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With less than a month to go before Terrence Malick‘s The Tree of Life hits theaters, the first official review has landed, and it is quite positive. Sprouting from the French site Les Echos du Cinéma, we have a translation below from an IMDb user. They praise the film for its natural performances and beauty, but call out its Christian tones.
In related news, the French distributor EuropaCorp have announced (via Blu-ray.com) a July 15th release date for the Blu-ray of The Tree of Life. No region coding is known yet, but that seems wildly early and highly unlikely. We’ll update the story if we hear any sort of confirmation or correction. For now, check out the review.
We see the birth and growth of Jack, a child of the Midwest. He has two brothers and parents who love him. His mother is the way of grace, love and kindness. The father raises his sons with firmness and hardness. He teaches them to fight and to avoid being too good. Jack grows up, the paradise of childhood fades and his life becomes a maze. He resembles his father more than his mother…
Reviewing “The Tree of Life” would be pointless and subjective. We may indeed find the film too Christian, close in its message to the beautiful sermon of the elder in Dostoyevsky’s “Brothers Karamazov”, which will surely bother many Parisian critics and intellectuals. We may find the movie sometimes long and obscure, like “2001” for example. One is reminded of Kubrick’s film by several shots and a cosmic sequence where millions of years disappear in a single cut, with the universe and the planets completing human history.
But, at the end of the screening, you sit there, frozen in your seat, and you understand that you cannot reproach this film, because it is beautiful, even sublime and very moving. The story is an anti-plot, there is no conflict, and the emphatic meaning of the film eludes analysis and discussion. This movie is a little like Spielberg, but deeper and more beautiful.
The actors are truer than true, Malick’s direction shows them so completely naturally that it makes you forget that you are watching fiction. The images mesmerize you with the strength and poetry they inspire. But that is not the best part. The best part is that you’ll rediscover your feelings of childhood like never before in film. You will see, laugh, run, grow and marvel like the child you were. You will literally rediscover the world…
“The Tree of Life” is almost completely shot in natural light (as was “The New World”), with a wide angle to render as human viewpoint as possible. The bright cinematography of Emmanuel Lubezki is soft and light, like a caress to the eyes. The camera swoops everywhere with infinite grace. Grace is all that matters for Malick.
Choosing grace rather than nature is the conflict within Jack. To love and to forgive is to choose grace. To create beauty is also to tend toward grace. Hardness, violence, and profit are the way of nature. More than the relationship between nature and man, Malick is talking here about the human soul, about God and the love between men.
But there is an added cosmic dimension to the film, and we witness the birth of the universe. Stunning shots where the camera sees stars arise, sweeping over irrupting volcanoes, following amoebas, jellyfish and other amphibians until they leave the water, and here you see the first dinosaurs that you look at with more wonder than those of Jurassic Park.
There is some back and forth between childhood and adulthood, where Jack is lost in a dehumanized society, and then finds himself in the desert and goes through a door… This sequence is the least beautiful and least universal because it is mystical, I would even say religious.
The film’s limitation is perhaps this lack of mystery that comes from a desire to show everything, to embrace everything, a vision that is humanistic, animist and Christian all at once. In the end Malick tells us nothing new, nothing more than what Job and many other great poets have left us with. But he has amazed us because he is one of the greatest filmmakers alive.
The Tree of Life hits theaters May 27th, 2011 after a Cannes Film Festival premiere.