The Tree of Life

Terrence Malick is the epic poet of American cinema. His first film, Badlands (1973), is a work of senseless beauty, a rich, aloof parable of crime, youth and solipsism. His second, Days of Heaven (1978), is a pastoral, crop-crackling, dusk-buttered ode to landscape, toil in the fields and family, as if painted by Jules Breton and written by Steinbeck. His third, released a casual twenty-one years after his second, is The Thin Red Line (1999), a strange, philosophical, Homeric, aesthetically radical requiem to masculinity, memory, loss and friendship. It is, after Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, perhaps the finest war film ever made (though it suffered for being released the same month as Saving Private Ryan). His fourth, The New World (2005), is a handsome, marvellously understated colonial allegory, which meshes the tentative palliative femininity of Days of Heaven with The Thin Red Line’s battle-hardened, soulful men without women.

The Tree of Life, for which Malick won (but, rather satisfyingly, refused to collect) this year’s Palme d’Or at Cannes, is his fifth film and combines elements of the previous four – the lyricism; the spiritual self-interrogation; the tensions between man and nature – yet it stands out, already, within the director’s canon. Sean Penn is a wealthy architect called Jack who, between meetings, remembers his childhood and, in particular, his relationship with his father (Brad Pitt) and the death of his brother R.L. His early life parallels the evolution of the universe, of which we get fleeting, heady glimpses throughout, before an ambiguous, Tarkovskian finale where people paddle about on the beach and you can’t be sure of anything.

It is Malick’s most ambitious film so far, and also his riskiest. It can seem, at times, like two very different films spliced together, an elegant, emotionally desiccated fifties family drama, with the occasional celestial interlude courtesy of Sir Patrick Moore. But it works rather well. Indeed, the cosmic landscapes are amongst the most extraordinary images I’ve seen in a cinema (though the scene with the dinosaurs is less convincing).

Brad Pitt is wonderful as the overbearing, Brahms-loving, Old Testament God of a father figure. At one stage, he asks his middle son at the dinner table to promise to do something for him without asking what it is, expecting the sort of unquestioning obedience God demands of Abraham in Genesis 22. It is an exemplary study in confused masculinity (teaching his boys how to throw a punch one minute; reminding them to give him a goodnight kiss the next) and a fascinating companion performance to his Jesse James: the harsh allure, the weary superstition, the warped paternal instincts, the temper. He is our Paul Newman. The other performances are nicely sketched, with Hunter McCracken particularly impressive as the bruised, callow young Jack.

The film is constellated with Biblical overtones. The prologue comes from The Book of Job, that proto-absurdist masterpiece of cruelty and patience. Pitt orders his sons to look after the garden; Jack is jealous of his younger brother R.L.; even Sean Penn’s skyscraper has echoes of the Tower of Babel. Throughout the film, this synthesis of the Christian and the scientific is a surprisingly harmonious one. Is the film as lovely to look at his others? Apart from the bits in space, I’m not sure. Emmanuel Y Tu Mamá También Lubezki (yes, he did The New World too, well done) is a fine cinematographer, but those jittery, hyper-Robert Bresson close-ups are slightly wearying.

To conclude, this film is a nebula, a dust cloud of contemplation, fear, love, anger, nature, humanity, time and space that is simultaneously troubling and full of hope. It is a long, treacherous piece and it’s very difficult to navigate, sometimes in a good way, sometimes in an Emperor’s New Clothes, Last Year in Marienbad, oh-for-fuck’s-sake sort of way (two couples walked out during our screening, but then we were in the Kingston Rotunda). Nevertheless, its unapologetic grandeur, its infinite poetry and its detached, difficult characters, amongst much else, restore one’s faith in American cinema.