Tree of Life

Smoothly flowing gently falling slightly billowing lightly floating metaphors, a series of remembered events stitched together through fluid dreamlike sequences, delineating foundations, from which identities are constructed. A father, a mother, a family, a routine. A strict routine, a strict father, a housewife, a code. Mr. O'Brien (Brad Pitt) unwaveringly sticks to his code whereby his rule is absolute and his every whim, non-negotiable. His wife acquiesces, his children grow, he arrives at work on time, tithes week-in, week-out. A subjective interpretation of a governing structure attempts to supply youth with a disciplined set of ground rules from which a reasonable degree of economic stability can be confidently expected, through the years. No discussion, no questions, just stilted secure repetitious order blindly and diligently recreating itself, again. There's a lot of depth to the scenes in this film and Malick poetically intertwines manifold transitions with incredibly versatile images which in themselves create a byzantine subtext whose hydra-like character challenges the narrative's status quo.

But I don't think it's meant to do this, it seemed more like Malick was supplying as much beauty as he possibly could to suburbia, to a conservative way of life, using a surrealist form to structure his traditional content, with instinct guiding the positioning of his imagery as opposed to planning, whereby Tree of Life develops a naturally secretive grace, as it bids farewell to one dramatization of the North American middle-class.

On the one hand, it elevates patriarchal dispositions to a cantankerously coy precipice, taking content that has been recycled ad nauseum and demonstrating that it can continuously be insightfully replenished if you're willing to put in a little time and effort.

On the other, it eclipses sundry previous manifestations of this particular vision to the point where it seems possible that it's trying to put an end to this storyline once and for all, playing the ultimate winning hand, the graceful capitalist end-game.

Don't mean to be applauding Tree of Life too much. I found the seemingly random quotes which accompany much of the imagery to be irritating (especially since they're supposed to have some sort of ethereal quality) and was happy to comfortably rest my eyes here and there, as Mr. O'Brien and his children had yet another coming of age moment.

It would be a great film to study more closely and definitely leaves the door open for multiple critical accounts which can be situated within various intellectual markets in order to facilitate conceptions of particular ethical viewpoints from which the effects of diverse cultural phenomena can be momentarily diagnosed.

Naturally graceful, or a graceful nature, either way Tree of Life has me examining this dialectic, and has, for me anyway, instilled it with a remarkable life force that I'll find difficult to ignore for some time to come.

This is where film can be different from reading yet just as powerful. In a book like In Search of Lost Time you come across dialectics constantly to the point where you've been bombarded with so many you suffer from intellectual overload. Sometimes it's nice to take one and use it as a general frame in order to study its vicissitudes specifically, and so on.