Review: "The Tree of Life" and my personal Terrence Malick Journey

Movie of the Week #29 surveys 12 years of writing

Welcome to Movie of the Week, a Wednesday column where we take a look back at a classic, obscure, or otherwise interesting movie, with writing of mine that’s never been published online before. Enjoy…

The Tree of Life

2011, Dir. Terrence Malick

Originally published in the book 200 Reviews, composited from reviews written in 2011 and 2020, unpublished fragments from 2017 and 2019, and original writing from 2023.

There is perhaps no film in my life I have had a more fraught or bizarre path to falling in love with than The Tree of Life, and no film that has taught me more about how to open one’s mind and heart to the complexities and surprises of this medium. The first time I saw it, in theatres in the summer of 2011, I hated it. I wrote:

Malick has quite a bit to say [here], and the crux of his message is actually quite beautiful; certainly, the film conjures many thoughts and emotions in the viewer’s head, and had I been taking notes, I’m sure I would have filled many pages.

Yet once I sat down to write this review, I realized I have very little to say about The Tree of Life.For all its so-called ‘meaning,’ for all the style and craft and ‘grace’ on display, [the film] merely numbed me for over two hours, and left me completely cold afterwards. This is an example not of style overwhelming substance, but of style beating substance into submission and then running a long, long victory lap. The Tree of Life is a beautifully crafted movie; the cinematography is some of the best you’ll ever see, with imagery that stands alongside some of the greatest art this medium has to offer. The editing creates a rhythm that belongs to this film and this film alone, and [the score] is devastatingly gorgeous. Yet the point Malick tries to make is constantly undermined by how he makes that point, and it doesn’t take long for the film to descend into self-parody.

It was as dismissive (and, frankly, arrogant) a review as I had ever written or published. But as the months went by, and I thought I was done with The Tree of Life, it became clear that The Tree of Life was not done with me. This film I had found pretentious and overwrought kept entering my thoughts, and when we learned my father’s cancer had returned later that year, the one movie I felt I needed to watch to help understand the world and my feelings was, for reasons I could not understand, The Tree of Life. So I rented it on my PlayStation 3, screening it on my little 26-inch monitor while sitting on my dorm room bed, and by the end, the movie had left me a weeping, frayed nerve. I had fallen in love with it. In the piece I published afterwards, I wrote:

Were I a film professor, The Tree of Life would be my go-to pick to illustrate the power of cinematography. Film is a visual medium, and few movies have ever embraced that fact like The Tree of Life. Each and every shot is a carefully constructed work of art, capturing the pure, unfiltered splendor of everyday life within the confines of the frame, making the audience conscious of what incredible gifts the characters are surrounded by but so often unaware of.

The beauty on display often cannot be explained. The images are edited together in a stream-of-consciousness style, and when one tries to break down their order or meaning logically, one comes up empty handed. It is an experience of pure emotion, and if you let yourself go, you will be swept up in the beauty, comprehending the story and message on an instinctual, ethereal level. The Tree of Life doesn’t just feature the most controlled, precise, and visually powerful images of 2011, but uses the cinematic medium to its fullest advantage.

Clearly, this was quite the turn. I had never had this kind of experience with a movie before, rejecting it at first and falling in love with it later. It is something that has happened to me many times in the years since. I learned to listen to that inner voice, that voice that told me when I wasn’t yet done with a film, even when – especially when – I had disliked or dismissed it on first viewing. It was learning to trust that voice, to give films another try when something I could not put my finger on pulled me towards them, that led me to fall in love with Terrence Malick’s entire body of work, and which led me back, as all roads inevitably would, to The Tree of Life, again and again, confirming that experience was not just a fluke, but a life-changing experience.

In that second piece, I also did some of the most personal writing I had undertaken up to that point. The Tree of Life practically demands such introspection, of course – it is a memory piece one inevitably processes through the lens of their own experiences. Here is some of what I wrote then:

After [the creation sequence], the film returns to the O’Brien family, the characters of the introductory portion. Set in the fifties, we begin with the birth of Sean Penn’s character, Jack, moving on through his infant and toddler years as his mother cherishes him and has other children.

