The Beauty Of The Tree Of Life - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osNA33gKBd8
The Tree of Life - Opening scene - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBawefQO6I0
The Tree Of Life - Vivaldi - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewOVK63gzSk
Way of nature vs grace - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z28Mi6mUyKo
The Tree of Life (2/5) Movie CLIP - You've Turned Them Against Me (2011) HD - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4TfTzW8GVg
The Tree of Life - Lacrimosa - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmnYqKl1LzE&t=2s
The Tree of Life #4 Movie CLIP - Do You Love Your Father? (2011) HD - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6Xi4LPydCs
Tree of Life - Ownership of Life - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d96Io-RpUeA
The Tree Of Life Scene : "Poor Boy" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckGc4g4jW1M
The Tree of Life - "Eternity" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VV_FbMbCP6Y
“Malick invites us to marvel at a universe created for our benefit and an afterlife in which all our cares will be resolved. The best part of the movie — Brad Pitt taunting his sons, willing them to rebel against an authority he doesn’t believe he deserves — vanishes behind a scrim of inane space flotsam, while the combination of the two endows Jack’s childhood with a world-historical weight it can’t possibly bear.”
Run away. Run away from everything, from civilization and its discontents, to a place where you can live freely, naturally, and without sin. But be aware that once you get there you will ruin it by your very presence. The world of men will catch up with you and drag you out, and in the process they will poison your frail paradise with their violence. That’s the wish and the warning at the heart of every Terrence Malick movie. Somewhere in every one of his films there’s a Garden of Eden, near or far, that’s part temporary refuge and part prelapsarian vision. In Badlands it’s a tree house hidden in the woods. In Days of Heaven it’s a mansion in the Texas wheat fields. In Thin Red Line it’s a Melanesian village on Guadalcanal, an oasis of peace in the heart of war. In The New World it’s the whole North American continent at the moment of its discovery.
In The Tree of Life Eden is harder to pinpoint, because it seems to be everywhere. It’s in the Waco, Texas of the 1950s, the landscape of Malick’s childhood, and in his lovingly recreated family home. But it’s also the whole universe, marvelous and benign in Malick’s vision, whose creation and destruction bookend the movie, and it’s present in a mysterious realm that exists either in memory or the afterlife, where his family gathers for an angst-free beachside romp. The only place it definitely isn’t is present-day Dallas, where Jack, Malick’s architect alter-ego (played by Sean Penn), struggles with recollections of loss and the spasms of ennui engendered by tastefully designed, sparsely furnished rooms.
The ennui might be a bit much, but the loss is real: from the prologue to the film, we know that Jack’s brother R. L. committed suicide at the age of nineteen. In Jack’s memories (the bulk of the film is an extended flashback, experienced it seems, while riding toward the sky in a glass-paneled elevator), R. L. is an angel with straw-blond hair, shy and noble, unbendingly moral and good at classical guitar. And seen across the grief of fifty years, why shouldn’t he be? But Jack’s mother (Jessica Chastain) is even more angelic. Tall and pale with flowing red hair, she’s the image of soulful, sexless, world-embracing motherhood. At different moments she dances in the air and sleeps in a glass coffin like Snow White. She keeps her perfect feet bare. For an extended sequence young Jack admires them as she washes with a garden hose in the front yard. She tells her boys that there are two ways through life, “the way of nature and the way of grace,” and that the sky is where God lives (someone is always saying something like this in The Tree of Life, and all of Malick’s films are awash with whispered profundities). Naturally, she is on the side of grace.
Jack’s father, Mr. O’Brien (Brad Pitt), is the only member of this family besides Jack endowed with the human weakness of greed and wrath (oddly, there’s also a third brother in the house, Steve, who doesn’t get much screen time and whose presence feels like an afterthought). O’Brien works as an engineer in an oil refinery and is frustrated by his station in life. In his youth he wanted to be a classical musician. Now he designs inventions that he can’t patent and plays Bach on the church organ when no one is around. He bullies his kids about posture and comportment and tells them they need to fight to get ahead in this world. He metes out petty punishments when they break his rules and plays Toscanini on the stereo at dinner to show them what real excellence sounds like. As played by Pitt he’s a man at war with himself, the only member of his family touched by doubt, self-loathing, or bitterness. He’s also the only person in the family whose public self is at odds with his private self. Outside the house he’s a sarcastic glad-hander; inside, he veers between fragile affection and bluff tyranny. Sometimes he combines the two, as when he orders his sons to kiss him goodnight.
