'Tree of Life': Terrence Malick tells the story of everything, in tiny little pieces
Brad Pitt in Tree of Life.
2:08 pm May. 26, 20113
Terrence Malick's Palme d'Or winning Tree of Life is the story of three young brothers growing up in 1950s Texas, told in flashback from the perspective of one of the grown sons looking back on his childhood from the present day. It is also the story of the beginning of the Universe and the development of our cosmos.
Liquidy light emerges from the black. Simple-celled undulating creatures appear. Lava flows and burns. Dinosaurs emerge and interact. The boys run across the yard in 1950s Texas. A meteor crashes into the earth from space. The grownup son stares at dizzying skyscrapers. Glaciers cover the earth. Different voices whisper in voiceover. It seems they are talking to God, asking Him questions, but at other times it seems they are talking to one another. Maybe it's the same thing.
Malick puts all of this together into an emotional collage intended as a meditation on what it means not only to be alive, but to be a part of the flow of time. It's a bold film, ambitious in its scope, yet also deeply personal. The result is profound, and unlike anything else.
The story, as it is, is relatively standard, and on the face of it you might mistake it for The Great Santini or any other son-coming-to-terms-with-cold-father film. Sean Penn plays Jack, the grown son, who navigates a mirrored world of gleaming skyscrapers, filmed at every conceivable angle to give a sense of their scope and dominance. These images meld into the flashbacks of 1950s Texas, which take up the majority of the film.
A father and mother (played by Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain) raise 3 small boys in a small clapboard house in the kind of neighborhood where boys roam through the woods in their free time, and mothers hang the washing out on the line, barefoot in their house dresses, while father waters the grass. It is a pastoral upbringing, infused with Malick's nostalgia for lost innocence (one of his themes as a director), and yet the father is very stern, and sometimes rough with the boys, slapping his big hands on their wee shoulders and necks in what seems to be a loving touch but is actually a clamp keeping them in place. The mother spends much of her time in the side yard, playing with the boys, whirling them around in dizzying spins, and admiring the grass and the butterflies. She is childlike herself. She rarely speaks, but her presence is always palpable, and complicated.
But Tree of Life is not interested in diagnosing the family's problems, or putting a label on the relationships. It's not a family therapy session. There are no neatly tied-up ends. How can there be when a prosaic moment of weeding the garden is followed by an image of a vast unpeopled prehistoric landscape belching with active volcanoes?
When the father is home, the boys sit at the dinner table, hunched over, trying to answer his questions in the right way, but never really understanding what it is that sets him off. We learn, eventually, in the languid time-flow of the film, that the father is a man disappointed by life. He has "27 patents" for machines he has invented, but no one will recognize and reward his genius. He is angry at the rich neighbors; they make him feel inadequate.
He plays the piano at home, passionately, lost in the music, and tries to teach the boys what he hears in Toscanini, pointing out what they should be listening for. He reveals to his son that he wanted to be a concert pianist. None of this is played for a maudlin effect. We put him together in our minds, in the same way the boys do. He is rather frightening (Pitt is terrific), but not because he's violent or overtly abusive. He is frightening because he withholds tenderness. When he goes away on a business trip, the mother and three sons tear through the house, screaming and laughing, chasing each other, exhilarated that the somber force who rules over them is absent.
The Texas scenes are filmed in a way that actually makes them feel like memories. They are not presented literally or linearly. We get glimpses and fragments; we see the same images repeating again and again, yet each time they appear they have a deeper resonance. It is as though repetition grounds the memory in the consciousness, just as the grownup Sean Penn continuously goes back in his mind, Proust-like, to the same childhood fragments: his mother whirling in the side yard, her bare feet with blades of grass stuck on them, the arc of water from the sprinkler, the crunch of grass in the yard, like the accumulation of sensory details can help him receive the whole picture of childhood, and of his life.
