The Tree of Life is a 2011 American epic experimental drama film written and directed by Terrence Malick and featuring a cast of Brad Pitt, Sean Penn, Hunter McCracken, Laramie Eppler, Jessica Chastain, and Tye Sheridan in his debut feature film role. The film chronicles the origins and meaning of life by way of a middle-aged man's childhood memories of his family living in 1950s Texas, interspersed with imagery of the origins of the known universe and the inception of life on Earth.

The Tree of Life
A series of images from the film arranged like mosaic tiles around the title.
Theatrical release poster
Directed by
Terrence Malick
Written by
Terrence Malick
Produced by
Sarah Green
Bill Pohlad
Brad Pitt
Dede Gardner
Grant Hill
Starring
Brad Pitt
Sean Penn
Jessica Chastain
Cinematography
Emmanuel Lubezki
Edited by
Hank Corwin
Jay Rabinowitz
Daniel Rezende
Billy Weber
Mark Yoshikawa
Music by
Alexandre Desplat
Production
companies
River Road Entertainment
Plan B Entertainment
Distributed by
Fox Searchlight Pictures (North America and Europe)
Summit Entertainment (International)[1]
Release date
May 16, 2011 (Cannes)
May 27, 2011 (United States)
Running time
139 minutes[2]
Country
United States
Language
English
Budget
$32 million[3]
Box office
$61.7 million[4]
After several years in development and missing its planned 2009 and 2010 release dates, The Tree of Life premiered in competition at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival,[5] where it was awarded the Palme d'Or. It ranked number one on review aggregator Metacritic's "Top Ten List of 2011",[6] and made more critics' year-end lists for 2011 than any other film.[7] It appeared in the 2012 Sight & Sound critics' poll of the world's top 250 films[8] as well as BBC's poll of the greatest American films,[9] one of the few 21st-century works to be included in either. The film was also later named the seventh-greatest film since 2000 in a BBC poll of 177 critics.[10] In December 2019, The Tree of Life topped The Associated Press' list of the best films of the 2010s.[11] The Tree of Life received three Oscar nominations: Best Picture, Best Director and Best Cinematography.

Plot Edit
The film begins with a quotation from the Book of Job 38:4-7: "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth?... When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?" Then, a mysterious, flame-like light flickers in the darkness.

Around the 1960s, Mrs. and Mr. O'Brien are informed of the death of their 19-year-old son, R.L., throwing the family into turmoil. Circa 2010, the O'Briens' eldest son, Jack, is adrift in his modern life as an architect, though disillusioned by his youth. Amid all this, voiceovers from Ms. O'Brien asks God why should R.L. die. This is then followed by visuals depict the birth of the universe, later the Earth, where volcanoes erupt and microbes begin to form and replicate. Sea life is born, then plants on land, then dinosaurs. A dinosaur chooses not to kill another dinosaur that is injured and lying on the side of a river bed. An asteroid strikes the Earth.

In a suburban neighborhood in Waco, Texas, live the O'Briens. The young couple is enthralled by their new baby Jack and, later, his two brothers R.L. and Stevie. When Jack reaches adolescence, he is faced with the conflict of accepting the way of grace or nature, as embodied by his parents. Mrs. O'Brien, the embodiment of grace, presents the world to her sons as a place of wonder. Mr. O'Brien, the embodiment of nature, easily loses his temper as he struggles to reconcile his love for his sons, wanting to prepare them for a world he sees as corrupt and exploitative. He laments his decision to work in a power plant instead of pursuing his passion for music, and tries to get ahead by filing patents for various inventions.

Jack's perceptions of the world begin to change after two of his friends die in separate accidents. He becomes angry at his father's bullying behavior and begins to keep a running tally of Mr. O'Brien's hypocrisies and misdeeds, lashing out at Mrs. O'Brien for tolerating his father. One summer, Mr. O'Brien takes a long business trip; the boys enjoy unfettered access to their mother, and Jack experiences the first twinges of rebelliousness. Goaded by peers, Jack commits acts of vandalism and animal abuse, and later trespasses into the house of his crush, stealing her sheer nightgown. Confused and angered by his feelings of sexuality and guilty trespass, Jack fearfully throws it into a river. Shortly after Mr. O'Brien returns, the plant that he works at closes; he is given the option of relocating to work in an inferior position within the firm or losing his job. As he and his family pack up to move to the new job; he laments the course his life has taken, and asking Jack to forgive his domineering behavior; Jack reflectively says he embodies nature.

