Tree of Life is sublime. It is the film any and every studied filmmaker who laud cinema and cinema theory would want to make. It is smart, academic, personal and artsy filmmaking can be without being at all amateur, nor alienating. In fact, you could hear a pin drop in the theater. The audience was completely engaged and stimulated with what was happening on the screen. Tree wants and acts like it wants to be a coming of age movie; however, it is more about the genesis of coming to be and existing.
Written and directed by Terrence Malick, The Tree of Life stars Brad Pitt, Sean Penn and Jessica Chastain and chronicles life through the eyes of a 1950's Texas family with sci-fi features, surrealist themes and impressionistic imagery through space, oceanic waves and human anatomy. Tree easily conjures up comparisons to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey; however, this would simply be homage as Tree is so strikingly original in glueing all of the elements of the narrative together like you have never seen before.Premiering in competition at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, The Tree of Life won the celebrated Palme d'Or and has since garnered overwhelmingly positive reviews for its technical and artistic merits, yet also received polarizing reactions in response to Malick's directorial style, in particular, film's fragmented and non-linear narrative.
Finally a movie to truly get excited about and inspired by at the cinema. Hollywoodteurs take note!
