The Tree of Life

Impressions before seeing it
From what I'd heard, it was either going to be a beautiful epic or a pretentious piece of nonsense. Superficially, it was the title that intrigued me.

How was it?
The beginning and end of The Tree of Life are hard to swallow, because they fall into the "pretentious piece of nonsense" category. Especially the beginning, because to me it felt like a full 30-40 minutes before the movie actually began. The sequences are assembled in a way that are meant to be poetic even though it's too early in the film for them to really have any meaning, we get some snippets introducing the characters but not giving us any clues as to their personalities, and then we get a straight 15-minute self-indulgent sequence of nothing but nature shots and special effects (including, for some reason, dinosaurs) set to operatic music. In the film's defense, they are among the most beautiful shots in the movie, but otherwise I saw no reason to include them. I think 15 minutes is a fairly long chunk of time to make your audience sit and watch while absolutely nothing happens, and putting those 15 minutes at the beginning of the movie when nobody has any clue what is coming afterwards, and very little clue as to what they saw before it, is a real test of one's patience. I was thinking to myself that if the rest of the movie is like this, I didn't know if I could handle it for nearly two more hours. And I've sat through Last Year at Marienbad more than once.

But eventually that stuff ended, and there actually is a movie in the middle of the artsy crap. From my views of the family snippets at the beginning, I was worried this movie would actually have no humanity in it due to too much focus on the poetic, but, again, after the drawn out opening sequences we finally get character development. I was going to add "and a story", but it's mostly the former: a family with three boys in the 1950's, mainly from the point of view of the oldest son. We're just seeing moments in their daily lives, and rather than following a significant plot we're just tracking character progress as the oldest son deals with parental issues (a strict father and passive mother) and begins a rebellious phase. I don't know how to make it more interesting than that, but it actually is interesting and the performances very solid. So I did like this middle part of the movie, and it could have easily been its own movie without those big unnecessary chunks of cinematographic flaunting at the beginning and end. And for Sean Penn fans, don't waste your time. His total screen time is probably under 10 minutes in a 140-minute film, and he hardly even says anything. As you can see, being the industry that it is, they still put his name on the poster.

Recommendation
The Tree of Life will probably pick up the cinematography Oscar, and perhaps other technical ones, and I'd say well deserved, but not if it wins Best Picture. The family scenes in the middle are very good, and if Malick had kept it to that I would've like the film a lot more, but all of the stuff around the edges feels like a blatant attempt to instill an abundance of meaning and beauty in what is just a simple family story. If you're going to watch it, I'd say skip ahead about a half hour, then turn it off when you see Sean Penn. Not Penn's fault, that's just when the content goes back to being less than relevant.