Invoking the shadow of Lucifer from beneath the Tree of Life
THE TREE OF LIFE
Written and directed by Terrence Malick
Starring Hunter McCracken, Jessica Chastain, Brad Pitt, Tye Sheridan, Sean Penn
by Matt Brown
June 18 2011
Screened at the TIFF Bell Lightbox.
It seems I am all the time lately seeing movies that call upon me to ponder the breadth and limits of life. Surely this cannot be. The movies were likely there all along. More likely that I have, myself, only turned a corner, and am now more ready to grapple with the Big Moosie in the room: that there are X years provided, and only Y left, and that we furthermore govern our tract with Z beliefs, as taught to us by god or sky or our own questioning mind.
The inquiry in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life is as vast and ambitious as the cosmos itself. We are given a paradigm: the way of nature, vs. the way of grace. We see that paradigm expanded upon and ultimately exemplified in one boy, Jack, the son of two parents, Mr. and Mrs. O’Brien. Mr. O’Brien might know a thing or two about the way of nature. He finds reasons to be unhappy. He would have been a concert pianist, but life took him in a different direction. Mrs. O’Brien is the avatar of grace. Childlike, she literally floats on air in her son’s mind’s eye; she commands water and earth and the air that we breathe. Grace does not try to please itself, and neither does Mrs. O’Brien. And always the parents wrestle within the son.
The Tree of Life deigns not necessarily to tell a story, but rather to measure the passage of time. It is a series of ever-denser telescoping lenses. In the beginning, we see the family lose a son, and then watch the universe form and the planet upon which we live begin to support its menagerie. In the middle, we step into any old summer in the lives of this family's youth, all of whose sequences could take place over the course of a week or five years, as is the way with childhood. In the end, we locate all the loved ones in the purifying after-time that is the Christian heavenly reward.
Along the way, a wounded plesiosaur looks up from a founding beach, and gazes at his own blood, and then gazes at the sky. Here, in a single image, Malick may have most specifically accomplished his intentions with The Tree of Life. Or perhaps it is another – the glorious frame I have included above – where, in Mrs. O’Brien’s grieving recollections, the late-day shadows of her boys stride inverted across the legend of the world like giants. I will stare, and ponder, and puzzle at, and be perplexed by that shot, perhaps for the rest of my life.
These images in The Tree of Life, like all the images in The Tree of Life, and like – yes indeed – life itself, pass too quickly. Emmanuel Lubezki has so precisely captured, not the photographic reality of the world in which we live, but the beguiling and nearly supernatural way in which light and air and water and grass fall together in our perceptions to become one great river drifting towards the All, that one wishes only for the ability to stop time, and stare at each of his creations, and live completely inside it, for as long as we can. But this is a film. The edits come at roughly the frequency of the human heartbeat, particularly in the first act, where The Tree of Life is less a story than an extended experimental video art piece. A narrative slowly convinces itself into being, reminding me of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where the gradual arrival of adult thinking forces story into what was otherwise a primordial cosmos. We force this story in life, as do the characters in the film: Mrs. O’Brien first, perhaps, when after the death of her youngest son, and having been told that her boy is in god’s hands, murmurs – “[But] he was in god’s hands the whole time, wasn’t he?”
When was the first time you noticed your father’s hypocrisy? Be kind. All fathers are hypocrites, because they want more for their children than they do for themselves. When Jack notices this – at the same age we all notice it – at the same age when he first notices the fine hairs on the back of a girl’s neck – he begins to push against Mr. O’Brien’s wonderfully stern, loving, studious, temperate, human, boundaries. But the larger question will be the one that The Tree of Life cannot answer, due to the inherent limits of its ethical system. “Lord, why?” Jack asks, after his brother has died. “Where were you?” To believe in a god is to believe in a father that has forsaken us.
That we demand answers from a vast and unyielding cosmos is perhaps the only commonality to all human life. That this selfsame expanse of space-time might experimentally be imagined as a yet-unmade, four-hour film strip in which the entire existence of the human race would be afforded only a single frame, tells us the scale of our significance. But therein lies the glory of the human race, and for just that reason, itself: for all the universe’s unimaginable vastness, to our selfish and loving eyes each of our lives are even more immeasurable than all the heavens’ unsounded depths.
There comes a time when Jack makes his first mistake and finds himself forever changed, a transition noticed foremost by the mother, which is the way of mothers. To incite his fall from grace, Jack breaks into a neighbour's house and softly explores her undergarments, stealing a nightie. Having spent his childhood as a force of giving, Jack becomes a force of taking. "What have I started?" he asks. "What have I done?" The incident turns Jack into the horrid thing that all boys become: a man, a sexual being. But here, the contemporary narrative ends for Malick and for The Tree of Life, as though with innocence fully dispensed with, the journey towards death is complete. But this shame-faced negation of the sexual in The Tree of Life is the same old religious claptrap, and is one of the film's key mistakes. That we live and die, yes, defines all life, but that we fight and fuck and question the stars above defines passion, art, and reason – defines humanity itself. We are creatures of blood, pondering the sun. Failing to place sexuality upon the altar to human experience that has been built in The Tree of Life makes rivers of mercury run through the film’s veins like poisoned sap. So it may be with all of us, I suppose, until we finally shed the worthless delusion of the great father in the sky.
I cannot help it. I do not believe. I want more from my understandings than daddy’s well-meaning homilies and an empty celestial kingdom that answers my entreaties with whispering wind or a pretty sunset. I would have liked a Tree of Life which does not call upon god and the church to conceive and contextualize the universe, and which does not rely on a notion as intellectually feeble-minded as the afterlife to wash away life’s sins and reclaim the virtues of love and grace. The real thing, to me, is precipitously more terrifying, so much more magnificent, and fills me with such greater awe.
This response to the Tree of Life is dedicated to Ian Waldron.