Deep-rooted love

CAST: Brad Pitt,Sean Penn,Jessica Chastain,Hunter McCracken,Fiona Shaw

Rating: ***1/2

At the centre of The Tree of Life is a story that’s so beautiful for being so completely simple. All around it is a grander design,still breathtakingly beautiful but sometimes smotheringly complex. You may find yourself waiting just too long for Malick to go through those layers to get to that story.

The story of the O’Briens,a normal family,with normal means in the town of Waco,Texas,in the ’50s. The Father (Pitt) is loving but stern in his ideas of right and wrong. To the three children,it is their Mother (Chastain) — an always-constant companion,sleeping,eating,reading,playing,participating in their every childhood fantasy with them — who is the centre of their universe.

Love is a constant refrain of the reclusive director’s films,and love just pours out of Chastain’s eyes as she watches her children from behind the curtain or reads a story to them. Malick has as easy a touch with grief,more about quiet sobs heard just out of sight than loud wailings.

When the film opens,the O’Briens have just lost a son,a news they get over the phone. The film cuts to the eldest son,now working in a high rise in a big city,who remembers this as the day he lost his brother. The clouds reflecting on the glass windows,the clouds above,the beach he strolls by all remind him of his childhood,of the times he spent with his brother,and of a family that we slowly get to know,under a tragedy that now overwhelms it all.

It isn’t the lack of warmth or closeness that’s straining the O’Briens as we meet them,it’s the expectedness of it. The Father knows he loves his children,the Mother knows he loves them,the children knows he loves them,and still,when things start going wrong with O’Brien,he acts in ways in spite of it.

The strength of The Tree of Life is how wonderfully Malick draws that portrayal of a loss of innocence against the bedrock of love that families rest on.

On the other hand,The Tree of Life also draws that portrayal against the backdrop of a larger story about the origin of life in the greater context of universe,about God and what creation means to Him,and about destruction and what that means to Him. Mrs O’Brien questions Him on taking away her son,“Why did you give him to me?”,and wonders “What are we to Him?”

The cinematography by Emmanuel Lubezki is astonishing,from the complexities of outer space to a quiet scene involving two dinosaurs staring at each other across a river.

However,Malick’s labour over this larger picture almost swamps the little people who inhabit it. “Grace,” Mrs O Brien says in the film,“never tries to please itself. Accepts being slighted,forgotten,disliked.” Not Nature,she adds,“that only wants to please itself,and finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world is shining around it”.

Quite like The Tree of Life,which seems to be striving for reasons to look away when all it is asking is for us to

see within.

shalini.langer@expressindia.com