One A Day #5: A Tree Blows In Texas

I've been meaning to write this review for awhile now, and this seemed like the perfect time, seeing as how small-town movie rental services are so encumbered by limitations on their inventory, and I was therefore unable to get all of the movies I wanted to review this week at one time.

The Tree Of Life, portrayed in the above trailer as a coming-of-age tale with splashes of introspection and beautiful art direction, was instead a heavily introspective, subjective, over-narrated, bigger-than-itself, too-smart-for-it's-own-good God-bludgeon of a tour of the Universe that had me constantly waiting for an actual movie to start or for writer/director Terrence Malick to come out and tell me I was being Punk'd.

At one point, the movie does start and we are introduced to Jack O'Brien (played as an adult by Sean Penn for roughly 21 hit-and-miss minutes that are constantly narrated by Penn and feature no dialogue), who is looking back on his life and the events that cause him to fall out with his toughly loving father (Brad Pitt) and too good of a good guy mother (Jessica Chastain, The Help). One of these life changing events, about which Chastain's character is frequently beseeching of God, may or may not be the murder or suicide by gun of one of her sons--but Malick doesn't seem to give a shit whether we know what, how, or even if it happened at all.

The 45 minutes we are subjected to before any kind of story gets under way are full of slow spiral-pans of sunlight through trees, passing clouds, birds flying in formation (ironic, considering the film's lack of information), even slower-moving megaclips of our Universe in the making, glowing light that, I imagine, is reminiscent of God's vagina, dinosaurs walking through a prehistoric jungle, orchestral accompaniment, and other non-sequitur wastes of music and film that would have made me think I was watching a National Geographic special narrated by Hal-9000 as voiced by Werner Herzog, had there been any narration to this first third of the film at all.

The actual story was respectably told and beautifully filmed, even featuring decent dialogue at times, but when I got to the bottom crust of the shit sandwich I was being force-fed, the space travesty returned in force, paired with an open ended afterlife/inner mind/whathefuck "resolution" (sarcastic quotes, how I love thee) that completed the feeling of not knowing what the hell it was I had just agreed to torture myself with.

If any of you uber-intellectual directors out there have anymore bright ideas for movies, please leave them on that beach full of dead loved ones inside your head.

F-