Dinosaurs and Dads: On The Tree of Life

The Tree of Life has a reputation for being divisive. An oft-repeated anecdote about the film claims that after its premiere at Cannes, some members of the audience booed, while others cheered. A week later, it won the Palme d'Or. Critics responded to it like some sort of projective test, a Rorschach blot for cinematic sensibilities. Roger Ebert rhapsodized about its evocative portrayal of a 1950s family, and later added it to his list of the ten best movies ever made. One of the New Yorker's three reviews called it insufferable, interminable, madly repetitive, vague, humorless, grandiose, but also "a considerable enlargement of the rhetoric of cinema." In the Gray Lady, A. O. Scott compared the film, not entirely favorably, to Moby Dick. In his review for Salon, Matt Zoller Seitz began by asking, "How does one watch Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life?" Browse around online and you'll mostly see a lot of people pissed off about the dinosaurs. The first time I saw it, in the theater, I felt the same way.

The film is schismatic partly because its faults are so obvious. It's almost devoid of humor or irony—the epigraph quotes the book of Job—and so oddly innocent that its portrait of an adolescent boy hardly gestures toward the topic of sex. Indeed, it's earnest almost to the point of absurdity: its binary theme of nature vs. grace quickly becomes trite, as do the incessant shots of trees and the multiple narrators' mumbled questions about life. Like most films by aging auteurs, it's much longer than it needs to be, and the ending sequence is a spectacle of mawkish self-indulgence, in which Berlioz's Requiem plays too loudly as characters say things like Brother, guide me and I give my son to you. The film's vision of a bygone America is disturbingly blithe in its nostalgia for a time and place dominated by white men, and the film's few women and minorities embody ideas or serve as props. Then there are the dinosaurs, the film's ill-advised concession to computer graphics, who appear for a demoralizing minute, just long enough for one protosaur to spare another's life, and, in the process, beat the movie's core conceit to death.

The Tree of Life's merits, on the other hand, almost require multiple viewings to appreciate. The film rewards difficulty with depth. It's remarkably complex and ambitious, fiercely sincere, profoundly empathic. Malick's project is massive in scope, an attempt to represent the entire history of life on Earth, as well as human memory: how time gnarls with age, and moments fragment and stylize, their point of view detached and wheeling. It's also one of the most beautiful films I've ever seen. VFX legend Douglas Trumbull used everything from milk to smoke to images from Cassini to create the stunning galactic sequences, and the human scenes are shot in natural light, and often via handheld shots from below, perhaps to mimic childish wonder. The sets show a fastidious attention to detail. The classical score fits the film's tone but is full of surprises. And the performances are superb: Malick scoured Texas to cast it mostly with first-time actors, including the three boys, and told them to be themselves. The family practically lived together during filming, and that freewheeling intimacy translates almost supernaturally to the screen: in one of the film's best moments, the father leaves on business and the boys rejoice, scaring their mother with a lizard, mocking their disciplinarian dad, and running, always running. Try to find a more poignant portrayal of the pure, rambunctious joy of boyhood.

The Tree of Life is a film made of moments like that, an object lesson in the lyric form: fragmentary, oblique, imagistic, slow, by turns frustrating and transcendent, prone to indulgence. Rather than braiding its multiple timelines together, the way a more narrative film might, Malick ties them into knots, so that a family sequence might be interrupted by...