Even before you have the whole film in mind, while you are watching it for the first time, "The Dawn of Man" fits easily into the experience, in part because of Kubrick's thrilling match-cut of the caveman's bone to the spaceship. That moves any reasonably receptive viewer aesthetically; it is an example of what Hitchcock would call "pure film."
I don't get any similar sensation from Malick's history of the universe. Some will like that sequence better, some (such as me) worse, but in relation to the rest of the film, it feels like a "stand-alone," as my friend Saul Manjarrez put it to me.
The Sean Penn scenes and the conclusion on the beach offer different challenges. I found the contemporary scenes beautiful to look at, largely because of the effective use of low camera angles to convey the strangeness of the modern city. That does form a nice visual contrast to the home-town Texas scenes. But the contemporary scenes and Penn's very game acting in them, although clearly emotional, are also emotionally inarticulate - as I wrote earlier, I just don't think there is enough information in them. Surely Penn's obvious unhappiness doesn't stem solely from his brother's suicide, from one moment in his life. People do move on. It's as if the thirty years in-between his boyhood and his present didn't matter at all, that nothing happened during them, that he did not live them. Odd, to say the least.
The beach sequence is to my mind the least defensible part of the movie. I get it thematically, but it is embarrassingly trite. Watching it, I felt bad that someone with persuasive power hadn't talked Malick out of including it in the film. Sure, let the director film the sequence if he needs to get it out of his system, but let it stop there. I have not read any defenses of this ending that are even slightly convincing to me.
POSTSCRIPT: When I speak of the brother's suicide, I should be careful; it isn't actually stated as such in the movie. All we know is that he died. We are not give much information in this instance, either, to have any basis for understanding the event or the other characters' reactions to it. For someone who so obviously uses Freudian Oedipal concepts, Malick seems very disdainful of psychology in other ways. In several places, he denies us the data for psychological insight. All we can do is guess.
My friend Robert Kennedy has suggested that the mother's example will always be with her boys. Jessica Chastain is indeed luminous, and does about as good a job of embodying an abstract concept like "the way of grace" as any actor could. Her message is joyful. It is curious, then, that the message seems not to have "taken" with the grown Jack. Penn seems miserable, about as far from leading a life of joy as a life-prisoner. Was the mother's message that weak in relation to the father's message? Is that what the movie is saying? It sure doesn't say much for the way of grace if that is true - doubly so if the second son did commit suicide, since one thing suicides uniformly have in common is that they can find no joy in life. If at least one or two of three sons can find no joy in life after having such a mother, what chance is there for anyone else? Roger Ebert finds The Tree of Life hopeful and positive, in part because of the imagined reconciliations on the beach. But I do not. Imagined reconciliations are not enough. For the movie to be truly hopeful, Penn's grown-up Jack should glow with an inner light. I don't see one.
SECOND POSTSCRIPT: A lot of us read the suicide into the movie because of the suicide of Malick's own brother. Nothing in the movie contradicts that reading. Malick underlines the similarity of the second brother in the movie to his own youngest brother by including those scenes of guitar-playing. It was during his advanced guitar training that Larry Malick "broke his own hands due to pressure over his musical studies," and then killed himself (in 1968). In the movie, Brad Pitt's father expresses regret over not pursuing a musical career, and it is easy to extrapolate from the combination of information inside the movie and outside the movie that a father like that might indeed pressure his musically talented son. If Malick didn't want us to perform those combinations, he shouldn't have made the movie so closely reflective of his autobiographical reality.
By the way, Malick's other brother Chris "was badly burned in a car crash that killed his wife" - you'll recall that burns play a part in The Tree of Life, too.
http://stillsearching.
(I had no idea that Malick was in the same American Film Institute class with David Lynch and Paul Schrader? The mind boggles. I wonder if the three men are friends.)
One critic I read suggested that the brother's death in The Tree of Life could have been a military death, but I don't think that's possible. During the Vietnam War and thereafter, the military services used Casualty Notification Officers to visit families with the bad news. (Up through the Korean War, telegrams were used.) Of course, the death in the movie could have been an accident. The reason for the death is simply not explicitly stated.
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