As young Jack (Hunter McCracken) grows up, he’s torn between the warring influences of his parents, between his mother’s injunction that he embrace the world and love openly, and his father’s wish that he make a space for himself through force of will. The bulk of The Tree of Life (roughly the central hundred minutes or so) is taken up with the story of Jack’s maturation — not exactly the path to manhood, but from naïve childhood to what you could call skeptical childhood. Jack loves his mother (to a degree that seems Oedipal), but he’s more like his father, and knows it. He starts acting out, throwing rocks through windows and torturing animals with the neighborhood kids. At one point he breaks into a wealthy home and steals a beautiful woman’s nightshirt. The shirt is beautiful too, and rather than defile it in any way he puts it in the river and lets the current take it away. At the height of his villainy he hurts his brother, exploiting the younger boy’s belief in his absolute goodness. For a second it seems like Jack has finally done it, done something really evil — but no, the hurt is minor, and before long Jack is helping the neighborhood cripple make toys and hoeing the cabbage patch with his father in the garden.
All of the long passage in The Tree of Life devoted to Jack’s childhood is finely observed and beautifully filmed. It’s also relentlessly, exhaustingly pretty, and weirdly cut off from the rest of the world. Practically every shot is bathed in golden light and plays to the accompaniment of swelling classical music. All that beauty comes at a cost: by making each individual moment beautiful, Malick robs them all of their power. As a visual style, it creates a dominant mood of spiritual bombast and honeyed nostalgia. Even the strongest performances have trouble standing up to it. Brad Pitt, with his rage and confusion and incremental decline, does, and so does young Jack, at times — Hunter McCracken does an excellent sullen brood — but R. L. and the mother get swallowed in the picturesque tide.
A little contact with the outside world would have helped. Malick focuses his attention almost exclusively on the O’Brien family home. It’s a kind of bubble, which makes sense, since childhood is a kind of bubble, with its own languages and rules and hierarchies. But the few glimpses we get are oddly frustrating. Each bears a heavy allegorical load, filed under “the loss of innocence.” In one scene, the boys witness a girl’s death at the county pool while their father tries helplessly to save her. In another, the boys go into town with their mother and see some men being taken away by the police. It’s hard to tell whether they are drunks, protesters, homeless, or crazy. The very fact that it doesn’t matter who they are or what they’ve done turns them into abstract symbols of injustice, as impotent as they are opaque. The other odd thing is the suppression of popular music in the film. The flashback in Tree of Life is set sometime around 1955 — exciting times on the radio, of which we get not a taste. Did they play Chuck Berry in Waco? If fifties suburban Waco is Malick’s own Garden of Eden, would Elvis have been his serpent? Could Little Richard have been his apple of knowledge?
It isn’t hard to guess why Malick maintains radio silence: just a few seconds of “Tutti Frutti” would have shredded Tree of Life‘s carefully tended atmosphere of pantheistic reverie. And reverie — at the miracle of existence and the mystery of the universe — is very much what the film is about, which I think is why Malick takes the fairly audacious step of filming the history of the universe from birth to extinction. Malick doesn’t look for the universal in the particular so much as equate the two: nebulae glow with womb-light, interstellar dust resembles clods of sperm, the birth of a child is the birth of the cosmos; a single death is like the annihilation of the solar system.
The Tree of Life begins with a quotation from the Book of Job, “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?” and then answers its own question with a prolonged cosmic barn-raising. A mix of old-fashioned special effects, Hubble Telescope stock photos, and walking-with-dinosaurs animations, the sequence presents a providential history of the universe as a spectacle culminating in the creation of Sean Penn. Life arises out of a mysterious swirl of bubbles. Amoeba devour bacteria before evolving into fish. An asteroid plummets into the Earth, saving us all from dinosaur hegemony. In the strangest scene, set in the jungles of Mesozoic Texas, a predatory dinosaur comes upon a dying herbivore. Instead of going in for the kill it lays a comforting paw on its head. Is it acting out of compassion? Does the way of grace extend all the way down the evolutionary ladder to Troodons, or are we inside Jack’s imagination, watching his own Christian-inflected prehistoric fantasia?
