The Tree of Life A

In theaters. 138 Minutes. Rated PG-13.
This film was previously reviewed by Lawyer here.

Terrence Malick in The Tree of Life sculpts an intensely personal, intensely beautiful retelling of life that is immediately accessible while maintaining a distance from the viewer that I suspicion will melt away upon subsequent interactions. In so doing, Malick attacks the very nature of the medium he’s chosen. More than any other art form, even the novel, film controls how and what we experience. It controls the questions we ask, what we see, when we see it, and how we process it. It traditionally gives us no space to consider what we’re watching and, more importantly, to bring our own experiences to bear. This stands in stark contrast to pieces of art, which beg us to step back and get lost in our own experiences as our eyes wonder. Even the novel, which may share the most in common with film, allows us to imagine places, people, and things and gives us permission to stop, consider, even put the book down and come back later. Tree of Life is best approached like poetry. Living in a time in which the appreciation of poetry is limited to collegiate sophomores or dirty limericks, it is perhaps to be expected that the walk out rate for this film is so high. That’s a shame. Great poems launch us on someone else’s voyage only to end with us realizing it’s our own terrain we’ve been exploring. So it is that in Life we start off wondering what’s going on in Jack O’Brien’s life and end up exploring our families, our past, and our future.

Ahh, but I’m just talking around the subject. Stylistically, Life is non-linear, abstract, and heavily spiritual; moving in and out of reality, history, memories, and imagination. It is marked by multiple narrators, many of them whispering prayers. The story is of Jack O’Brien, played as an adult by Sean Penn, but the real heavy lifting goes to Hunter McCracken who plays Jack as a child. He is the oldest of three boys born to a disciplinarian father (Brad Pitt) and a loving, angelic mother (Jessica Chastain). Pitt’s character, a frustrated musician, tries to instill in his son the hard-knock nature of existence. Although a committed religious man, his ethic is survival-of-the-fittest in which he teaches his sons to fight and instills in them a selfish view of humanity. While the father is hated at points by his sons, he is a sympathetic character, a man who practices a certain realpolitik in life that may be ultimately wanting, but is a valuable counter-balance to his wife. Jessica Chastain’s mother instructs her boys to love everyone, always forgive, and never use violence. While her sons love her, they also take advantage of her and do not submit to her authority unless it is backed by her husband. While it is easy to dismiss her mantra of love and grace as idealistic and out-of-touch with the real world, her handling of the death of one of her sons proves it is anything but as she moves from anger to grief to acceptance, movements her husband seems incapable of.

This tension between two approaches to life inhabited by the mother and father, described in Life as the way of nature and the way of grace, propels the film. It is here that we get in to the deep spirituality of the film. It begins with a beautiful scripture from the Biblical book of Job. “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation while the morning stars sang together and all the angels[a] shouted for joy?” Job, along with Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, falls within the category of wisdom literature in the Bible. Job is a counter to Proverbs. Proverbs basically teaches that if you do good things, good things will happen to you. Job says, “except when it doesn’t.” This scripture is an important one to the film in that it not only addresses a major issue in the plot, the death of a child (the death of all Job’s children is one of his afflictions), it also holds in tension the inscrutability of God by humans and the great joy and beauty of God’s creation. Indeed, the beauty of creation seems to be the point of a 20-minute re-telling of the evolution of the universe that serves as the foundation of the story. It is a breathtaking exploration of film and photography marked by rapturous music. But even here, as Malick both embraces a creator and shows a scientific explanation of species, the twin themes of the beauty of grace and the harsh reality of nature play out.

Malick even goes so far as placing scripture in the very mouths of his characters. Among other examples, Paul is paraphrased twice, once from the 1 Corinthians 13 (the love chapter), and once from Romans 7. What are we to do with all this scripture, prayer, and religion? Is Malick proselytizing? Is he symbolically retelling the story of Job? Is this an allegorical tale? I don’t think so. Malick is doing something infinitely more interesting and complex. He’s taking scripture and other forms of knowledge seriously and trying to understand life via them. He’s not retelling Bible stories. He’s telling his story in light of them. It is the lens he’s using to understand a life lived, while simultaneously using that life to make sense of scripture. The audience is caught in the middle, watching this dialectic play out. Is what we’re seeing memory? Reality? A dream? My guess is, if we could ask Malick, he’d say all those things all the time. For a believer, which Malick’s characters are (and one assumes Malick to be as well), memory, reality, and possibility are all filtered through faith. Indeed, there is no independent knowledge unbuttressed by beliefs, experiences, and texts. Malick isn’t trying to get outside of his particular vantage point, nor is he trying to convert others to them. He’s just showing life from his particular set and inviting the audience, through multiple pauses, silences, stories, and visuals, to explore their own.

Through all this Malick wrestles with the great spiritual and scientific dilemma of our time. How can a loving God create through such a brutally painful mechanism as survival of the fittest? How can a brutally painful mechanism such as survival of the fittest alone lead to such exquisite beauty and love? While theology and evolutionary biology both posit answers, neither are satisfying and rarely does either side take the other's objections seriously.

That Malick chooses to take up these issues (and countless others I won’t write of here) is commendable. That he treats both with respect and finds, ultimately, a reality that acknowledges then supersedes these questions, is close to miraculous. The best movie of the year thus far. The best movie about about faith I’ve ever seen.
A