Having watched it twice in order to make a more informed judgment, I still find myself unqualified to say what it’s about, or to say that it’s about anything at all. It’s a beautiful movie – each individual scene is perfect, probably, except the dinosaurs, which are silly – but its narrative is almost incoherent because many of the scenes have no explicit relationship to one another. They’re simply scenes from a family’s life juxtaposed against macrocosmological imagery, without any ‘comment’ from Malick. Not that there needs to be commentary or explanation or anything (I generally like films that deny the viewer satisfaction / resolution), it’s just that the comparison of human scale v. cosmic scale has been made ad nauseam in literature and film and Malick doesn’t seem to bring anything new to it. He kind of makes the comparison and just lets it hang there.
Of course there’s the stuff about ‘nature’ and ‘grace’ as antithetical forces, the father being the former, mother the latter, as revealed in the voice-overs, but those monologues are so abstract and, like the visual aspect of the film, offer no insight into the meaning of the comparison. They are lovely to listen to but feel insubstantial.
I had a theory after first seeing it that Malick was attempting to juxtapose the ‘grace’ of each beautiful scene (the cinematography is very graceful, everything is gracefully filmed) with the apparent lack of order to those scenes – as if the scenes were shot and then simply shuffled together, and then intermittent images of the cosmos were spliced in, et cetera. This would seem very neatly to encapsulate the nature (orderlessness) v. grace (order) paradigm that he is working with, but I haven’t thought about it too seriously.
@Blackberry – ‘Visual poetry’ is the right way to describe it. Or maybe cinematic poetry, since the soundtrack is also very important there. The problem is that the poetry went on for far too long and had no narrative to sustain it. (There’s a reason the longest poems are always narrative poems, and why, say, e.e. cummings, who also created ‘visual poetry’, wrote mostly short poems. Can you imagine a 50,000-word e.e. cummings poem? Yikes…) If The Tree of Life were just an hour long, or even 90 minutes, I’d probably like it much better.
Certainly one of the most beautiful films I’ve ever seen, but at 139 plotless minutes it’s also one of the most insufferable.