Things get even harder to sort out toward the end, when the adult Jack reunites with his loved ones in a dream space that seems to exist outside linear time. Jack goes through an empty doorframe in the desert and emerges on a beach where his mother and brothers are there, all restored to youth and frolicking by the shore. With a few whispers, all Jack’s transgressions are forgiven. Flanked by angels, his mother cradles a glowing light in her hands and gives her son up to God. Clad in a shimmering white slip, she’s the Virgin Mary without the angst.
Everything in The Tree of Life lacks a crucial dimension of angst. Malick invites us to marvel at a universe created for our benefit and an afterlife in which all our cares will be resolved. The best part of the movie — Brad Pitt taunting his sons, willing them to rebel against an authority he doesn’t believe he deserves — vanishes behind a scrim of inane space flotsam, while the combination of the two endows Jack’s childhood with a world-historical weight it can’t possibly bear.
But then again, where would we be without risible notions? All of Malick’s movies (even Badlands, his best) suffer from an excess of high-mindedness. He tries to cram every beautiful thing he can think of into every scene. The archetypal Malick image, repeated here, is of trees shot from the level of the roots looking up, set to the accompaniment of classical music. A line of dialogue by Mrs. O’Brien — “Love everyone, every leaf, every ray of light” — might be the archetypal sentence. Malick’s guiding impulse is to submerge consciousness in nature, while keeping a hand on the most elevated products of human harmony. His films come from a point somewhere between Emerson and Rousseau: he’s always on the lookout for natural man and a pre-verbal contact with the substance of the universe.
Sometimes he even manages to bite off a piece of the sublime, and he isn’t afraid to go too far or to risk being laughed at. He reminds me of D. H. Lawrence, and like Lawrence, no matter how tedious he can be he always finds space for something unexpected as well. I like it when Malick flirts with apocalypse. I like the locusts and the brushfires in Days of Heaven and the big artillery assaults in Thin Red Line. I like his little imaginary Edens, especially when they feature chickens, as in Badlands, or are surrounded by spooky cedar swamps (New World). I don’t like his too-wise-for-this-world kids, but I like his tongue-tied vigilantes. I don’t like his pacing or his preaching, but I do like Brooke Adams. In spite of myself, I like his flights of fancy. I like the troupe of Italian clowns descending on North Texas in Days of Heaven, and the baffled look on Colin Farrell’s face when he shows up in Greenland for three seconds. I even like the dinosaurs. The dinosaurs might just be the best part.
The Tree of Life (film)
| The Tree of Life | |
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Theatrical release poster
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| Directed by | Terrence Malick |
| Produced by | |
| Written by | Terrence Malick |
| Starring |
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| Music by | Alexandre Desplat |
| Cinematography | Emmanuel Lubezki |
| Edited by |
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Production
company |
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| Distributed by | Fox Searchlight Pictures |
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Release date
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Running time
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139 minutes[1] |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $32 million[2] |
| Box office | $54.3 million[3] |
The Tree of Life is a 2011 American experimental epic drama film written and directed by Terrence Malick and starring Brad Pitt, Sean Penn, and Jessica Chastain. The film chronicles the origins and meaning of life by way of a middle-aged man's childhood memories of his family living in 1950s Texas, interspersed with imagery of the origins of the known universe and the inception of life on Earth.
After several years in development and missing 2009 and 2010 release dates,The Tree of Life premiered in competition at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, where it was awarded the Palme d'Or. It ranked no. 1 on review aggregatorMetacritic's "Top Ten List of 2011",[4] and in January 2012 was nominated for three Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Cinematography.
The Tree of Life made more critics' year-end lists for 2011 than any other film.[5] It has appeared in the 2012 Sight & Sound critics' poll of the world's top 250 films[6] as well as BBC's poll of the greatest American films,[7] one of the few 21st century works to be included in both.
Contents
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Plot[edit]
The film begins with a quotation from the Book of Job: "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth?... When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?"
A mysterious, wavering light, resembling a flame, flickers in the darkness. Mrs. O'Brien recalls a lesson taught to her that people must choose to follow either the path of grace or the path of nature. In the 1960s or thereabouts, she receives a telegram informing her of the death of her son, R.L., aged nineteen. Mr. O'Brien is notified by telephone while at an airport. The family is thrown into turmoil.
In the present day, the O'Briens' eldest son, Jack, is adrift in his modern life as an architect. One day he apologizes to his father on the phone for something he said about R.L.'s death. In his office, Jack begins reflecting; shots of tall buildings under the sky, Jack wandering in the desert, trees that stretch from the ground up to the sun high in their leaves, and scenes from his 1950s childhood all link together and lead back to the flame.
