Does anyone understand the tree of life

It will strike chords with anyone who has ever questioned life and death. And then, 22 minutes in, The Tree of Life becomes something extraordinary.

The next 17 minutes are gobsmacking, requiring unbelievable daring and confidence from the film-maker, but also beseeching a giant leap of filmic faith from the viewer. Malick, in short, goes off on one. Shots of planetary movements, hot geysers, lava, bacteria, molecules, jellyfish, canyons and churning seas give way to a CGI dinosaur caressing another injured beast — a scene of prehistoric kindness.

Like the polar opposite of Michael Bay, these aren't special effects, these are ideas. But they are also risky, baffling, beautiful images. Are they Darwinian or creationist? They're certainly a little studenty and Discovery Channel-ish, a sort of lava lamp cinema.

If you feel like laughing, maybe that's OK, too. We return from this cosmic reverie, sharply, to the childhood bliss of postwar, smalltown America clues indicate this is Waco, Texas, where Malick grew up, although the film was shot in Smithville and this section will now form the meat of the film, as young Jack Hunter McCracken and his two brothers play in the wide streets, swing on the trees, waft around with their ethereally lovely mother by the river.

When their father — "call me sir" — gets home, things get stricter and meal times are often spent cutting meatloaf under his glare. It is like an unnamed feeling for him, but it shatters him beyond limit nevertheless.

He learns compassion, sympathy — the ways of grace. What was it you showed me? But I would see it was you. Always you were calling me. There are conspicuous moments of abomination in The Tree of Life movie wherein we see Jack hating the guts out of his father.

He hates to see his mother being fine with it all. Jack wishing his father dead is like a person hating nature. The inevitable segment that is blunt and yet quintessential in order to ensure that life goes on. A big man. Look at the glory around us. Trees and birds. I lived in shame. You are all I have. You are all I want to have. It aces with a beautiful quote too:. Unless you love, your life will flash by.

Do good to them. She has come to terms with all her questions with the Lord. We finally see what looks like the end of time. A point where souls come to rekindle. Images of dead calling out people from the grave, to reconcile is evident there. Jack finally reaches the spot, a beach, where he finds every dead sauntering along trying to find each other. So, even though the place looks like a figment, it is a glimpse shown to him about how everything pans out in the end.

Yes, there are seagulls squawking over them. Jack finds his mother, and his dead brother. They are happy to see him. His whole family is there. His old man is proud of him. Love is everywhere. She then leads her child through a door and is able to reconcile with the sad truth finally, and yet understands the way of the nature.

It looks like there are angels around him, or elements of grace that help her overcome grief. They are talking to her with hand gestures and nimble movements, and she comprehends the way of living with their elemental energy. We see a smiling Jack in the end as if he has realized the ultimate truth, and has come to terms with it too.

He feels lighter and better. I would love to hear it though and see how close I was to getting him. Movies like The Tree of Life are rare gems that need to be celebrated. If you have a knack for watching the unusual I would highly recommend you to watch The Tree of Life movie at once. It is an esoteric flick that will definitely blow your mind away. However, you need to stay on the same page in order to truly understand the movie for what it is.

Because it could be really vexing for some. Enjoyed this analysis? Check out more cool movie analysis on our website. I enjoyed reading your observations of The Tree of Life. As you stated, it is an esoteric flick indeed and as for myself, I feel the greatest film ever produced. His poetic voice-over nearer to the end of the film when he realizes the errors in his ways is a lesson all of its own.

Favor cannot be earned from God. All the while, Mr. The scene where Jack approaches his dad in the garden is one that will forever stick with me. As Mr. The beach everyone is standing on in the film's closing moments doesn't have a collapsed Statue of Liberty waiting at the end of it. Jessica Chastain's Mrs.

O'Brien does not turn out to have been one of those dinosaurs all along. So it's probably best not to think of the closing sequence as strictly the conclusion of a storyline, either that of Jack O'Brien played as an adult by Sean Penn or his family.

In fact, the film will likely defeat you if you do, since when Jack meets up with his parents on a wind-swept beach they look as they did in his childhood, with his brothers also as children even though he remains roughly Sean Penn-aged.

The location exists out of time in more than one way; there's a shot of Chastain holding the wrinkled hand of some unseen elderly person up to her lips, but when she lowers the hand it seems to be young again. The beach is crowded with people outside of the O'Brien family, and all of them seem to be wearing the sort of period clothing Mr. O'Brien wore during Jack's childhood and have on in this scene. Jack is the one who looks out of place, still in his modern suit.

What voice is this that speaks within me It's probably in there because Malick has been imagining the creation of the universe since he was a boy, and always wanted to see it depicted on a big screen. But it also ties into that searching sensibility that's at the core of the entire movie, that impulse to ask, "Where did I come from?

What created me? How do I fit in with the universe? Bad news comes in the form of a telegram, as it always did in those days.

O'Brien Jessica Chastain reads it in her home, and gives vent to grief. O'Brien Brad Pitt gets the news at work. We gather a child has died. It is after that when we see the universe coming into being, and Hubble photographs of the far reaches. This had an uncanny effect on me, because Malick sees the time spans of the universe and a human life a lot like I always have. As a child I lay awake obsessed with the idea of infinity and the idea of God, who we were told had no beginning and no end.

How could that be? And if you traveled and traveled and traveled through the stars, would you ever get to the last one? Wouldn't there always be one more? In my mind there has always been this conceptual time travel, in which the universe has been in existence for untold aeons, and then a speck appeared that was Earth, and on that speck evolved life, and among those specks of life were you and me. In the span of the universe, we inhabit an unimaginably small space and time, and yet we think we are so important.

It is restful sometimes to pull back and change the scale, to be grateful that we have minds that can begin to understand who we are, and where are in the vastness. Among other things, "The Tree of Life" s about suffering and transcendence -- and about carrying on with the often tedious business of life being fully aware that one is fated to die, yet still being able to take pleasure in small moments and find wonder in outwardly "ordinary" things.

The film opens with a quote from the Book of Job before delving into what you might call a "late flashback" -- the moment when the family is sent reeling by the death of one of Jack's brothers. The rest of the film keeps returning to this death there's even a figurative shot of the boy still alive, buried in a cross-section of earth while also bringing in contemplation of the suffering of people beyond the family, suffering that strikes Jack and other family members as unfair such as the palsied child they see in town.

We wonder why the innocent suffer. Why do bad things happen to good people? Tree of Life opens with quotations from the book of Job. In the biblical narrative, Job loses his wife, his children, his health and his home.

Friends offer bad advice, blaming him for his ordeal, suggesting he repent from whatever sins caused God to send so much suffering. Job is understandably tempted to curse God.

Malick has chosen source material ripe for drama. Yet, 'Tree of Life' focuses not upon the losses of Job but upon the overwhelming answer from God. Without that framework, 'Tree of Life' may seem random and intractable. It is a poetic meditation on loss. It unfolds as a visual symphony with five or six movements centered around a core aspect of life: death, birth, the age of awareness. The sections are separated by musical cues rather than plot twists. The threadbare plot flows from tragedy to creation, and from innocence to experience.

A family is invited to move from grief to surrender. And viewers are taken from Genesis to Revelation. How come that one predatory dinosaur looks like it's about to kill the wounded dinosaur at the river, then walks away instead?

I hate to cop out here, but like so much in "Tree of Life," I don't know exactly what this is supposed to mean. I think it ties in with the nature vs. But we don't know why the dinosaur walked away.

We might be witnessing the very first stirrings of a moral consciousness in nature, or it might just be that the predator decided it wasn't hungry or would rather go do something else at that moment. Malick is big on "What did that mean?