As the credits rolled at the end of Terrence Malik’s kaleidoscopic The Tree of Life, I turned to my friend in the cinema. We each lifted our eyebrows to express what we were thinking: "Wow." I turned to my uncle who was watching with us, and he said with indignation: "Are you fucking kidding me, James?" As my friend and I sat in awe of what we had just watched, my uncle declared with complete confidence that it was the worst film he had ever seen.
This exchange offers a snapshot of the critical polarization that came after The Tree of Life’s highly anticipated 2011 release. This was Malick’s first film 13 years, following 1998’s The Thin Red Line, and it was booed during its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival.
To critics, it was either a masterpiece or an insufferable indulgence. Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian described it as "a magnificent, toweringly ambitious and visionary work." While Stephanie Zacharek wrote it was "a gargantuan work of pretension and cleverly concealed self-absorption." Despite creating a critical divide, Malik’s drama has achieved canonical status, placing in multiple all-time lists, including seventh in the BBC’s Top 100 Films of the 21st Century.
People often assume that how you view a piece of art is static—if you initially love or hate something, you will always feel that way. But your relationship to art can be fluid, with your emotional response reconfiguring as you personally change. I first saw The Tree of Life in 2011 and in the ten years between that and this article, I have seen hundreds of other films; each of these films has affected how I perceive others.
The Tree of Life is a behemoth, its narrative straddling literally billions of years from the very formation of the universe to the suffocating steel coffins of modern-day office life. The bulk of the film takes place in 1950s Texas and focuses on Jack (played by Sean Penn in the present) and his relationship with his parents: the patriarchal, abusive Father played magnetically by Brad Pitt and the angelic, almost celestial Mother played by Jessica Chastain.
Pitt’s Mr. O’Brien is a frustrated, failed musician working a white-collar job while reigning supreme over the family dynamics. He is aggressive, prone to fits of rage, and obscenely hierarchical, forcing his children to finish every utterance to him with "sir." He does show affection to his sons by playing and hugging them, but the self-perception that his life is a failure manifests into authoritarian control of his family.
Mrs. O’Brien is presented by Malik as the embodiment of a certain type of parental perfection: unconditionally loving, unyieldingly attentive, and a graceful wonderment that basks her every movement. Chastain and Pitt’s characters represent the dual, contrasting ideas of nature and grace with Jack negotiating, rejecting, and embracing these ideals at different points in his childhood. Malik often displays these conflicting ideas with a fairly broad brush; his Father teaches him how to fight, imploring Jack to punch him in the face, while his Mother attempts to install in him a sense of virtue and kindness.
At it’s center, The Tree of Life is a film about creation, how events in life—from small domestic incidents to cosmological explosions—continually create new realities. This is how Malik fuses the depictions of the universe expanding and the first arthropod desperately clawing its way onto land, with the (somewhat) realist depictions of mid-century suburban American life. We see the universe forming in a spectacular show of luminous lights of deep red, blue, and amber, merging together as they stretch into infinity.
Malik pairs these existential moments with Jack committing increasing acts of vandalism and criminality, at one point sneaking into the house of his childhood crush and stealing her nightie. These disparate scenes, among many others, show how cosmic and individual reality is constantly reforming to take on new shapes and textures. Malik manages to marry the galactic and the personal, demonstrating how meteors destroying the Earth and your Father going away on a business trip are no different.
So, is The Tree of Life a masterpiece or infuriating pretension writ interstellar? The film is a piece of pure cinematic wonder, skipping between scenes of pre-historic terrestrial formation and 1950s family dynamics with a visionary flourish. The major problem is Malik’s decision to base a large amount of his narrative drive within voiceovers that are instantly aggravating, as different characters wax pseudo-poetic about life seemingly from a world in which only whispering is allowed. It also doesn’t help that every time Sean Penn is on screen, he has the facial expression of a man confused by a particularly complex joke in a kid’s magazine.
However, The Tree of Life is an epic work, sitting alongside films like 2001: A Space Odyssey or The Seventh Samurai for sheer ambition, and it will survive the weather of time and be thought of as an all-time classic. I feel almost the same as I did when watching it 10 years ago—the sense that this is cinema at its most profound, most beguiling, and most majestic.