Terrence Malick's Tree of Life

I went to see Tree of Life at the Camden Odeon.


The film has received mixed reviews, and I was not sure what to expect. But I reasoned that any work that has won the Palme d'Or must be worth seeing. The front of house team at the Camden Odeon needs more training.

Long film, but completely entrancing. Impressionistic in style, the director Terrence Malick presents a sequence of moving images that are consistently beautiful. No sequential narrative - the film moves from present day to the Jurassic period, to 1950s Texas.

Performances are excellent - especially Brad Pitt, Fiona Shaw (small part but unmistakable), Jessica Chastain.

The subject of the film is disputed. There seems to be a general consensus among critics that the film is about "the meaning of life". Personally I think the film may be a more specific discussion about competing ideologies - the authoritarian father favours Darwinianism (only the strongest will survive) whereas the mother has a love-focussed philosophy (Larkin's view that all that ultimately remains of us is love).

Ultimately the Darwinian philosophy of the father failed, while the mother’s philosophy of love validated everything.

The film is symbolist in style, although the symbols are encoded in the work. For instance, the title Tree of Life probably refers to one of the two trees in the garden of Eden, which in turn reminds me of the story of the brothers Cain and Abel who were exiled "east of Eden", which then makes me think of the 1955 film East of Eden, directed by Elia Kazan. East of Eden was a 1950s retelling of the Cain and Abel story, which seems an elliptical reference back to Terrence Malick's Tree of Life.

The dinosaurs in the film are more problematic. Terrence Malick seems to be using the creation of the universe scenes to show that he endorses the science of evolution. Therefore the message I gain from the film is that Terrence Malick rejects Darwinian perpetual struggle, widely regarded as one of the mechanisms of evolution, in favour of evolution based on a mechanism of love and mercy.

An ambitious film that aims to unite in a visual work the philosophies of science and religion.