Hunter McCracken makes a boy’s resentment of his father inseparable from his need for approval. His work in The Tree of Life is painfully convincing; our admiration rests on that one substantial performance.
Fi1m perspective
Hunter McCracken’s Young Jack wants his father’s approval even while resenting his authority. In Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life (2011), McCracken makes those competing feelings painfully easy to recognise. He never makes the boy’s resistance seem like proof that he has stopped needing his father. We felt an uncomfortable shock of recognition in that rebellion, because wanting to defy a parent and wanting to please one can be equally urgent. The performance allows Jack to be conflicted without making him difficult to understand.
Brad Pitt gives him something substantial to resist as Mr O’Brien, a father whose authority is formidable without making him simply a villain. McCracken’s work depends partly on that distinction: Jack has someone to push against whom we can also understand. Sean Penn plays the adult Jack, and Malick keeps returning to the childhood that still occupies him. It is a considerable demand to make a child’s troubles hold our attention in a film that also considers the origins of the universe. McCracken meets it by keeping those troubles personal and recognisable.
His eyes do much of the work, carrying a sadness that makes Jack seem older than his years. Opposite Pitt and Jessica Chastain, who plays Jack’s mother, his naturalness suits Malick’s improvisational approach. The danger in praising a child performance this way is to make it sound as though merely being present was enough. McCracken gives a sensitive boy’s contradictory feelings enough weight to sustain the domestic scenes, and that takes more than looking right for the part. We warmly recommend the film, though Malick repeats some of its larger questions long after they are clear.
This is the only screen role on which to base a judgement of McCracken, so there is no succession of reinventions or changing partnerships to trace. Nor can we say how the same qualities would fare in another kind of film. That limit should keep the claims modest, without diminishing a substantial central performance. See The Tree of Life for the family scenes, and allow for a director who is less willing than his young actor to leave a point alone.
Biography
Hunter McCracken is an American actor. He made his screen debut as Young Jack in Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life (2011), portraying the childhood version of the character played by Sean Penn as an adult.
Discovered while playing at school in Texas, McCracken was selected after a year-long casting process involving more than 10,000 children. He received the Online Film & Television Association award for Best Youth Performance and nominations from bodies including the Chicago Film Critics Association for Most Promising Performer. No further acting credits are recorded.