The scenes with the three boys are revelatory in how the camera captures their unselfconscious behavior. There's one tiny (funny) cliffhanger of a moment when the oldest boy tries to scoop a piece of meatloaf onto his knife without using his finger to push it on, under the watchful, disapproving eye of his father. Small moments of behavior like that take on enormous importance, and stick with us forever. Malick's camera captures it all in a way that never pushes, just presents.
The universe-creation montages are spectacular and odd, with breathtaking images that nevertheless seem strangely familiar. (Haven't we all imagined what the beginning of the universe must have been like?) Sometimes it is hard to know what we are looking at. Our first image in the film is of blackness with a puddle of liquidy golden light that starts to flow and swirl, intensifying. "God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness." There is something biblical about the progression of events, suggesting that there is a force out there guiding everything—the same force that creates the bond of the family, and the same force that people whisper to, in supplication and pleading.
Malick's constantly undulating display of images (I don't think there's one stationary shot) has a cumulative effect. The rhythm of the film is insistent and unique. The cuts that create a juxtaposition of specific images are not meant to ratchet up the tension or keep the audience on edge. It's a flow, and succumbing to it is one of the great pleasures of seeing Tree of Life. It's not so much what he shows us, but how it is all put together, and why he has chosen one image to follow another. We are used to a certain kind of conventional pacing and a certain kind of shot progression. Long shot, medium, closeup, end-scene. None of that is in evidence here, which is not surprising considering Malick's history as an artist, having created such visually arresting films as Badlands, Days of Heaven (who can forget how he presented that prairie?), The Thin Red Line and New World.
There is a fascinating moment in Tree of Life that occurs between two dinosaurs on a riverbank (the animation is extraordinary, with none of the CGI glitter that can make such images alienating and unreal. These beasts appear to be alive). One lies injured, its body heaving up and down with painful breaths. Another dinosaur appears out of the woods and its body language changes when it sees the injured creature.
We have been trained by Land of the Lost and Jurassic Park to think of nature as being only red in tooth and claw so I waited for the slaughter. Instead, the predator dinosaur hops across the river and stares down at the injured dinosaur. It puts its clawed foot out, and rests it on the fallen dinosaur for a moment. Instead of attacking, it then hops down the river, leaving the injured dinosaur by itself. Malick, as he showed in The New World, longs for a time before civilization came along and messed everything up. It's naive, perhaps, but also a compelling fantasy. I love a director who follows his obsessions from film to film.
Grace is a difficult concept to put into words, yet you tend to know it when you see it, or when you feel it, as is more often the case. There is grace in the divine or religious sense, but there is also grace in the physical sense, as in the movements of ballerinas or stallions. Grace is also present in the silent feelings between people—the ties that bind us to each other, however painful or unresolved. Love is transcendent, or at least it can be, and loving another person provides for the possibility of compassion and empathy. It's one of the things that distinguishes the human race.
That is one of the things I thought as I watched the violent creation of the universe, billions of years before any of us showed up. If I had to try to define it, from my own experience, I would say grace is what you find in those brief moments when a sensation flows over you that tells you, "This. Here. Right now. Is perfect." But that's not really a definition, is it? That's the problem with, and the beauty, of grace. Tree of Life isn't about grace so much as it is a pure representation of it.
Sweet, Sheila. The keen way you read the film challenges those who say it's remote and arty. That you noticed such details as the knife-meatloaf incident shows how appreciating this film is a matter of being open rather than merely alert.
Who was the kid with a chunk of his hair missing?
There’s hardly anything in your review that I didn’t also feel about Tree of Life, but I thought this comment was especially brilliant: “Different voices whisper in voiceover. It seems they are talking to God, asking Him questions, but at other times it seems they are talking to one another. Maybe it’s the same thing.”
