Terrence Malick makes movies that are about more than the stories would suggest. In most movies that fill the local AMC Theater, the movie is only the plot. This movie is about a billionaire playboy who uses a suit of armor to police the world, that movie is about a bunch of robots blowing shit up, that one over there is about pirates looking for the fountain of youth, and this over here is about the greatest idea ever.
Malick’s stories are about wars, Pocahontas, and lovers on the run. What the movies are really about are humankind’s fall from grace and our exile from Eden. Meditation on the immaterial (all those things without physical form, be it spiritual or philosophical) occupy most of the screen time in a Malick film. Characters are constantly asking questions (of themselves, of God, of no one in particular) that go unanswered.
This is part of why I love Terrence Malick movies so much. He makes movies that no one else would dare to make in Hollywood, movies that are focused on those immaterial ideas that often get left in the pages of academic, philosophical, or religious text. These are the big questions, though, that we have all asked ourselves. These are the things we’ve all tried to figure out. Still, we only file into to the theaters to see the latest big budget gadgetry or Syd Field mandated storytelling.
Some people are not interested in the idea that there are immaterial things to figure out and definitely have no interest in going to the movies to think about them. I have spent my whole life, however, obsessed with the immaterial. Sort of like a modern-day version of the biblical Jacob, I have wrestled with the idea of angels, God, and holiness in a material world in which these concepts seem irrational, illogical, and (ultimately) futile. I looked for God in church and didn’t find him. So I ran from one church and found another where the prayers are written by Paul Schrader and the hymns are from Max Steiner. So film is my church and Terrence Malick is a saint of cinema. In that context, The Tree of Life is both the books of Genesis and Revelation.
Before discussing this movie in-depth, it should just be stated that this is a Terrence Malick film. This means, obviously, that it is beautiful to look at. There are contemplative shots of trees swaying in the breeze, of course. The visual poetry of this film can’t even be called into question, nor can it be compared with anything else put out recently.
The Tree of Life is a movie about God. It is about many of the questions that those who have either fallen from faith, or had doubts in their faith, have asked themselves. It is about the struggle to believe in the Grace of God in world where our very nature contradicts the very concept. Fortunately, Malick doesn’t pretend to have the answers. The movie isn’t a lecture between maker and audience, where Terrence Malick makes us privy to the secrets of the universe. The movie is a poem about humanity and the questions of our existence that just living should draw out of us.
The story is based around the childhood experiences of Jack O’Brien. We first meet Jack as a middle-aged adult, still consumed by the grief of losing his brother years earlier. He seems surrounded by people in his modern life, at work and home, but he also seems apart from them. There are no words spoken between Jack and his wife; only brief disinterested conversations between Jack and his co-workers. There is an emptiness to him.
Is this a comment on the disconnect of a modern society only brought together by technology? Is it the remnants of a childhood torn between the saintliness of mother and the domineering “American-ness” of father? Does he just want a sandwich?
To get to the root of the adult Jack’s current spiritual malaise, Malick goes back to the beginning. The absolute beginning. The Big Bang beginning.
Is it contradictory for a neo-Christian movie that directs most of its dialog at God to begin with the Big Bang and continue through evolution to the dinosaurs? Are creationism and evolution both getting nods of approval? Is God dismissed entirely at this point, and the struggle between Grace and Nature a moot point? Maybe this is getting us to ask the larger question: if there is no God, who is everyone praying to? Who is hearing those whispers in the dark?
This sequence is awe-inspiring. Volcanoes erupt, oceans form, DNA strands turn into the beginnings of life on earth. Dinosaurs wander the land and show their own “humanity”(dino-osity?). All set to Zbigniew Preisner’s “Lacrimosa” (written for another one of my favorite filmmakers Krzysztof Keislowski). Stunning.
In keeping with the old bumper sticker (“And on the 8th Day, God Made Texas”), the story goes from the Ice Age to a more recent time in the Lone Star State. Young Jake is introduced to us in a dreamlike birth, his body swimming towards the surface of the ocean and breaking out into the world, where his life of wonderment begins. Here, Malick is a master in invoking the slightest memories of youth and bringing meaning to them.
Then the movie settles to a point where the focus of the “action” takes place. Here is where the quiet war of grace vs. nature is waged by Jack’s stern father and angelic mother. It is during this point in the film that Malick hit all the right emotional chords with me. The instances of having life, death, and their relationship to your weekly bible reading constantly pushing you to silently ask God, “If you’re so indifferent to us to allow this world to be the way it is, then why should I care about you?”
Jack feels the eyes of God upon him as he steals the silky negligee of a comely neighbor. He is put into a panic as he tries to hide away the evidence of his lust only to eventually cast it down the river, setting it far away from his Catholic conscience. I was faced with this burden many times growing up, where any transgression wasn’t just an act of rebellion against earthly authority figures, but a virtual eating of forbidden fruit in itself. You can see the weight that this burden places on young Jack’s shoulders as he comes home and faces his mother, who I’m sure he is convinced knows exactly what he did.
Brad Pitt plays Mr. O’Brien as a man bitter against a world he feels has not rewarded his efforts. A military man who respects order and demands that same respect from his children, Pitt is both a man just trying to turn his boys into men, and an overbearing tyrant. When one of his children dares to question him, dares to speak up, Pitt rages like a holy storm. Jessica Chastain plays Mrs. O’Brien with a not-at-all subtle hint of angelic saintliness. She is mother, she is goddess and she worshiped by her children as such. In one beautiful shot, she floats in the yard, swaying in the breeze like a leaf. In another, she chases a butterfly only to have in land softly in her hands. She stands there as the mother of all beauty. She truly is the Grace of God.
The end of the movie is the end of everything. Flames engulf the Earth and our world is no more. Perhaps this is just in the mind of the adult Jack. He walks the shore of a beach and sees his family as he remembers them from his youth. He sees the young version of himself. He sees his younger brother who he misses so much. Are these other people around him his memories of people he’s known throughout his life or are they, like him, travelers to end of the Earth? In these moments before the last light of the universe fades to nothing, Jack accepts a sort of piece. Is this hope for all of us? Or, rather, a show of no hope, since none of us living will see the end of the universe (*knock on wood*)? One thing is answered in this ending, though. Mrs. O’Brien, after opening the movie in tears at the discovery that her child was dead, offers her child willingly to God, accepting finally the fate that had already been chosen for him. It’s an impotent gesture against the imposing will of Heavenly Father who takes the lives of whomever he so wishes. Yet, accepting this is the only way some faithful have of dealing with “His will.”
Okay, I get that it’s obvious that there are some serious Bible-issues that I’m still dealing with. And, yes, this had a huge effect on my appreciation of the film. But what I walk away with from The Tree of Life is an experience that is as close to enlightenment as I’ve ever felt in the church of cinema. A truly phenomenal film.
