Splat Review

   "Sometimes a film’s beauty can be encapsulated into a scene, or a few shots.   Malik’s vision and deeply powerful imagery outlives its welcome after 20 minutes, leaving a film that meanders along trying to impress with concepts and ideas . . .but to the occasional movie goer it misses much, much more than it hits." Rhett Bartlett of Dial M for Movies gave Malick's Tree of Life just one star. Based on his review, I don't think that one star is fair to the movie, as well as to Malick as a director. I'll grant to Bartlett that the nearly two and half hour spectacle that is Tree of Life was a little hard to watch, but to call the film pointless should be an insult to all humans. A central motif to the movie is soul searching and inner thoughts, something that every single person on the planet can relate to. We all deal with struggling to find who we are, what our purpose is, and a fair portion of us struggle with our religious faith. To call those struggles "sow paced" as Bartlett does, is saying that every human life is as well. And props have to be given to Malick for visually encompassing (because there is very little dialogue) every difficulty relevant to the movie going population: growing up, the loss of innocence, parenting struggles, faith, and even death (suicide?). If you had to make a movie, how would you visually depict nature and grace as evidently and seamlessly as Malick did?
   At first blush, the movie can seem like a scrambled 'hot mess' with several different plot points that are barely ever closed, shown to us through a series of "abstract images, powerful and deliberately deep scenes on the creation of the universe." But that's what life is, isn't it? Crazy abstract things that throw us through loops, and us constantly asking ourselves what the point of said craziness is. Life never has a "coherent plot," and as we get older we constantly find ourselves thinking over the past or thinking about what might happen. In that sense, life isn't linear either, just like this film. Most of the plot points that "don't give as much as they should," can be figured out once put into the context of the movie as whole, along with little forgotten pieces of the film that slip from our mind in the viewing of it. Trying to summarize the film is a sentence or two has lead me to this summary: Jack is a 50 something man in a world that progressed far beyond what he ever imagined during his simple life in 1950's Texas. He lost himself and his family when his younger brother died when he was 19, now Jack struggles as he tries to find who he was as a child.
    Tree of Life is a visual representation of the human condition at its most elemental and fundamental level. Rhett Bartlett clearly never thought to think of this film as anything but the movies that have dominated modern cinema. This movie was not for entertainment, although it was for anyone who isn't opposed to a little bit of intelligent thought. This movie was supposed to make you think about what makes you you, and to search for your essence. I give Bartlett's review two stars, and that's being generous. He addresses things that are probably very common gripes about the movie, and how people walked out of the movie in the first half hour. But he fails to acknowledge how the movie "teaches you how to watch itself," to quote from a classmate. He doesn't point out that after just a little bit of analysis, the movie makes so much sense that it becomes undeniably straightforward and relatable.