The Tree of Life

[Jeremy Blackman]

I don't understand why this is being called "impressionistic." That's completely misleading. This is the opposite of impressionism.

i hate to engage in petty discourse over semantics but i have to say i find this claim to be befuddling.  to me, malick's films are inherently impressionistic in style, none of them more so than the tree of life.  so either our understandings of the term are off or we had vastly different experiences with the film.

Alright, let's unpack it...

the technique in art, literature, or music of conveying experience by capturing fleeting impressions of reality or of mood

ToL definitely contains impressionism, especially at the beginning, when we don't really know the family or understand what's going on...

The characters are deep, clear, and fully-realized. They are initially fleeting, but their elements sort of swirl together and fully crystallize with surprising skill.

Bolded the second part for emphasis.

Think about the family, how their story developed and how the characters became full, rich, and crystal-clear. This is the opposite of impressionism. If you only got an "impression" of them, you did see a different movie. To call the movie impressionistic is to ignore most of what happened in it. We can't pretend that the meat of their story (which even becomes comparatively conventional) never happened, and that all we got were wispy impressions of them. Not the case at all.

[Jeremy Blackman]

MAJOR SPOILERS

Spoiler: ShowHide

I loved some of the shots of the empty river and the flowing seaweed, particularly because I didn't know whether a dinosaur or one of the kids was going to trample into the picture. I loved that tension. The connection there was really clear, too, but also subtle.

I also love how you know which kid died, without ever being shown or told. Amazing how he did that.

I want to see more movies like this.

as for the meaning of the origin sequence, i don't think there's a clear-cut meaning to be drawn from it but its presence within the film is obviously integral.  the crux of malick's poetry (of late, anyway) lies in parallelism and the implications of considering the birth and ostensible end of the universe in the same breath as a story about childhood memories is astonishingly impacting.  ed gonzalez at slant magazine described the film as a "confession of human inconsequence", a notion that has no greater point of reference than the vastness of the universe.

I like that, but I think the meaning I got from it was completely different. The message I got was actually one of human significance, in the way that we're connected to the earth and its history, and the universe. Especially thinking of the flowing seaweed... We saw the kids running through it, but we also saw it in an origins sequence.

[wilder]

MAJOR SPOILERS CONTINUED

Spoiler: ShowHide

I also love how you know which kid died, without ever being shown or told. Amazing how he did that.

Yeah that was incredible.

[Gold Trumpet]

Dammit, red spoiler and all, that was hard not to read.

[Stefen]

Dammit, red spoiler and all, that was hard not to read.

haha same here. I fucking read it. oh well.

[Stefen]

MAJOR SPOILERS CONTINUED

Spoiler: ShowHide

I also love how you know which kid died, without ever being shown or told. Amazing how he did that.

Yeah that was incredible.

OHHHH, see, now why isn't this utilized more often? 

[Jeremy Blackman]

Does that work now? Last time I used that I was told that only admins can see the contents. I'll edit my post.

[polkablues]

Yeah, we tried to get that to work for the longest time.

[Stefen]

BEST. FEATURE. EVER.

Seriously, I have no will. I read spoilers all the time.

[Mr. Merrill Lehrl]

utilized

Was this on purpose or an instance of cosmic synchronicity?  If you don't even know what I'm talking about it's the latter.

I looked at this thread before I logged in and discovered you can't read the text unless you're logged in.  So the feature's great for spoilers and secrets.

[Stefen]

hah, no, the fact that sambong and I both used the word was coincidence.

[Ghostboy]

ghostboy, out of curiosity, at what points in the film did you cry?

When the second child is born and the first is upset; when the mother kisses all three boys good night; and almost at the ending, in spite of myself.

And then the whole ride home from the theater.

[samsong]

you'll get no argument from me that the characters are more fully realized than what some might expect given what some of us have said about the film in an effort to remain spoiler-free, but i don't see how that negates the possibility of it being impressionistic or how that description is misleading.  sure there's a clear narrative thread for the majority of the film but it comes to us in episodes and in a manner that seems to be intended to give the impression of memories recalled as a way of portraying a character considering his past to make sense of his present.  the emphasis you put on elements swirling together doesn't make it any less abstract or useful in making your point.  it seems to me you think  "impressionistic" implies that something is completely fragmentary and lacking in cohesion, and that doesn't even begin to resemble my understanding of impressionism.  

a similar if more thorough definition of impressionism that also happens to suit my opinion on the matter: the depiction (as in literature) of scene, emotion, or character by details intended to achieve a vividness or effectiveness more by evoking subjective and sensory impressions than by recreating an objective reality.  

if you want to get really pedantic (and i don't, really), you describe elements of character in the tree of life being "initially fleeting" but eventually "swirling together" and "fully crystalizing", which taken in a different context can be somewhat analogous to the experience of standing up close to a painting done in the style of pointilism (an offshoot of impressionism) and slowly backing away from it to see the larger picture.  

i'm really only going this far because i don't see the validity in your invalidation of my claim.  not even a little.

ghostboy, i get where you're coming from as the most glaring misstep in the tree of life is the overt-ness of some of the imagery like the example you cited, but the emotions being conveyed were enough to sweep me up.

Spoiler: ShowHide

 seeing his brothers and mother again was too beautiful to be annoyed with that silly doorway. the ending played more powerfully for me on second viewing, especially the denoument that brings us back to the present with a new tone accompanying the shots of modernity, a softening in penn's countenance, and the final shots of the majesty of contemporary architecture.  that line that pitt delivers earlier about having disgraced the glory around him and wasting his life reverberated in my thoughts as this sequence started and i was moved to tears.  also that insane bit of the evolution sequence when the cosmos starts to expand with this song () peaking got my pulse racing.

[polkablues]

I'm with Samsong on this.  The fact that you can tell it's a painting of a starry night doesn't make Starry Night any less impressionistic.

[Sleepless]

Saw it. Intend to write more later but just wanted to say I was surprised how accessible the film was. Probably his most conventional movie since Badlans (it's been years side I watched it but I recall it as his most mainstream/straightforward film).

Wife really loved it. Was her first time seeing Malick. She was genuinely touched by it, and as a Christian she took away a vastly different experience than me.

I really liked it. More in a few days...