In the present, Jack leaves work. Riding the elevator up, he envisions following a young girl across rocky terrain. As he walks through a wooden door frame erected on the rocks, he sees a view of the far distant future in which the sun expands into a red giant, engulfing Earth and then shrinking into a white dwarf. Someone says "follow me" in the darkness, and candles are lit. After emerging from rustic doors, Jack follows the girl, then a young version of himself, across surreal landscapes. On a sandbar, Jack sees images of the dead returning to life. He is reunited with his family and all the people who populate his memory. Jack encounters his young brother and brings him to his parents, who say goodbye to him as he steps out of a home into a vast expanse. Accompanied by two women in white, Mrs. O'Brien looks to the sky and whispers, "I give him to you. I give you my son."

Jack's vision ends and he leaves the building smiling. The film ends as the mysterious light continues to flicker in the darkness.

Cast Edit
Brad Pitt as Mr. O'Brien
Jessica Chastain as Mrs. O'Brien
Sean Penn as Jack O'Brien
Hunter McCracken as young Jack
Finnegan Williams as (aged 5) Jack
Michael Koeth as (aged 2) Jack
Laramie Eppler as R.L. O'Brien
John Howell as R.L. (age 2)
Tye Sheridan as Steve O'Brien
Kari Matchett as Jack's ex
Joanna Going as Jack's wife
Michael Showers as Mr. Brown
Kimberly Whalen as Mrs. Brown
Jackson Hurst as Uncle Roy
Fiona Shaw as Grandmother
Crystal Mantecón as Elisa
Tamara Jolaine as Mrs. Stone
Dustin Allen as George Walsh
Tommy Hollis as Tommy
Production Edit
Development Edit
In the late 1970s, Malick was offered 1 million dollars for his project after Days of Heaven. Malick had an idea for a film that would be "a history of the cosmos up through the formation of the Earth and the beginnings of life."[12] The film was known as Q and included elements not in The Tree of Life such as a section set in the Middle East during World War I, and an underwater minotaur dreaming about the evolution of the universe.[13] One day, Malick "just stopped" working on the film.[13]

Decades later, Terrence Malick pitched the concept of The Tree of Life to River Road Entertainment head Bill Pohlad while the two were collaborating on an early version of Che. Pohlad recalled initially thinking the idea was "crazy," but as the film concept evolved, he came to feel strongly about the idea;[14] he ended up financing the film.[15] Producer Grant Hill was also involved with the film at an early stage.[15] During a meeting on a different subject involving Malick, his producer Sarah Green, Brad Pitt, and Pitt's Plan B Entertainment production partner Dede Gardner, Malick brought up Tree of Life and the difficulties it was having getting made.[16] It was "much later on" that the decision was made for Pitt to be part of the cast.[16]

The Tree of Life was announced in late 2005, with Indian production company Percept Picture Company set to finance it and Donald Rosenfeld on board as executive producer. The film was set to be shot partially in India, with pre-production scheduled to begin in January 2006.[17] Colin Farrell and Mel Gibson were at one stage attached to the project. Heath Ledger was set to play the role of Mr. O'Brien, but dropped out (due to recurring sicknesses) a month before his death in early 2008.[18]

For the roles of the three brothers, the production team spent over a year, seeing over 10,000 Texas students for the roles.[19] About 95% of the entire cast had no prior acting experience.[19]

In an October 2008 interview Jack Fisk, a longtime Malick collaborator, suggested that the director was attempting something radical.[20] He also implied that details of the film were a close secret.[21] In March 2009, visual effects artist Mike Fink revealed to Empire magazine that he was working on scenes of prehistoric Earth for the film.[22] The similarity of the scenes Fink describes to descriptions of a hugely ambiguous project entitled Q that Malick worked on soon after Days of Heaven led to speculation that The Tree of Life is a resurrection of that abandoned project.[23]


The Fayette County Courthouse and local square, located 20 miles outside of Smithville in La Grange, TX, appears in the film as the O'Brien boys witness an arrest.[24]
Filming Edit
Principal photography began in Texas in 2008.[25] Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki returned to work with Malick after collaborating with him on The New World. The film was shot in 1.85:1 and often used natural light.[26][27] The film used the 35mm, 65mm, and IMAX formats.[27]

