There's much one can
say about a movie's beautiful , lush photography when it works with a
structure--a good script, a graspable plot and ideas an audience can take
interest in, credible, complex characters--but pretty pictures by themselves
cannot save a film like Terrence Mallick's "Tree of Life" from coming
across as a bloated, pretentious attempt to evoke a sense of human existence
and beyond what the director seemingly considers the petty concerns of
individual characters.
It is a mess, with a
whispering, hushed narration that cannot seem to rise above a mumbling buzz,
and sequencing of story lines between a family tragedy set in a 1950's American
suburb, the pensive rumination of a soul sick business man in current day
Dallas, and images of dinosaurs hunkering, squirming, swimming, wandering
through their various versions of flora and fauna in search of food and , we
could assume, significance beyond their appetites and survival instincts.
This would all be
interesting in the right proportions, but this film is not the tone poem
Mallick wanted it to be; it is is not mesmerizing, poetic or suggestive of the
sort of secret-of-life conceit the film hints at. What is infuriating , beyond
the rhythm-less, shambling length of the film ( two hours and 44 minutes) is
that for all the wonderful images Mallick and his crew manage to bring us, very
little of it is effectively mounted or framed; we are not allowed to become
engaged with any seen nor permitted any sense of continuity . It seems to have
been edited with a lawn mower on a foggy day.he constant riff of showing us
various trees, in various stages, topographically believable for conceptually
baffling, with light coming through the branches was irritating, as was the
constant visual cues of running water from rivers, lakes, streams and
shorelines. These are meant to function as a leitmotif, no doubt, but
repetition does not equal effective emphasis. This results in symbolism without
an actual "thing", an idea, under the metaphorical disguise. It does
seduce into thinking about one thing only to discover that something else was
being arrived at just under our perceptual radar.
There is, I'm sure, a
metaphysical aspect that I've missed through this ,but closer to the truth, I
think, is that I merely noticed what's missing from the film. I don't know
quite what those elements were as to what was intended, but it seems clear
enough that no one thought to bring them to this project.
