Best Picture nominee The Tree of Life is an exercise in metaphor and conflict. In some respects it’s a challenging film that employs nonlinear storytelling and feels like an odd mix of memory, dream, and fantasy.
Jack, played as a child by Hunter McCracken and as an adult by Sean Penn, has to deal with his parents’ influences. His mother (Jessica Chastain) says in voiceover that everyone has to choose a path, either that of grace or that of nature. As she describes them, neither path sounds particularly appealing. In one of the film’s more ham-fisted metaphors, Mother represents the path of grace, nurturing and kind, and Father (Brad Pitt, in probably the least typical role of his career) represents the path of nature, unflinching and somewhat violent. This conflict does help the thin story, but when I finished watching, I felt that at Sean Penn’s age he should have already figured out that it was a false dichotomy.
The film’s cinematography, by Emmanuel Lubezki, has deservedly been nominated for an Oscar. The childhood sequences look beautiful and idealized, even as the action depicted is unpleasant, stark, even ugly. The look of the film enhances the wishful thinking and the pain of childhood memories.
The Tree of Life has sequences of images and music depicting the origin of the universe through the development of life on earth. The reason for the inclusion of these sequences is not immediately obvious. They are beautiful to look at, and throughout the film the music is gorgeous.
I understand the film's nomination for Best Picture--it's unusual for Hollywood to recognize a film that's more poem than story, especially in this category. Director Terrence Malick, also nominated, took some enormous risks with this film. Some of those risks paid off while others may have hurt the film more than the risk was worth. Risky impressionistic films tend not to be crowd-pleasers, and they also usually don't win the big prize on Oscar Sunday.
You can view a trailer for The Tree of Life here.
This post, written by LR Simon, is part of a series on films nominated for the 84th Academy Awards.
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