Locations included Smithville,[28] Houston, Matagorda,[29] Bastrop, Austin,[30] Dallas,[31] and Malick's hometown of Waco.[32]

The namesake of the film is a large live oak tree that was excavated from a property eight miles outside Smithville.[33] The 65,000-pound tree and root ball were trucked into Smithville and replanted.[34][35][36][37]

The sets for The Tree of Life were unusual for a large scale film.[38] According to Brad Pitt, "A movie set is very chaotic. There [are] hundreds of people; there [are] generators and trucks. And this was a completely different experience — we had none of that." "There were no [camera] lights ... there were no generators and the camera was all hand-held so it was a very free-form, low-key experience."[38]

Malick would change different aspects of a scene between takes in order to create "moments of truth".[38]

Editing Edit
Similar to many of Malick's films, the film had "teams of editors to put together different cuts, and finding and discarding entire story lines during the post-production process."[39] Malick used "unorthodox methods to edit the film".[40] One of the film's editors, Billy Weber said “Terry is willing to try anything. Absolutely anything. Sometimes we’d cut a character out of a scene, or cut all the dialogue out of a scene, just to see if it worked. And when you’ve worked with him for any length of time, you can even try that without asking him about it first. He’s very open to looking at anything that you try.”[40] This includes allowing film students from USC and University of Texas, as well as interns, to play a part in the editing process.[40] Some of them stayed on the film the whole time.[40]

In an unused ending for the film, Jack arrives as a boarding student at St. Stephen's Episcopal School, which Malick attended in the 1950s.[39]

Visual effects Edit
After nearly thirty years away from Hollywood, famed special effects supervisor Douglas Trumbull contributed to the visual effects work on The Tree of Life. Malick, a friend of Trumbull, approached him about the effects work and mentioned that he did not like the look of computer-generated imagery. Trumbull asked Malick, "Why not do it the old way? The way we did it in 2001?"[41]


The home of the fictional O'Brien family is located in Smithville, Texas.[42]
Working with visual effects supervisor Dan Glass, Trumbull used a variety of materials for the creation of the universe sequence. "We worked with chemicals, paint, fluorescent dyes, smoke, liquids, CO2, flares, spin dishes, fluid dynamics, lighting and high speed photography to see how effective they might be," said Trumbull. "It was a free-wheeling opportunity to explore, something that I have found extraordinarily hard to get in the movie business. Terry didn't have any preconceived ideas of what something should look like. We did things like pour milk through a funnel into a narrow trough and shoot it with a high-speed camera and folded lens, lighting it carefully and using a frame rate that would give the right kind of flow characteristics to look cosmic, galactic, huge and epic."[43] The team also included Double Negative in London. Fluid-based effects were developed by Peter and Chris Parks, who had previously worked on similar effects for The Fountain.[44]

A column in The New Yorker noted that the film credited Thomas Wilfred’s lumia composition Opus 161, and that this was the source of the "shifting flame of red-yellow light" at the beginning and the end.[45]

Themes Edit
Philosophical Edit
Many reviewers have noted the philosophical and theological themes of the film. Catholic author and now auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles Fr. Robert Barron, reviewing The Tree of Life for a Chicago Tribune blog, noted that "in the play of good and evil, in the tension between nature and grace, God is up to something beautiful, though we are unable to grasp it totally...“Tree of Life” is communicating this same difficult but vital lesson."[46] The Catholic magazine America called the film "a philosophical exploration of grief, theodicy and the duality of grace and human nature". They described the final beach scene as "the greatest film depiction of eschatological bodily resurrection".[47]

Rabbi David Wolpe says "that Terrence Malick's new film "Tree of Life" opens with a quotation from Job. That quotation holds the key to the film and in some sense, the key to our attitude toward life."[48] He added that "The agony of the parents, the periodic cruelty of the father — all are the powerful but passing dramas that for the moment entirely preoccupy us as we watch the movie. But then we are drawn back to a world so much bigger than our hour upon the stage that we know again how essentially small is each human story."[48]

According to Bob Mondello, the film is showing that "to understand the death of a young man, we need to understand everything that led to his creation, starting with creation itself."[49]

Kristen Scharold compared the film to Augustine's Confessions, and noted how one voiceover is nearly identical to a quote from Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov.[50]

Nature and grace Edit
Many have said that Mr. O'Brien represents the way of nature, while Mrs. O'Brien represents the way of grace.[49][38]