I think the thing I like most about the film is how beautifully it captures the existential paradox that lies at the heart of our experience as human beings: that our individual lives are in one sense totally insignificant -- and yet in another sense, and *at the very same time,* they embody the very essence of meaning, the only meaning we can really know. Although the prologue posits a split between “the way of grace” and “the way of nature,” it seems to me that the rest of the film lays out a pretty convincing argument that it is really the integration of the two that represents the path to wholeness and redemption.
There was a wonderful article in The Atlantic a couple of months ago about E.O. Wilson, the sociobiologist who was the first to notice that ant colonies function as a sort of super organism, with each individual or group of individuals playing roles that are analogous to the organs in a human body. Over the course of his career, Wilson has come to believe that there are two very different types of evolution: one that favors survival of the individual, and another that favors survival of the group. Often, these two forces are in direct opposition to one another, with self-serving behaviors that promote individual survival going toe-to-toe against more cooperative or even altruistic behaviors that are essential to survival of the group. According to Wilson, the dynamic tension between these two opposing forces provides a much more robust explanation for human behavior than Darwinian “survival of the fittest” alone.
Although I couldn’t have articulated it exactly this way when I first saw The Tree of Life, I think there’s a pretty good match between Wilson’s theory and what Malick presents as “the way of grace” versus “the way of nature.” In that sense, I see the film less as a study of lost innocence than as a celebration of innocence retained despite the vicissitudes of a life that is at best difficult to understand. The Brad Pitt character epitomizes the masculine principle that steels us against the innocence that is our greatest vulnerability, while the Jessica Chastain character embodies the feminine principle that calls us to embrace innocence as our greatest strength. And as Jack puts it toward the end of the film, “Father, Mother, always you wrestle inside me. Always you will…”
Another thing that I absolutely loved about the film is how it is shot in a manner that so faithfully captures the way we actually experience life -- less as a running narrative than as a series of moments that we turn over and over in our minds, making sense of them in a hundred different ways as our experience gives us a greater range of perspectives to work from. At least in my experience, the pivotal events of our lives are hardly ever “passages” of months or years; rather, they are the intensely personal moments in which the things that we believe about ourselves or the people we love and about life itself are made manifest. In your review, you mention the scene in which Jack is trying so hard to take a serving of meatloaf in a way his father won’t be able to criticize… For me, the most poignant scene was the one in which Jack comes upon his younger brother having found a way to connect with their father through music, and his expression conveys so clearly his understanding that this kind of connection will never be possible for him.
The first time I saw the film, I was pretty disappointed in the ending, which I experienced as having overtones that were for me, at least, uncomfortably Christian. On subsequent viewings, though, I’ve experienced the scene on the beach as having much more to do with Jack’s hard-won integration of the opposing forces within himself than something that is religious in a more orthodox sense. But this integration is definitely spiritual -- the place where the personal meets the universal/eternal. And I love that his brother, even more than his mother, is the one who leads him to this place.
It totally amazed me that Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain were both nominated for Academy Awards, but for films other than this one. I think Brad Pitt is one of the most underrated actors of his generation; he kind of reminds me of Paul Newman in the way that his physical beauty almost works against the depth of the work he is able to do and the seriousness with which he seems to take his calling as an actor. I thought his portrayal of the father in this film was pitch-perfect -- and certainly more demanding than his role in Moneyball (which I also loved). As far as I’m concerned, his only other role that even begins to approach the complexity of this character is the one in A River Runs Through It, and I think his performance in both is pretty near flawless. Not to mention Fight Club and even Thelma & Louise, which were both way more than pretty-boy roles.
Just because she is so much less familiar, Jessica Chastain was even more of a surprise to me. How she could be nominated for The Help and not for this is totally beyond me. Not that she didn’t do a great job there, but there are a zillion other actresses who could have played that role equally well. This one, though -- it’s hard to imagine many others being able to do what she did here.
So, there you have it -- my argument for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Cinematography (which I guess it could actually win). Hell, if it were up to me, I’d probably even give it the Irving Thalberg Award for lifetime achievement by a transplanted live oak tree. Did I mention I love this film?