The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011)







What's all that about then? What's all that about!? What's it not about more like! It is life and love and death. A beautiful collage of everything that makes life beautiful, scary, exciting, frustrating, wonderful, angering, reassuring and unsettling; a visual poem that is at it's best when the narrative is sidelined for montage. The sequence surrounding the birth and infant years of the son is quite staggering.
Terrence Malick has always liked trees and this film is no different, lots of lovely low angle shots up through the branches, splitting the light in kaleidoscopic shards. The fractured light might be seen as symbolic for the contradictions that shaped the man; a beautiful whole pulled in different directions, both mystifying and simple.


A complex work of tremendous beauty that may be wonderfully profund and delicate, or maddeningly boring and pretentious. Go on, find out. J



Comments

  1. O. Gordon9 July 2012 at 18:01

    I'm glad you enjoyed it so much, this is encouraging me to actually take the plunge and watch it. I keep threatening myself in hmv to buy it but never got around to it..until now perhaps.

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