Some films aren’t designed to be watched and absorbed in two hours. They need repeated viewings over the years; they beg for their audience to grow along with them, their meaning evolving over time. Stanley Kubrick’s "2001: A Space Odyssey" is one of those. Terrence Malick’s "The Tree of Life" is another.
Usually a film like this will leave you silent at the end of it, as you begin to make sense of what you’ve just seen and what it all means. If you’re lucky, maybe you have someone with you that you can chew the fat with, someone who will toss ideas and questions back and forth about the movie. We used to call this “let’s go get coffee and talk about it.” Now we call it Twitter.
These days, when a movie like "Tree of Life" is finally seen at the Cannes Film Festival, and in London and later in New York and Los Angeles, the conversation about it will take place loudly and wildly on Twitter. That usually means snap judgments are made and sides are taken. At first, the discussion was whether or not the French audiences booed the Malick film. They did. They booed it immediately, taking no time to think it over. Much of the rest of the audience sat silent and still before breaking into applause. One of the reasons that it took so long for the applause was that people weren’t sure if it was over or not. It wasn’t until Malick’s name appeared on the screen that the audience knew for sure it was over.
Also read: Terrence Malick's "Tree of Life" Gets Boos, Applause; Director Absent
Whether or not you get anything out of it will depend on your willingness to look. People are still excavating meaning out of "2001," which, like "Tree of Life," takes place over all time and takes on the daunting challenge of explaining life’s meaning. How do you explain something that shall forever remain a mystery? By doing just that: making the mystery itself the explanation. To that end, is there anything ever put to film as mysteriously beautiful as "The Tree of Life?" I don’t think so.
There is a sequence in the film which meanders around through the subconscious of its characters – probably one character in particular (who grows up to be Sean Penn). As a family absorbs the shock of a death, we are plunged back in time – all the way back in time, back to before there was even life on earth. The seed of desire is planted in an instant. This desire will swell to a lifetime’s searching, a primal need for another person to fulfill it. How lovely to see it played out with such subtlety, without judgment, the truth laid bare.
When you love someone, have grown up with them, they are part of your biology. This film makes the point that the very biology to which you belong is the biology to which all life on earth also belongs. Does
