Reviews about the "Tree of Life" are of interest to everyone who wants to see this famous drama by Terrence Malik, which was released in 2011. The tape was included in the program of the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Golden Palm Branch.
Production
Reviews of the "Tree of Life" can be read exactly the opposite. Someone liked the picture, someone was not inspired by the thoughts and ideas that its creators sought to convey to the viewer.
It is interesting that the idea of this work with Malik appeared in the late 70s. Then it was announced that this work had the working title Q. Then the project was still abandoned, but some of his ideas were included in the 2011 film “The Tree of Life”.
Production of the painting began in 2006. Famous actors Mel Gibson and Colin Farrell took part in it then, but then the process was suspended. It is known that the next year the producers and the director were in talks with Heath Ledger and Sean Penn. As a result, Penn was approved for one of the main roles, and Ledger died in 2008. After that, Brad Pitt began to consider his role.
The shooting took place in the small town of Smithville in Texas. Actress Jessica Chastain, who played a major female role, admitted that after four months of working on this project, she left a complete devastation inside, the feeling that now she was left alone. So all the participants in the filming process were imbued with what was happening on the site.
Plot
The plot of the film "The Tree of Life" is built around the fate of 11-year-old boy Jack (played by Hunter McCracken), who observes the world around him with childlike childlike directness.
His mother teaches the boy selfless love and kindness, while his deeply religious father insists on the primacy of his own interests in this life.
Parents of the protagonist Jack are too different people. Moreover, each of them seeks to convey to the child his understanding of the place of man in life.
As a result, reality becomes darker when a child has to deal with suffering, pain and death. Now the world around him no longer seems as clear and pure as he seemed to him in childhood. With age, the Oedipus complex, that is, an unconscious sexual attraction to a parent of the opposite sex, begins to manifest itself more and more clearly in Jack.
In the description of the film “The Tree of Life”, it should be noted that the boy’s symptoms that are characteristic of such a condition begin to manifest themselves more and more. This is jealousy for the mother, growing hatred for his father, a subconscious enmity, which at some point already goes to the conscious level.
The meaning of the film
It should be recognized that the film "The Tree of Life" by Terrence Malik, whose genre was defined as a mystery, requires explanation for many.
If you deeply analyze this cinematic work, then it can be conditionally divided into two parts. These are memoirs and a peculiar molecular-cell trip, which at the same time begins to resemble Darren Aronofsky’s “Fountain” and Gaspard Noe's “Enter the Void”. It is to these fragments of the picture that the audience and critics have the most questions. On the other hand, based on them, the meaning of the film "The Tree of Life" can be explained.
When you look at the picture of Terrence Malik, you must always pay close attention to nature. For this director, she is always the source of a huge number of metaphors and meanings, in some cases a full-fledged character, and not an ordinary background for the development of events. In this tape of nature there is enough - fish, jellyfish, frogs, birds and even dinosaurs occupy a considerable part of screen time. Personnel with these animals are constantly replaced by elements and materials. Explaining the film The Tree of Life becomes much easier if you explain what role nature plays in this paradigm. It symbolizes that everything divine should give earthly depth.
Summing up, we can say that this is a sad, beautiful and gentle film. Immediately about time, life, fragile surrounding reality, memory, love, which can linger in the palms when everything else has flowed between your fingers. The analysis of these concepts is the meaning of the film "The Tree of Life".
Awards and nominations
It is worth recognizing that this is one of the most successful work of Terrence Malik. Reviews of the film "The Tree of Life" were mostly positive, the tape received a large number of prestigious awards and nominations.
In 2012, she was nominated for three Academy Award statuettes, but failed to win a single one. The picture claimed victory in the most prestigious nomination "Best Film", but the award went to the comedic melodrama by Michel Hazanavicius "Artist". Terrence Malik himself was included in the list of best directors, but here Khazanavichus passed him. Cameraman Emmanuel Lubetzki also fought for the statuette, but the Oscars in this category were awarded to Robert Richardson for Martin Scorsese’s adventure film Time Keeper.
But Lyubetskiy won the film award "Critics' Choice", in four more nominations the film "The Tree of Life" of 2011 was nominated, but could not win.
The jury of the American Sputnik Prize in the field of television and cinema awarded Jessica Chastain for the best actress in a supporting role and Terrence Malik himself for the best original screenplay. At the end of the year, the tape was in the top ten films according to the National Council of Film Critics of the United States.
Malik's main victory was at the Cannes Film Festival. The film received the most prestigious award - the Golden Palm Branch. Interestingly, the tape was expected to be included in the festival program in 2010, but by that time Malik had not had time to finish his work, so it was decided to postpone the premiere. In the main competition, the film "The Tree of Life" outperformed the melodramatic thriller Pedro Almodovar "The Skin I Live in", the drama of Luke and Jean-Pierre Dardenne "The Boy with the Bicycle", the drama of Julia Lee "Sleeping Beauty", the tape Lynn Ramsey "Something not so with Kevin, "Nuri Bilnier Ceylan's crime drama Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, Lars von Trier's fantastic drama Melancholy.