From the darkness the universe is born, the Milky Way and then the solar system form while voice-overs ask existential questions. On the newly formed Earth, volcanoes erupt and microbes begin to form and replicate. Sea life is born, then plants on land, then dinosaurs.[8] In a symbolic first act of compassion, a dinosaur chooses not to eat a weakened creature that is lying on the side of a river bed. An asteroid tumbles through space and strikes the Earth, causing the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event.
In a sprawling suburban neighborhood in the American South live the O'Briens. The young couple is enthralled by their new baby Jack and, later, his two brothers. When Jack reaches adolescence, he is faced with the conflict of accepting the way of grace or nature, as embodied by each of his parents. Mrs. O'Brien is gentle, nurturing, and authoritative, presenting the world to her children as a place of wonder. Mr. O'Brien is strict and authoritarian, and easily loses his temper as he struggles to reconcile his love for his sons with wanting to prepare them for a world he sees as corrupt and exploitative. He laments his decision to work in a power plant instead of pursuing his passion for music. He tries to get ahead by filing patents for various inventions.
Jack's perceptions of the world begin to change after one of his boyhood companions drowns at the pool and another is burned in a house fire. He becomes angry at his father for his bullying behavior and begins to keep a running tally of Mr. O'Brien's various hypocrisies and misdeeds, lashing out at his mother for tolerating such abusive behavior.
One summer, Mr. O'Brien takes a long business trip. While he is away, the boys enjoy unfettered access to their mother, and Jack experiences the first twinges of rebelliousness. Goaded by other boys his age, Jack commits acts of vandalism andanimal abuse. He later trespasses into a neighbor's house and steals her sheer nightgown. Jack is confused and angered by his feelings of sexuality and guilty trespass. He throws the stolen lingerie into a river to rid himself of it. Mr. O'Brien returns home from his business trip. Shortly thereafter, the plant that he works at closes and he is given the option of relocating to work in an inferior position within the firm or losing his job. He and his family pack up to move to the new job location. He laments the course his life has taken, questioning whether he has been a good enough person. He asks Jack for forgiveness for his harsh treatment of him.
In the present, adult Jack leaves work. Riding the elevator up, he experiences a vision of following a young girl across rocky terrain. Jack tentatively walks through a wooden door frame erected on the rocks and sees a view of the far distant future in which the sun expands into a red giant, engulfing the earth and then shrinking into a feeble white dwarf. Someone says "follow me" in the darkness, which is ended by the lighting of two candles. After emerging from rustic doors, Jack follows the girl and then a young version of himself across surreal landscapes. On a sandbar, Jack sees images of death and the dead returning to life. He is reunited with his family and all the people who populate his memory. His father is happy to see him. He encounters his dead brother, whom he brings to his parents. The parents are then seen saying goodbye to the young brother as he steps out of a home into a vast expanse. Accompanied by a woman in white and a young woman, Mrs. O'Brien looks to the sky and whispers, "I give him to you. I give you my son."
Jack's vision ends and he leaves the building smiling, while nature returns to the surrounding buildings as the sky is reflected in them.
The mysterious wavering light continues to flicker in the darkness.
