This Tree of LIfe got strangled by the vines of pointlessness — 6 days ago
Tree of Life starts out sober and gets grimmer from there. The basic premise is this: in a family of three children, one child dies. The survivors immediately find themselves sucked into a morass of sorrow that doesn’t relent throughout the entire film or apparently ever again in the entire lineage of the family as it shows one of their other children all grown up and still floundering in the morass of angst. Intercut with miniature homages to Ingmar Bergman and Friedrich Nietzsche. (The film stars Brad Pitt and Sean Pean. Frankly, I would expect this kind of overblown ego-stroke from Sean, but Brad disappoints me here in extremis. Sad enough, he not only acted in it, he worsened his offense by producing it.) Apparently, the family’s grief is so lasting and monumental that after wallowing in sorrow for about 20 minutes, the filmmaker then launches the film out into the cosmos, combing the cloud nebulas and star systems (with a stop at what appears to be the cantina from Star Wars for a close-up of one of its most lumpy denizens), presumably to search for God to make Him answer for the epic fail that resulted in this family’s descent into the everlasting doldrums. With the requisite operatic soprano ariating in a minor key, of course. And that’s pretty much the whole first half of the movie: vignettes of morose people who are all morose in disconnected ways, interspersed with shots of space and jellyfish and then a meander down the “cell-to-water-creature-to-dinosaur-to-tada!-man” tangent that doesn’t really have a flipping thing to do with anything that went on before, but that of course somehow fits because the whole movie is so random and so f***ing arty, it can’t stand itself.
Then the film seems to decide it needs to make some kind of point after this self-indulgent bouillabaisse of symbolism and metaphorical cackhandedness, so it lays out the tale of this little family making its life (in what appears to be mid-century Waco) from embryology to gerontology with random, but more or less chronologically presented, scenes, the most interesting of which is one where the oldest boy, the apparent precursor to Sean, comes across Daddy Brad lying under a jacked-up automobile. The boy stands, looking at the jack, contemplating whether or not to dislodge it and subject his father to death-by-Oldsmobile. On the one hand, I can’t say I blame him much – his father does seem a rather brutal and domineering sort. On the other, this whole film brutalizes us with its heavy-handedness, so I lost my empathy with the whole clan somewhere near the beginning of the tale.
This is Hollywood at its most artistic and pretentious. Naturally, this piece of crap got nominated for about a million Academy Awards. There’s nothing that pleases the Los Angeles crowd more than a film that reminds the public they are, after all, ARTISTS, even if their ART is sentimental and pointless crap.
I did indeed keep watching, asking myself as Fred Savage did, “When’s it going to get GOOD?” Sadly, the answer is, “Never.”
It makes me wonder if the people who conceived of this film ever really lost anyone or if they only imagined what it would be like to lose someone and this movie is the result: a chance to sink themselves into an imaginary hell of depression and grief and wallow in it for awhile.
One of the reviews I read compared this film with another recently released, saying Tree of Life is the hopeful obverse of the other. Holy Moses on a cracker, if this film is hopeful, I’m damned glad I didn’t check out the other one or I’d be searching for a high tower to jump off of about now.
Sigh! Brad, Brad, Brad – whatever happened to Fight Club the Rematch?
