The opinion of critics
Interestingly, the positive reviews about the film "The Tree of Life" were not immediately presented by critics. For example, at the premiere in Cannes he was booed, but this did not stop him from getting the main award from the jury.
Many critics in reviews of the film "The Tree of Life", which they wrote some time after the premiere, having understood what they saw, gave him the highest ratings. For example, they described it as a parenting novel, drawing even certain analogies with the cult book of the mid-20th century American writer Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. On the other hand, they noted that this is a movie dedicated to the creation of the world and its impending doom.
Many critics described the special effects used as "crazy." They help to form an amazing visual series that matches the voiceover, as well as the “mental radio” and the stream of consciousness.
Others described this picture as a symphony, which consists of several parts embedded one into another according to the principle of a nesting doll. Other critics in their reviews emphasized the confidence and phlegmatism of the director, who created an exhaustive work on the structure of the entire Universe.
If all the previous critics described the picture on the positive side, then there were many who gave categorically negative reviews to the 2011 Life Tree film. People who were skeptical about the director's work noted that the picture was grandiloquent and pretentious, on the verge of kitsch. At the same time, the tape seems to deliberately dull the feelings of the viewer and turns off his mind. To others, this work reminded the worst traditions of highly spiritual Soviet pathos.
Negative reviews about the "Tree of Life" were left even by critics who previously enthusiastically accepted all of Malik's works. For them, the new work of this famous director was too standard and mundane. Critics noted that Malik too enthusiastically plunged into the autobiographical element, reveling in the smallest details of his childhood, while starting to link them with events of a planetary scale, which looked completely strained and artificial.
To others, it seemed not a complicated picture of childhood, which was recreated through the eyes of an adult, but a primitive attempt to idealize a child who was stuck in a rather trivial and mundane situation of the Oedipus complex.
Spectator Impressions
Spectators were more supportive of the picture. The number of positive reviews about the "Tree of Life" is almost three times more than negative.
Fans of Malik saw in this work a revelation from the director, who shared his own worldview of reality with the whole world. He managed to bring the genre of drama in sacred and interpersonal relationships to the most subtle level of perception of the surrounding reality. This allowed him to increase the gradient of cinema, not paying attention to the majority opinion.
Malik leads the viewer in a difficult way through the macrocosm into the microcosm through abstraction. The end point of the creator of this work is the family, even the inner world of one individual person. With the birth of the planet, the director likens the birth of every person. Life is born through the pain of the Earth and each specific mother. In the picture of Malik, each of us has the opportunity to observe the path of mother, beauty and higher feelings, and the path of the father is the path of fear, which gives rise to blinding vision and selfishness.
Some viewers who liked the tape saw in it the appeal of Malik to never lose faith in God, even when falling into really difficult life circumstances. All the same, remain yourself, strive, understand and find out the reason for your grief. It may be surprising for an ordinary person, but death and illness are not always punishments for sins. The main thing is to always believe in the correctness of what God is doing, reconcile to his providence. In the work of Malik there are really quite a lot of references to biblical motives and plots, there are enough direct quotes, for example, from the book of Job. This seemed too pretentious to some, while others, on the contrary, saw in it peculiar clues that help to understand and decipher the meaning of this difficult tape, endowed with many meanings and subtexts.
Negative
The main claims that were presented to the picture are its pathos and pretentiousness. Even those who liked the picture agree with these shortcomings.
In addition, many quit watching the film at the very beginning, when the too long and prolonged scene of the birth of the Earth appeared, which seemed to many too boring.
To many, everything the director talked about seemed too obvious - they were simple life truths that were familiar to everyone around, and as a result they left no imprint in their memory. The first joys and sorrows of some of the first in the life of each child were not so impressive that they were considered extremely banal.
For some of the viewers, the only advantage of the Malik tape was a truly amazingly beautiful picture, which cannot leave anyone indifferent. But behind this external picture, they did not see any deep meaning. At the same time, part of the audience insisted that the main drawback of the tape was the director's view. Malik was accused of the fact that he does not have a single view of the world, he is too moral and peremptory. As a result, for some, the film left an extremely disgusting feeling.
Producer
The creator of this picture is American director Terrence Malik. He was born in Ottawa, Illinois in 1943, and is now 75 years old. There were three Academy Award nominations in his career, but he failed to win a single award.
It is known that in 1969, teaching philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Malik became a student at the American Institute of Motion Picture Arts. It was there that he directed his first short film, Lanton Mills. Then he began to try himself as a screenwriter. According to his scripts, several paintings came out, and he was not always indicated in the credits.
His full-fledged directorial debut was the dramatic Wasteland Road Movie, starring Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen. This is a story based on the biography of the famous American robber and criminal, nicknamed "The Frantic Killer," Charles Starkweather. Together with his girlfriend Caril Fugate, they killed 11 people in Wyoming and Nebraska. In Malik's view, this became a classic road movie about two lovers who decide to oppose themselves to society. At the same time, the director did not consider the characters as romantic heroes. They behave in the way real heroes should behave in their view. In this way, the director reveals the meaninglessness of their existence and inner squalor.
