Ever since I saw the trailer for The Treet of Life I was very much excited. I thought the duo of Sean Penn and Brad Pitt (even though not working directly together) would make this a fantastic movie. A few weeks later after watching the trailer I was even more excited because the movie had just won the Palme D'Or at this years edition of the Cannes Film Festival, getting much positive praise because of it. Even better, just a few weeks after it won the award, it was showing at the Fine Arts cinema. Now, after all that excitement, was the movie worth it?
My answer would have to be a resounding "no". Now, I won't claim to be an expert at all things cinema. I'm not Gene Siskel or Roger Ebert or even Richard Roeper. I just know what I like and I know what I don't like. Furthermore, I know what I hate. And I have a lot of hate for a lot of things in this movie.
Like I said in the Cannes Spotlight, I was not a big fan of Terrence Malick's last movie. And I think the same things that I didn't like about that movie carry over to this one. I think he is somewhat heavy handed in his approach and his films end up feeling too long and they don't really elicit any emotional reactions in me. I must say that the film that I ended up watching was nothing like I expected. It is epic in scope. It reminded me of Stanley Kubrick's classic movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Malick tried to make his own Odyssey and I think he failed.
It's a beautiful film. There is no doubt about it. The soaring imagery and the booming soundtrack filled with a lot of classical music and silence. There are endless scenes of volcanic magma and of the birth-pains of the beginning of the universe and the beginning of life. There's too much of it all. It seems like auto-gratification to me.
What I thought was interesting was the relationships between the family members. The stern father (Brad Pitt) who tries to get his boys ready to survive any eventuality. The main conflict of the movie is severely lacking though. Young Jack (Hunter McCracken) doesn't know what to think of his father and at times he has a deep rooted hate for him. To me, the father wasn't that hard. He was just imbuing discipline and I think the kid was just a cry-baby, to be honest. The beautifully surreal mother (Jessica Chastain) who smiles and her smile lights up the screen more than the scenes of fire and magma. The Cain and Abel like relationship between the two brothers that doesn't seem to really get anywhere. There is a scene during the film where the brothers are playing with a BB gun and Jack asks his younger brother to put his finger right in front of the barrel and the brother does it and get shot in the process. There's a lot of things to praise about the movie, but I think its a lot more shiny than what its worth.
The acting by Pitt, Chastain and the kids was top notch. Sean Penn was underused and sort of just there. Malick wanted to say too many things with this movie and instead of getting one coherent message, I think what we got was a jumbled mess of ethereal ideas that feel empty inside.
I know that I'm probably in the minority. The critics have already hailed this film as a masterpiece, but I just didn't see it. It's the critics job to love movies like this one. Maybe if I watch it again down the line, I might feel different about it, but my first impression after seeing it only once is that its an empty metaphysical trip down an eccentric's mind.
3 out of 10