Brad Pitt said Mr. O'Brien "represents nature — but nature as that oppressive force that will choke another plant out for its own survival."[38] "The American dream didn't work out as he believed it would. [He's] quite envious and bitter that people are ahead of him. Naturally, when someone feels oppressed, they find someone weaker to pass that oppression on[to], and the sadness in this situation [is] it's on his sons."[38]

Autobiographical Edit
Many reviewers have noted the similarities between Jack's life and Terrence Malick's life. Jim Lynch, a close friend of Malick, told Malick that he thought The Tree of Life, Knight of Cups, and Song to Song, formed an "autobiographical trilogy".[39] Lynch said Malick disliked the labeling and "didn’t want people thinking that he was just making movies about himself. He was making movies about broader issues.”[39]

Release Edit
In March 2009, Empire magazine's website quoted visual effects supervisor Mike Fink as saying that a version of the film will be released for IMAX cinemas along with two versions for traditional cinemas.[22] The IMAX film has been revealed to be Voyage of Time, a documentary expanding on the "history of the universe" scenes in The Tree of Life, which the producers decided to focus on releasing at a later date so as not to cannibalize its release.[51] It was released in IMAX in the United States on October 7, 2016 by Broad Green Pictures.[52]

Delays and distribution problems Edit
By May 2009, The Tree of Life had been sold to a number of international distributors, including EuropaCorp in France, TriPictures in Spain, and Icon in the United Kingdom and Australia,[53] but lacked a US distributor. In August 2009, it was announced that the film would be released in the US through Apparition, a new distributor founded by River Road Entertainment head Bill Pohlad and former Picturehouse chief Bob Berney.[54] A tentative date of December 25, 2009 was announced, but the film was not completed in time.[55] Organisers of the Cannes Film Festival made negotiations to secure a premiere at Cannes 2010, resulting in Malick sending an early version of the film to Thierry Fremaux and the Cannes selection committee.[56] Though Fremaux warmly received the cut and was eager to screen the film at his festival,[56] Malick ultimately told him that he felt the film was not ready.[57] On the eve of the 2010 Cannes Film Festival, Berney suddenly announced his departure from Apparition, leaving the company's future uncertain.[58] Pohlad decided to keep The Tree of Life at Apparition, and after significant restructuring, hired Tom Ortenberg to act as a consultant on its release. A tentative plan was made to release it in late 2010, in time for awards consideration.[59] Ultimately, Pohlad decided to close Apparition and sell rights to the film.[60] Private screenings of the film to interested parties Fox Searchlight Pictures and Sony Pictures Classics took place at the 2010 Telluride Film Festival.[61] On September 9, Fox Searchlight announced their acquisition of the film from Pohlad's River Road Entertainment.[62] The film opened in limited release in the United States on May 27, 2011.[63]

On March 28, 2011, UK magazine Empire reported that UK distributor Icon Entertainment was planning to release the film on May 4, 2011. This would make the UK the first region in the world to see the film,[64] preempting the expected Cannes Film Festival premiere on May 11. This would disqualify the film from inclusion at Cannes.[65] As a result, a surge of interest in the story developed on international film news sites.[64] After film blogger Jeff Wells was told by a Fox Searchlight representative that this was "unlikely",[66] and Anne Thompson received similar word from Searchlight and outright denial from Summit,[67][68] Helen O'Hara from Empire received a confirmation from Icon that they intended to stick with the May 4 release.[64] On March 31, Jeff Wells was told by Jill Jones, Summit's senior VP of international marketing and publicity, that Icon has lost the right to distribute The Tree of Life in the UK, due to defaulting on its agreement, with the matter pending arbitration at a tribunal in Los Angeles.[69] On June 9, it was announced that The Tree of Life would be released in the UK on July 8, 2011, after Fox Searchlight Pictures picked up the UK rights from Icon.[70]

Home media Edit
The Tree of Life was released on Blu-ray Disc in the United States and Canada on October 11, 2011; on January 24, 2012, there was a separate release of the DVD.[71]

During the Cannes Film Festival in 2011, Peter Becker, president of the home media company The Criterion Collection, and Fox Searchlight discussed a potential Criterion home video release that would include a longer alternate version of The Tree of Life which Malick would like to create. In an unprecedented move, Criterion decided to finance the alternate version for its eventual inclusion on both Blu-ray and DVD. In creating the alternate version, the original negatives' palettes were located for Malick to use, the entire film scanned in 4K resolution.