Terrence Malick. You either love him or don't get him, I think. I've been interested in his films since I fell in love with The New World, which is basically a poem written to Pocahontas and early America in the form of a movie.
Now, I'm usually willing to believe that if most people hate it, it isn't good. But Terrence Malick's films are one exception, particularly The Tree of Life. This was no Where the Wild Things Are. I bring that up because it was another highly anticipated film that a lot of people went to see and walked out booing. To each his own, really, but I was a booer on that one. However, I felt the loud booing and complaining about The Tree of Life was completely unwarranted.
Have you seen 2001: A Space Odyssey? It is the closest comparison to The Tree of Life I can come up with. Pretty much a beautiful series of images, with a little bit of dialogue and lots of questions as whispered voiceover, it was graceful and ponderous and stylistically daring. I loved it.
Malick has a way of using actors who are already famous in ways that people aren't used to seeing them—in The New World it was Colin Farrell, Christian Bale, and Christopher Plummer—and mixing them up with unknowns like Q'Orianka Kilcher, whose innocent beauty was enchanting. The Tree of Life claimed to star Brad Pitt and Sean Penn, but the real star was Hunter McCracken, in a performance that leaves almost every child/adolescent actor looking like a piece of candy or a dirty kleenex.
Child actors are an interesting study. For example, Shadowlands is a biopic of C.S. Lewis made several years ago, starring Anthony Hopkins and Deborah Winger. I highly recommend it, but to this day, I'm not sure if Joseph Mazzello was good or if Attenborough just knew how to use a kid in a heck of an effective way. In the case of Hunter McCracken, I'm pretty sure it was both. He had so much screen time it couldn't have been just the stellar directing.
I think that the touch that took it from being just an interesting series of images that were both cleverly and lyrically filmed (can a picture be lyrical? I say yes) to being what Roger Ebert describes as "a film of vast ambition and deep humility, attempting no less than to encompass all of existence and view it through the prism of a few infinitesimal lives ... [with] fierce evocation of human feeling" is the music. Alexandre Desplat did the score, but only a few minutes of that actually made the cut. Most of it was timeless pieces by Holst, Smetana, Berlioz, Mahler, and others, with my personal favorite piece, "Lacrimosa" by Zbigniew Preisner. Just listen to it.
Grief really is the universal theme, and what I liked about this film is that it truly was simply a meditation on the grief one feels over losing a family member—how knowing that life has been going on and on for so long and people have been living and dying for centuries doesn't make any person's individual sorrow any less cosmic. But all the same, life is beautiful regardless of all of that.
It might have been a long, slow, meandering film with a few really strange scenes, but I loved that Malick tackled such a subject, and that he did it with sensitivity and taste.
