Director: Terrence Malick
Starring: Brad Pitt, Sean Penn, and Jessica Chastain
Distributor: Icon Films
Runtime: 138 mins. Reviewed in Nov 2011

| |

Rating notes: Mild themes

The film’s core message is that God is a divine being who takes from life, as he gives to it, and this is a movie about how God asks one family to suffer greatly. Its imagery is beautiful. The film sweeps you across time, and some of its scenes leave you exalted. At the same time, however, the movie aims too high by trying to collapse all of the complexity of humanity into single frames of meaning. The film has been likened to a symphony with several movements. It plays through life, and literally sweeps you along, philosophically, and emotionally. This is a highly ambitious movie. It is almost entirely impressionistic in its impact, often surreal, and it arouses deep reflections with nearly every image it creates. Said to shine a light on both secular and religious reality, the scope of the themes the movie attempts to tackle is enormous.

Although its photography is outstanding, the film is low on narrative thread. Artistry exists in nearly every frame, however, and the philosophical questions it raises have no easy answers. Malick places the competing forces of this family into the context of the universe, and uses different levels of meaning – psychological, religious and spiritual – to enliven and inform each other.

In narrative terms, the story is complex. Sean Penn plays Jack, a weary middle-aged executive who is devastated to learn of his brother’s death. The film transports the viewer back to the 1950s where Jack was a boy in mid-Western America. His father (Brad Pitt, in a compelling performance), was a stern disciplinarian, and religiously, very authoritarian. The news of the sudden death of Jack’s younger brother, of whom he was jealous, is bought to his distraught, long-suffering mother (Jessica Chastain) by a telegraph boy, who simply walks away. Jack’s volatile father lives his life according to his own needs, while his mother is a person of unconditional acceptance, and forgiveness. Her smothering love is seductive, while her husband’s sternness is rejecting. The contrast of mother and father establishes saintliness against something much darker. Just as Job was tested through suffering, God is testing Jack’s family, with all of its faults. Jack respects and rebelliously fears his father, but for each member of the family – mother, father and sons – the movie never strays too far away from its absorption with the meaning of the question, “why has the loss happened, and what does it mean?”

This is cinema on a huge scale. The film has a redemptive final sequence that is problematic, but moving. The word “Amen” fills the sound track, as the members of the family find each other again on the sands of an ocean, and embrace. God’s test of this family means that they have to search for happiness in whatever God gives them, and not in what he takes away.

This is a fascinating, flawed, and bold piece of creative film-making. It is a highly personal and meditative piece of cinema that explores the meaning of life through images that adhere to “the tree of life”. It might fail to tell a coherent story, but artistically it is richly imaginative, and its imagery is stunning.