Maybe it`s got something to do with my callow youth and my irreverent nature, but I hate being preached at, regardless of the gorgeousness of the medium it`s done in. And Malick`s latest work, while replete with moments of stunning visual poetry, is quite frankly a 139 minute sermon disguised as a movie.
It`s hard to tell you what The Tree of Life is about exactly: it aims to capture life and universal existence, but via a microcosm: the lived experience of a jaded man called Jack(Sean Penn), and his memories of his American suburban family. Brad Pitt plays his domineering, artistically frustrated father, Jessica Chastain his religious, permissive mother. The acting is stellar, but is obscured by the film`s non-linearity, and is honestly secondary to the film`s thematic concerns. Oh, and there`re CGI dinosaurs. Don`t ask me why.
What stopped me from enjoying The Tree of Life wasn`t the above-mentioned exploded non-narrative. It wasn`t the overuse of European composers. It wasn`t the overt Christian imagery. It wasn`t even the disembodied, whispering voiceovers that mumbled pretentious non-sequiturs. Rather, what really got my goat was the patronizing way Malick bludgeons you over the head with his hackneyed central theme: the interconnectivity of existence, and the discovery of the eternal in the mundane. Honestly, you could find that eternity-in-a-grain-of-sand schtick in William Blakeâ€