Tree Of Life

Tree of Life is a strange picture in a number of ways, and one whose moral message seems to be more in line with 1950s era conceptions of female identity and autonomy than contemporary ones. However, having watched some of Terrence Mallick’s other works, I am unsure that the sort of anti-feminist rhetoric that seems apparent in the film is what was intentioned and while such criticism remains valid we can perhaps forgive the director in light of the otherwise interesting and beautiful aspects of Tree of Life. For example, Mallick’s work immediately preceding Tree of Life, The New World starring Colin Firth and then teenage , has a similarly controversial and antique presentation of Native Americans, suggesting that the people encountered by the Jamestown colonizing party were childish, brutal, or “in tune with Nature.” But, that film and our current subject are both designed and intended much life a work of Nathanial Hawthorne, not as a serious consideration of specific, actual events taking place in the real world but as narrative allegories based around very general themes; thus, it seems less like Mallick is a racist misogynist and more a really poor judge of appropriate subject.