This period of life is illustrated through montage, using music and imagery to say more than words ever could. It is my favorite portion of the film for the way it illustrates motherhood, framed through the eyes of a child. Young Jack sees his mother as a mystical figure, a God in his eyes who gives him everything, who cares for him and loves him. When she has to divide that attention with other children, he doesn’t know what to do with himself. His God is no longer personal; he has to share her with others, but as he learns to do so, he sees even deeper layers of grace.

I see so much of my mother in Jessica Chastain’s performance. Her enthusiasm for life, her playfulness, her kindness, her unfathomably warm smile that assures safety in no uncertain terms, and most importantly, her love: Unquestionable, unwavering, etched in every line of her face and expressed in every action. The way Chastain is framed through the eyes of her young children is exactly how I remember my mother when my brother and I were little. Malick understands the blinding beauty of motherhood, [of the strength of that presence that nurtures and loves us, that makes a child] feel like the most important thing in the world. Those who have experience this kind of love will always be marked by it. I know I am. I never thought I would watch an actress in a movie so completely embody the things I love and treasure about my mother, but this is the gift I found in The Tree of Life. To me, it is the most gorgeous segment in a film of limitless beauty.

As Jack and his brothers grow, their relationship with their mother matures, as is natural. We never see their teenage years, but I can extrapolate, imagining the evolving but no less diminished impact their mother will continue to have. The film instead begins exploring fatherhood. This section is far more challenging, because fathers are complex. Loving one’s mother [is easy] … but embracing a father is a journey. The Tree of Life presents a specific, 1950s view of fathers, but I believe the core tenants of the message are universal. Our fathers see our mothers differently than we do; they don’t idolize or deify her as a child does, but treat her as an equal; they divert our mother’s attention, which is simply inconceivable.

Most importantly, fathers are less interested in shielding us from the harshness of the world, if not intentionally. Mothers protect, but fathers wear their baggage on their sleeves. In The Tree of Life, Mr. O’Brien’s frustration over his failing career and dying ambitions manifests itself through moments of physical abuse and constant verbal demands, as was typical in the period. My Dad was and is very different than that, but I absolutely relate to the idea of seeing the darkness of the world embodied in our fathers. If our mothers introduce us to the kindness and compassion of our world, then our fathers give us our first glimpses into the darker realities of life. This is what happens here, and young Jack doesn’t so much hate his father, I think, as he hates the implications his father embodies, the idea that life can be harsh and unforgiving … Mr. O’Brien desperately wants to be a good dad, to make the kids love him as much as their mother does, but he simply doesn’t know how (all of which Brad Pitt expresses in silent, reserved glances). He raises his kids the way he was raised, which means he simply isn’t wired to be the most loving person in the room.

These are the harsh truths the film deals with. The Tree of Life is a celebration of life’s infinite beauty, but it recognizes that beauty can come in dark and uncomfortable moments. If bad things didn’t happen, after all, we would never learn and become better. It is in the second half that the film truly becomes dark … Jack begins questioning God. “Why should I be good if you aren’t?” he asks, and begins to rebel … The worst thing Jack does is hurt his brother. When he does so, he is torn apart, and comes to learn that being a brother, especially an older brother, means being there for your sibling in a profound way, protecting and loving them no matter what. As with so many other messages, Malick expresses this wordlessly, but the scene moved me greatly. I remember how I came to learn my role as big brother. I’m not proud of how I sometimes treated my little brother when we were much younger, but when I realized what part I needed to play in his life, I like to think I began to make up for my mistakes. I will always continue to try, and Jack clearly will as well. It’s why adult Jack is so torn up, decades after his brother’s death; he can no longer be there for his brother, can no longer execute his sworn sibling duty.

Near the end of the film, Mr. O’Brien loses his job and is humbled. “I lived in shame,” he says. “I dishonored it all and ignored the glory.” Throughout the film, he is shown to be the most devoutly religious member of the family, yet the worst things happen to him. But there is meaning in the unpredictable ways of grace, and Mr. O’Brien’s humbling makes him closer to his children. He even has a moment of clarity, I think, where he comes to this conclusion as well. “Father…Mother…you always wrestle inside me…” Adult Jack thinks as we move back to the future.

