The Tree Of Life - DVD Review

'if David Attenborough ever bothered to sit down and craft a fictional drama but maintained his fascination with all things natural then this is what it would look like'

Terrence Malick - the easiest director to parody or mock who never seems to get parodied or mocked - returns after, by his standards, a comparatively short absence with The Tree Of Life, a film that, once again, features his trademark 'floaty' narration and obsession with trees, grass and butterflies. If David Attenborough ever bothered to sit down and craft a fictional drama but maintained his fascination with all things natural then this is what it would look like.

Of course, Attenborough might restrain himself to a story which makes solid narrative sense, rather than pausing his story to take in the big bang, single-celled organisms' emergence from the primordial soup and a sympathetic dinosaur or two. Only Malick can make this sort of thing. How do you pitch something that involves dinosaurs as a throwaway gesture if you're not him?

Easy though it is to second-guess Malick's cosmic meandering, the first hour of the film, which takes in all this and more, is a joy to behold. Inter-weaved with the story of Jack (Sean Penn) and Young Jack (Hunter McCracken) is an ambitious, beautiful, experiment of a film, flashing through nebula with the care and craft of Kubrick's 2001. Nothing in this first segment appears quite where you expect it to although - and this is testament to Malick's lengthy editing process - the jumps between the modern façades surrounding Jack, the abstract look at Universe creation and the Fifties heyday of Young Jack, never feel like they jar.

Come the second hour though, where the focus is much more on Young Jack, Malick loses some of the film's magic. Gone are the unexpected visual treats (although the camera work remains excellent) and in their place a much more predictable parent-and-child drama, Jessica Chastain and Brad Pitt (effectively playing against type) providing the support and aggressor dynamos to McCracken's temperamental youngster.

In the end it is a shame that The Tree Of Life is at its best when Malick is being Malick - abstract, brave and unconcerned with the conventions of film language - and at its worst when he slips closer to something more approaching standardisation. Perhaps it is the jarring of the two, the fact that Malick does move from experimentation to life narration, that creates this effect. Regardless of its cause, the glimpse of genius afforded by the first hour is all the more delicious given how quickly the film moves away from it, returning again to this level of daring only in the final twenty minutes, which prove dazzling once again.

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'The cast talk as if they are in a dream, they walk, and walk, and walk while mumbling what's going on in their minds. This works for a few scenes, then grows old.' - Rambling Film, C