The Tree of Life

On the 17th November (reference 1) I mentioned a good haul of new-to-me DVDs, including 'The Body in the Library'. Another was 'The Tree of Life', now viewed and here reviewed.

The box explained that this was a stunningly original triumph starring the same Brad Pitt as the one who gave us 'Troy' and which took several prestigious & golden pancakes when it - 'The Tree of Life' that is - was first shown at a Cannes Film Festival. 'Troy' being my first and only previous exposure to Brad, a film which we have attempted but failed to finish at least twice, albeit on television. Perhaps the problem was that they did not think to show it on our favorite channel, ITV3. Also true that some films, indeed perhaps this latest one, do not scale down well: what can stun on the big screen can look plain silly on a telephone. And maybe vice-versa.

'The Tree of Life' turned out to be pretentious, self indulgent and too long, although not without merit as a portrait (given by Brad) of a dreadful father and the pain & suffering he inflicted on his family, this despite his being devout. A lot of time was given over to very arty shots of forces of nature and of beaches. Some of these were indeed stunning, and some of them just silly, as when they saw fit to show us some grazing dinosaurs, presumably the work of a computer scientist rather than of a natural scientist. Or when they showed us some of the inhabitants of heaven walking around on a beach.

I found the presentation of the story rather confusing, with a lot of jumping around in time. For me, the film would have done better to give me a few more clues as it went along, so that I could make at least some sense of it without recourse to wikipedia after the event.

But it did strike me that Brad had a very negroid profile and I was struck enough by this to ask Professor Google about the matter - and it turned out that he knew a great deal. A great many people besides me had pondered about this very matter. Giant pedigrees were available for my inspection, going back to the 17th century, but pedigrees which only revealed, European, mainly insular British (including here the Irish island) ancestry. Notwithstanding, it seems that plenty of blacks were keen to make him one of their own, an octoroon at the very least. But a more sensible solution came from someone from Scandinavia who pointed out that a noticeable number of northern Scandinavians do indeed have a negroid profile, without having anything African about their genes at all, at least not unless you go back to the last big migration out of Africa, say 100,000 years ago. Perhaps a quirk resulting from admixture with the peoples they pushed north, back into the Arctic.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/the-body-in-library.html.