoints. Its artistic approach and cinematography give it the look and feel of a perfume commercial while Alexandre Desplat's soundtrack envelops the images with plethora of ethereal choruses. As for the narrative, it keeps going back and forth between the present and the 50's, with some hallucinatory sequences being intertwined (lava, cosmos and other textures).
For 45 minutes, this visual and audio symphony overwhelms with the beauty of camera movements, the quasi-divine light that underlines each sequence, the extreme precision of the acting (most particularly Brad Pitt and the kids) and the poetry that emerges from the ensemble.
But from the beginning, director Terence Malick (Badlands, The New World) seems to have spent too much time watching the dailies, each sequence looking like a patchwork of takes as if the director had spent countless hours trying to pull all the finest moments to include them in his film.
Malick films the sky, sunflower fields, the stars, the universe, the ocean, volcanoes and dinosaurs ... ... It's beautiful, deep, it's strong. His film examines the human condition, caresses the soul, flirts with the beyond. But all this seems completely and terribly vain. His images leave a print on the retina, haunting the spectators way after the film ends and letting them awake from this dream, sweaty and lost. Maybe it is a good thing, in the end, to let the film penetrate your subconscious insidiously and maybe it requires a certain time to fully reveal all its essence. Maybe the film is simply talking about the impossibility of finding the meaning of life. One can't reach infinity so easily but this attempt is poignant and beautiful; and that's probably why it is futile.
Moland Fengkov
 Badlands review
Cannes film festival 2011
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