His second painting, Harvest Days, tells about the life of an American farmer during the First World War. After that, the director began work on a large-scale project on military operations in the Middle East, which was never implemented. Moreover, he went to Paris, led the life of a complete recluse for almost 20 years.
Only in the late 80s he received a proposal to film the Johns military drama The Thin Red Line. The tape of the same name was released in 1998. It tells a fictional story about the battles of the American army in World War II in the Battle of Guadalcanal. The main characters of the tape are Lieutenant Colonel Toll, who seeks to win at all costs, for the sake of promotion and fame, and Private Bell, whose wife goes to another while he fights at the front. The picture was very successful at the world box office. Received seven Academy Award nominations, losing in all. Malik himself claimed the award for best directing and adapted script, but lost to Stephen Spielberg with the military drama "Saving Private Ryan" and Bill Condon with the biographical drama "Gods and Monsters."
In 2005, Malik's next film, The New World, appeared, which tells the story of Pocahontas and Jones Smith, which formed the basis for Americans' Thanksgiving celebrations.
After the success of the film "Tree of Life", the director released four more films. They became:
- the melodrama "To a Miracle", which premiered at the Venice Film Festival,
- drama "Knight of the Cups",
- drama and the documentary "Time Travel",
- musical melodrama "Song by song" about two intersecting love triangles.
Brad Pitt
The actors of the film "The Tree of Life" have done a lot to ensure him such success. Fortunately, the main roles were invited real Hollywood stars.
The image of Mr. O'Brien on the screen recreates the popular American artist, Oscar winner Brad Pitt.
Now he is 55 years old, his acting debut took place in 1987 in the drama action movie Roger Donaldson's "There is no way out", in which he appears in the guise of an officer at a party. At first, he got episodic and secondary characters. The real breakthrough came in 1994 when he played Louis de Pont du Lac in Neil Jordan’s dramatic fantasy Interview with the Vampire, and then in Edward Zwick’s drama Legends of the Fall, for which he was nominated for an award for the first time in his career. Golden Globe. " Then followed the main role in the detective thriller David Fincher's "Seven". After her, Pitt was already officially talked about as a real Hollywood star.
In 1999, he played one of his most famous movie roles, appearing in the image of Tyler Durden in the film adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk's novel "Fight Club".
It is interesting that Brad Pitt was nominated for an Oscar five times, and managed to win the statuette only once. And not as an actor, but as one of the producers of Steve McQueen’s historical drama “12 Years a Slave,” which became the best in 2014.
Of his recent works after The Tree of Life, Robert Zemeckis’s romantic thriller The Allies, David Michaud’s drama The War Machine, and David Litch’s comedy sci-fi thriller Deadpool-2 can be noted.
Sean Penn
Mr. O'Brien’s son is played by Hollywood actor Sean Penn. This actor in the film "The Tree of Life" in 2011 became, of course, one of his jewelry. Penn is a real star, he is considered one of the most titled actors of our time in the world.
The 58-year-old American made his debut on the big screen in 1981 in Harold Becker's drama "End Light", creating the image of cadet Alex Dwyer. He has won two Oscars. He got them for starring in Clint Eastwood’s dramatic detective, The Mysterious River, where he played cop Sean Devin, who is investigating the murder of a 19-year-old girl. He received a second statuette for his role as the protagonist of Gus Van Sant’s drama "Harvey Milk", a famous American gay rights activist who became the first US politician to publicly declare his homosexual orientation.
After the drama The Tree of Life, actor Sean Penn rarely appeared on the screen. He played in only a few films. This is the tragicomic road movie Paolo Sorrentino's "Wherever You Are," the crime thriller Ruben Fleischer "Gangster Hunters", the adventure tragicomedy of Ben Stiller "The Unbelievable Life of Walter Mitty", the thriller Pierre Morel's "Ganmen", the science fiction drama series "First."
At the Berlin Film Festival in 1996, Penn won a prize for best actor in Tim Robbins’s crime drama Dead Man Goes, won the Cannes Film Festival in 1997, starring in Nick Cassavetes’s comedy melodrama She's Beautiful. The jury of the Venice Film Festival turned out to be most favorable to him. The best actor in this forum was recognized twice. Such high marks were awarded to his work in the drama Anthony Dreisen "Trouble" and the film Alejandro González Iñárritu "21 grams".
Movie about Charles Darwin
When looking for information about this Terrence Malik movie , you can stumble upon a tape with a similar name. This is a biology documentary called Darwin and the Tree of Life. It was scripted by David Attenborough for British television.
Attenborough himself played the main role in this tape. This project was implemented on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the birth of Darwin, as well as on the 150th anniversary of the publication of his most famous work entitled "The Origin of Species."
Attenborough, along with the audience, goes on an exciting journey, which describes in detail the life of the famous English scientist, during the plot, the viewer has an understanding of how he came to understand the theory of evolution.