When it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last week, Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life — a film that's been called a "138-minute meditation on the meaning of life," and features Brad Pitt as a disciplinarian dad and Sean Penn as his adult son reflecting back on his upbringing — was met with both vocal boos and a smattering of applause. And yet, on Sunday, the film nabbed the festival's highest prize, the prestigious Palme d'Or, in what was called a "shocker." Is it really deserving?
No, this film is a pretentious mess: "Malick's movie-making here is all forced spontaneity and failed inspiration," says Michael Sragow in The Baltimore Sun. The film's "structure is ludicrously busy and confusing," cutting from the 1960s to the present day, and then to lengthy cosmic scenes of dinosaurs and meteors. Malick's directing is rife with adolescent pretensions, from his obvious choices in classical music to "voice-over dialogue that belongs in a beatnik cafe." This film definitely doesn't deserve all the accolades it's getting.
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