The Tree of Life

What is our faith based on, when the roar of a waterfall can drown our prayers for help? What do our questions matter, when entire galaxies are being created and crushed on an incomprehensible scale all around us? What is the value to our pain, the depth of our loss, the tragedy of our mistakes, when our lives are but a cosmic blink. Mallick wonders about these, much like his characters, who speak more through silence and reflection than through dialogue. A son has died, a brother has been lost, and human questions rise like smoke in whispers, trying hard to be heard, searching for sense through the cold magnificence of nature. The mother who wants to fly with grace and love, finds herself bound to the ground heavy with grief. The father who respects nature as much as he fears it, only occasional sorrow breaking the stony facade to reveal a sliver of grace. The brother, who mourns the early loss of innocence, and carries it through his life, meanders a lonesome landscape looking for the same answers to the meaning of life and death as we all do.

What is profound about Mallick's evocative labor of love is how he tries to put the miseries and triumphs of the human experience in context to our place in the Universe, without making them seem insignificant. You are awed by the spectacle of the birth and evolution of cosmos, and our solar neighborhood, even the little rock we call home. And yet, it doesnt eviscerate the dull pain you experience for the family. You ask the same questions, in the same hushed tones, with the quiet frustrating knowledge that no answers are forthcoming.

'The Tree of Life' is not flawless by a long shot. The vagueness of art is more suited to music than to movies, given to seemingly irrelevant stretches. But that is also what makes it an experience of note unlike any other. It seemed like a worded rendition of Koyaanisqatsi. Some will love it, others will walk out on it, both will not completely comprehend it. That in itself is worth the price of admission.