Cast[edit]
- Brad Pitt as Mr. O'Brien
- Sean Penn as Jack O'Brien
- Hunter McCracken as young Jack
- Finnegan Williams as (aged 5) Jack
- Michael Koeth as (aged 2) Jack
- Jessica Chastain as Mrs. O'Brien
- Laramie Eppler as R.L. O'Brien
- John Howell as R.L. (age 2)
- Tye Sheridan as Steve
- Kari Matchett as Jack's ex
- Joanna Going as Jack's wife
- Michael Showers as Mr. Brown
- Kimberly Whalen as Mrs. Brown
- Jackson Hurst as Uncle Roy
- Fiona Shaw as Grandmother
- Crystal Mantecón as Elisa
- Tamara Jolaine as Mrs. Stone
- Dustin Allen as George Walsh
Production[edit]
Development[edit]
Terrence Malick pitched the concept of The Tree of Life to River Road Entertainment head Bill Pohlad while the two were collaborating on an early version of Che. Pohlad recalls initially thinking the idea was "crazy," but as the film concept evolved, he came to feel strongly about the idea;[9] he ended up financing the film.[10] Producer Grant Hill was also involved with the film at an early stage.[10] During a meeting on a different subject involving Malick, his producer Sarah Green, Brad Pitt, and Pitt's Plan B Entertainment production partner Dede Gardner, Malick brought up Tree of Life and the difficulties it was having getting made.[11] It was "much later on" that the decision was made for Pitt to be part of the cast.[11]
The Tree of Life was announced in late 2005, with Indian production company Percept Picture Company set to finance it andDonald Rosenfeld on board as executive producer. The film was set to be shot partially in India, with pre-production scheduled to begin in January 2006.[12] Colin Farrell and Mel Gibson were at one stage attached to the project. Heath Ledger was set to play the role of Mr. O'Brien, but dropped out (due to recurring sicknesses) a month before his death in early 2008.[13]
In an October 2008 interview Jack Fisk, a longtime Malick collaborator, suggested that the director was attempting something radical.[14] He also implied that details of the film were a close secret.[15] In March 2009, visual effects artist Mike Fink revealed to Empire magazine that he was working on scenes of prehistoric Earth for the film.[16] The similarity of the scenes Fink describes to descriptions of a hugely ambiguous project entitled Q that Malick worked on soon after Days of Heaven has led to speculation that The Tree of Life is a resurrection of that abandoned project.[17]
Filming[edit]
Principal photography began in Texas in 2008.[18] Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki returned to work with Malick after collaborating with him on The New World. Locations included Smithville, Houston, Matagorda,[19] Bastrop, Austin,[20]Dallas,[21] and Malick's hometown of Waco.[22]
The namesake of the film is a large live oak tree that was excavated from a property a few miles outside Smithville. The 65,000-pound tree and root ball were trucked into Smithville and replanted.[23][24][25]
Visual effects[edit]
After nearly thirty years away from Hollywood, famed special effects supervisor Douglas Trumbull contributed to the visual effects work on The Tree of Life. Malick, a friend of Trumbull, approached him about the effects work and mentioned that he did not like the look of computer-generated imagery. Trumbull asked Malick, "Why not do it the old way? The way we did it in2001?"[26]
Working with visual effects supervisor Dan Glass, Trumbull used a variety of materials for the creation of the universe sequence. "We worked with chemicals, paint, fluorescent dyes, smoke, liquids, CO2, flares, spin dishes, fluid dynamics, lighting and high speed photography to see how effective they might be," said Trumbull. "It was a free-wheeling opportunity to explore, something that I have found extraordinarily hard to get in the movie business. Terry didn't have any preconceived ideas of what something should look like. We did things like pour milk through a funnel into a narrow trough and shoot it with a high-speed camera and folded lens, lighting it carefully and using a frame rate that would give the right kind of flow characteristics to look cosmic, galactic, huge and epic."[27] The team also included Double Negative in London. Fluid-based effects were developed by Peter and Chris Parks, who had previously worked on similar effects for The Fountain.[28]
A column in The New Yorker noted that the film credited Thomas Wilfred’s lumia composition Opus 161, and that this was the source of the "shifting flame of red-yellow light" at the beginning and the end.[29]
Release[edit]
In March 2009, Empire magazine's website quoted visual effects supervisor Mike Fink as saying that a version of the film will be released for IMAX cinemas along with two versions for traditional cinemas.[16] The IMAX film has been revealed to beVoyage of Time, a documentary expanding on the 'history of the universe' scenes in The Tree of Life, which the producers decided to focus on releasing at a later date so as not to cannibalise its release.[30] It is set to be released by Broad Green Pictures.[31]
Delays and distribution problems[edit]