… In the final section of the film, adult Jack guides the audience to Malick’s vision of the afterlife, set on a beach, where the meaning of the watery sounds we have heard throughout the film are made clear. They are waves, and the symbolism is not hard to understand. There, Jack sees his Mother as he remembers her from childhood, beautiful and ethereal, a gift if there ever was one. He meets his Dad as an equal, with an understanding they did not have in life. Jack has carried his brother with him all these years, and as such, the child appears, and Jack is able to deliver him back to his mother.

“This last part should infuriate me,” I wrote in my notes. It did in theatres, as it is the most image-driven, esoteric, and impenetrable portion of the movie. It should bother me. Instead, I was enthralled. It is filmmaking at its purest, gorgeous images driven by sound, not meant to narrate, but to evoke. “I give him to you. I give you my son,” Mother says. These are the last words of the film. As it fades to black, I tear up. I scribble in my notes the first thing that comes to mind: “I just feel whole and content watching this movie.” That about sums it up.

While I moved on through the rest of Terrence Malick’s body of work in the years after I wrote this piece, it was actually a long time before I watched The Tree of Life again. At a certain point, it became clear I was consciously avoiding it. My father had passed away in the interim, about ten months after writing my second piece on The Tree of Life, and I changed a lot as a person in the years that followed; in particular, my relation to faith and religion was upended entirely. The film had touched me deeply, and I thought about it often, but I didn’t know if I could let it back in. I knew somewhere inside me that I still loved this film, but wondered if that love would still be there if I watched it a third time.

I finally did so in 2017, when Sean Chapman and I were preparing for the 200^th episode of The Weekly Stuff Podcast, where we were doing new rankings of our ten favorite films of all time. I had seen Malick’s other work at this point, and had come to love his style, feeling he spoke to me in a language no other filmmaker has. I was still trepidatious; re-entering this particular cinematic cathedral felt like returning to church as a lapsed Christian. Yet when I entered, I felt right at home. I wrote notes at the time intending to create a third major piece on The Tree of Life, and while that never came together, there’s one snippet from those thoughts that elegantly encapsulates how deeply this movie had touched me, even going years without seeing it:

The imagery in this film is so powerful. I saw it twice in 2011, and for years, it has literally rewired the way I look at the world – at nature, but also manmade structures. There was the Engineering building at CU Boulder, and every day I walked to school, I would go under it, through this little underpass, and there were these breaks in the underpass where light would come through. And I would always gaze my head up and look at the way light played on the concrete, or how the little plants and blades of grass grew in this largely stone structure. I would move my eyes like Lubezki moved his camera – and every time, I would think of this movie. There is no other film, visually, that has stuck with me for that long, that has so fundamentally affected how I look at the world. And it’s true of all of Malick’s films. I leave them, moving differently, looking differently, thinking differently. I think of them all the time, seeing blades of grass, or little pieces of nature on the side of the road. But this is the one that hit me hardest.

I have seen the film quite a few times since that third viewing, a few times on the initially-released bare-bones Blu-ray, once more on 35mm at CU Boulder’s International Film Series when they did a week on Malick, where I introduced the film to my brother, and finally on The Criterion Collection’s Blu-ray set which debuted the three-hour extended cut (which is an interesting experiment on Malick’s part, if a more diffuse version of the film overall). I find The Tree of Life to be a different movie every time. Sometimes bigger, sometimes smaller. There are things I always love unreservedly: namely the entire first hour, up through the Creation set-piece and the initial sequences of childhood. Sometimes I bristle more at the darker second half, sometimes I vibe with it entirely. At my most lucid, I can admit that there are so many uncomfortable truths bouncing around that last half, in everything with the darkness of the father and the darkness rising in the son, that I bristle at them because they are true, and I relate to them profoundly, and I cannot help but want to look away. And the end always moves me immensely.

Today, The Tree of Life is, indeed, one of my very favorite movies. I can watch it in whole or in parts and feel like I am having a cleansing spiritual experience, one that centers and stabilizes me, and in which the film always feels like a slightly different entity than the one I encountered before. Not all movies make themselves easy to love; having to work for it – or, more precisely, to work with it – sometimes makes the love all the more profound.

Read the book 200 Reviews by Jonathan R. Lack in Paperback or on Kindle

Subscribe to PURELY ACADEMIC, our monthly variety podcast about movies, video games, TV, and more

Like anime? Listen to the podcast I host with Sean Chapman, JAPANIMATION STATION, where we review all sorts of anime every week. Watch on YouTube or Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.