By May 2009, The Tree of Life had been sold to a number of international distributors, including Europacorp in France, TriPictures in Spain, and Icon in the UK and Australia,[32] but lacked a US distributor. In August 2009, it was announced that the film would be released in the US through Apparition, a new distributor founded by River Road Entertainment head Bill Pohlad and former Picturehouse chief Bob Berney.[33] A tentative date of December 25, 2009 was announced, but the film was not completed in time.[34] Organisers of the Cannes Film Festival made negotiations to secure a premiere at Cannes 2010, resulting in Malick sending an early version of the film to Thierry Fremaux and the Cannes selection committee.[35]Though Fremaux warmly received the cut and was eager to screen the film at his festival,[35] Malick ultimately told him that he felt the film was not ready.[36] On the eve of the 2010 Cannes Film Festival, Berney suddenly announced his departure from Apparition, leaving the company's future uncertain.[37] Pohlad decided to keep The Tree of Life at Apparition, and after significant restructuring, hired Tom Ortenberg to act as a consultant on its release. A tentative plan was made to release it in late 2010, in time for awards consideration.[38] Ultimately, Pohlad decided to close Apparition and sell rights to the film.[39]Private screenings of the film to interested parties Fox Searchlight Pictures and Sony Pictures Classics took place at the 2010 Telluride Film Festival.[40] On September 9, Fox Searchlight announced their acquisition of the film from Pohlad's River Road Entertainment.[41] The film opened in limited release in the United States on May 27, 2011.[42]
On March 28, 2011, UK magazine Empire reported that UK distributor Icon Entertainment was planning to release the film on May 4, 2011. This would make the UK the first region in the world to see the film,[43] preempting the expected Cannes Film Festival premiere on May 11. This would disqualify the film from inclusion at Cannes.[44] As a result, a surge of interest in the story developed on international film news sites.[43] After film blogger Jeff Wells was told by a Fox Searchlight representative that this was "unlikely",[45] and Anne Thompson received similar word from Searchlight and outright denial from Summit,[46][47]Helen O'Hara from Empire received a confirmation from Icon that they intended to stick with the May 4 release.[43] On March 31, Jeff Wells was told by Jill Jones, Summit's senior VP of international marketing and publicity, that Icon has lost the right to distribute The Tree of Life in the UK, due to defaulting on its agreement, with the matter pending arbitration at a tribunal in Los Angeles.[48] On June 9, it was announced that The Tree of Life would be released in the UK on July 8, 2011, after Fox Searchlight Pictures picked up the UK rights from Icon.[49]
Home media[edit]
The Tree of Life was released on Blu-ray Disc in the United States and Canada on October 11, 2011; on January 24, 2012, there was a separate release of the DVD.[50]
Soundtrack[edit]
The Tree of Life Original Motion Picture Soundtrack by Alexandre Desplat was released in 2011 by Lakeshore Records. Although billed as the movie soundtrack, only a few minutes of the album's music are heard in the film.
Reception[edit]
Early reviews for The Tree of Life at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival were polarized. After being met with both boos[51] and applause[52] at its premiere at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, the film received mixed early reviews.[53][54] The film went on to be awarded the prestigious Palme d'Or. Two of the film's producers, Bill Pohlad and Sarah Green, accepted the prize on behalf of the reclusive Malick.[55] The Tree of Life is the first American film to win the Palme d'Or since Fahrenheit 9/11 in 2004.[55]The head of the jury, Robert De Niro, said it was difficult to choose a winner, but The Tree of Life "ultimately fit the bill".[55] De Niro explained, "It had the size, the importance, the intention, whatever you want to call it, that seemed to fit the prize."[55][56]
The film won the 2011 FIPRESCI (International Federation of Film Critics) Big Prize for the Best Film Of the Year. The award was presented on September 16, during the opening ceremony of the 59th San Sebastián International Film Festival.[57]Malick released a statement of thanks for the award.[58] On November 28, it was announced that the film had won the Gotham Award for Best Feature, shared withBeginners.[59]
The Tree of Life has since garnered critical acclaim and holds an 84% rating onRotten Tomatoes, based on 256 reviews. The site's consensus is that "Terrence Malick's singularly deliberate style may prove unrewarding for some, but for patient viewers, Tree of Life is an emotional as well as visual treat."[60] At Metacriticwhich assigns a weighted mean rating out of 100 reviews from film critics, the film has a rating score of 85, based on 50 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim".[61]
Roger Ebert gave the film four stars of four and wrote, "The Tree of Life is a film of vast ambition and deep humility, attempting no less than to encompass all of existence and view it through the prism of a few infinitesimal lives. The only other film I've seen with this boldness of vision is Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and it lacked Malick's fierce evocation of human feeling. There were once several directors who yearned to make no less than a masterpiece, but now there are only a few. Malick has stayed true to that hope ever since his first feature in 1973."[62] The following year, Ebert gave The Tree of Life one of his 10 votes in Sight & Sound's 2012 critics' poll of the world's greatest films.[63] Anthony Lane of The New Yorker said a "seraphic strain" in Malick's work "hits a solipsistic high" in The Tree of Life. "While the result will sound to some like a prayer, others may find it increasingly lonely and locked, and may themselves pray for Ben Hecht or Billy Wilder to rise from the dead and attack Malick’s script with a quiver of poisonous wisecracks," the magazine's reviewer said.[64]
Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian awarded it five stars and lauded it as an "unashamedly epic reflection on love and loss" and a "mad and magnificent film."[65] Todd McCarthy of The Hollywood Reporter states "Brandishing an ambition it's likely no film, including this one, could entirely fulfill, The Tree of Life is nonetheless a singular work, an impressionistic metaphysical inquiry into mankind's place in the grand scheme of things that releases waves of insights amidst its narrative imprecisions."[66] Justin Chang of Variety states the film "represents something extraordinary" and "is in many ways his simplest yet most challenging work, a transfixing odyssey through time and memory that melds a young boy's 1950s upbringing with a magisterial rumination on the Earth's origins."[67] Peter Travers of Rolling Stone states "Shot with a poet's eye, Malick's film is a groundbreaker, a personal vision that dares to reach for the stars."[68] A. O. Scott of The New York Times gave the film much praise and stated, "The sheer beauty of this film is almost overwhelming, but as with other works of religiously minded art, its aesthetic glories are tethered to a humble and exalted purpose, which is to shine the light of the sacred on secular reality". Total Film gave the film a five-star review (denoting 'outstanding'): "The Tree of Life is beautiful. Ridiculously, rapturously beautiful. You could press 'pause' at any second and hang the frame on your wall."[69] Richard Corliss of Time named it one of the Top 10 Best Movies of 2011.[70]
Some religious reviewers welcomed the spiritual themes of the film.[71][72][73][74] For instance, Catholic author and now auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles Fr. Robert Barron, reviewing The Tree of Life for a Chicago Tribune blog, noted that "in the play of good and evil, in the tension between nature and grace, God is up to something beautiful, though we are unable to grasp it totally...“Tree of Life” is communicating this same difficult but vital lesson."[75] Rabbi David Wolpe says "that Terrence Malick's new film "Tree of Life" opens with a quotation from Job. That quotation holds the key to the film and in some sense, the key to our attitude toward life."[76]
Not all reviewers were positive. Sukhdev Sandhu, chief film critic of The Daily Telegraph describes the movie as "self-absorbed," and "achingly slow, almost buckling under the weight of its swoony poetry."[77] Likewise, Stephanie Zacharek ofMovieline praised the technical aspects of the film, such as the "gorgeous photography", but nonetheless criticized it as "a gargantuan work of pretension and cleverly concealed self-absorption."[78] Lee Marshall of Screen Daily referred to the film as "a cinematic credo about spiritual transcendence which, while often shot through with poetic yearning, preaches too directly to its audience."[79] Filmmaker David Lynch said that, while he liked Malick's previous works, The Tree of Life "was not his cup of tea".[80] In 2016, John Patterson of The Guardian complained of the meager impression that the film left on him, opining that "much of it simply evaporates before your eyes."[81]
Sean Penn has said, "The screenplay is the most magnificent one that I've ever read but I couldn't find that same emotion on screen. ... A clearer and more conventional narrative would have helped the film without, in my opinion, lessening its beauty and its impact."[82] He further clarified his reservations about the film by adding, "But it's a film I recommend, as long as you go in without any preconceived ideas. It's up to each person to find their own personal, emotional or spiritual connection to it. Those that do generally emerge very moved."[83]
The film appeared on over 70 critics' year-end top ten lists, including 15 first-place rankings.[84] The Tree of Life was voted best film of 2011 in the annual Sight & Sound critic poll, earning one and a half times as many votes as runner up A Separation.[85] The film also topped the critics poll of best released film of 2011 by Film Comment,[86] and the indieWireannual critics survey for 2011,[87] as well as The Village Voice/LA Weekly Film Poll 2011.[88]
In 2012, 16 critics, including Roger Ebert, included it as one of their 10 votes for Sight & Sound; this placed it at #102 in the final list (making it the fourth film on the list which had been released since the year 2000, behind Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love, Edward Yang's Yi Yi, and David Lynch's Mulholland Drive). The film also received five votes in the directors' poll (placing it at #132).[6]
In 2015, Bradshaw named the film one of the top 50 films of the decade so far by The Guardian.[89]
The Tree of Life ranked seventh on the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)'s 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century in August, 2016.[90] The list was compiled by polling 177 film critics from around the world.
