(This is not the trailer, which they won't let me imbed on YouTube. This link takes you to the official trailer: Check out this great MSN video: 'The Tree of Life' Trailer )
I was initially puzzled why this film isn't being shown in more theaters, seeing as Sean Penn and Brad Pitt are in it, and it has won the Palme d'Or at Cannes.. Now that I've seen it, I understand. This film has only the slightest narrative, being a diaphanous stream of images depicting the life of a family living in Waco, Texas in the 50's, cast against a cosmic backdrop. Many people will not enjoy this at all. Think 2001 Space Odessy or Tarkovsky - if you know who he is, and like him, see this film. Otherwise, you may want to stay away.
The minimal story is focused on the eldest son, who we learn in the very first scenes will die when he is 19. The film then cuts to his birth, and begins to show us the dynamic of his family - Pitt plays his father, a man driven to succeed according to the cultural mores of 1950's corporate/upper class America, who clearly loves his sons, but treats them with a sternness and discipline that borders on pathological. His wife, played by Jessica Chastain (who is stunning here) is a much more gentle and non-judgmental personality.
The devastation they both experience at the death of their son is cast against this dynamic, but it is never explained how the son dies - if he commits suicide, if his death is any way influenced by his relationship with his father.
Then, we flash forward to one of the other two younger brothers in the family (it wasn't clear to me which) as an adult working as an architect in a skyscraper in some American city, somewhere like Dallas or Kansas City, played by Sean Penn. He's obviously still wracked by these events years later. Apparently the film is meant to be at least in part a mediation on life from this character's point of view.
Then, we shift into a long series of images beginning with the dawn of time, the Big Bang, the rise of life, terrestrial life, so forth, culminating in images that seem to suggest the end of the universe in fire and darkness.
The film then jumps back to tell the story of perhaps one year in the life of the family, where the relationship of the eldest son with his father is depicted. He is obviously haunted by his father's expectations and feelings of resentment and inadequacy. These drive him to commit some anti- social acts like launching a frog hundreds of feet in the air tied to a backyard rocket, stealing lingerie from a neighbor's house, and some other small acts of cruelty and disobedience that are clearly attempts on his part to react to the pressure of his father's expectations and the growing realization that he is very much like his father in both his strengths and weaknesses. All of this is cut with other impressions of a beautiful family life in an idealized 1950's setting, only with the occasional acts of cruelty or selfishness on the part of the son or his father to mar the idyll.
The finale of the movie (which comes after what seems to be a very long time, which I didn't mind apart from the fact that I saw the film at the Enzain dinner theater and had ordered three pints during the film, a choice which came back to haunt me in the last 20 or 30 minutes of the film, but not enough to actually make a run to the restroom.. ) is an apparent resurrection of sorts, an afterlife in which Sean Penn's character is seen walking along a long beautiful beach with all his family, and a large crowd of strangers.
That's basically the story. Very highbrow, high concept, but not particularly doctrinaire. The director, Terrence Malick, evidently poured himself into this film, and it shows. He's the same guy who directed A Thin Red Line, another great film shot with a very similar visual style, but with more narrative structure, and is a trained philosopher - ABD at Oxford on a thesis dealing with "the concept of world" in Heidegger, Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein.. He had a divergence of opinion with his tutor, it seems.
Malick was raised Assyrian Catholic (that is to say Iraqi, or Chaldean Catholic) in Waco, himself, and that is also evident in the film. He also then went to a high class Episcopalian Prep School in Austin.
This film is obviously fruit of all of that study, and all of those philosophical and religious influences, and so is just as pretentious and interesting, as well as alternately staunch and new agey as you'd expect.
The family is Catholic and are often depicted at mass. Their priest is shown at one point giving a homily on the Book of Job in which he hammers home the futility of all worldly things, and the necessity of grace and the salvation of God which is beyond all human understanding: "his thoughts are infinitely above ours.."
The film also opens with a verse from one of my very favorite chapters in the entire Bible, also in Job: "Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation... while the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?" This is from Chapter 38 where God first takes the stage after Job has been sitting on his dung heap being heckled by his friends who have all sorts of opinions as to why Job has fallen on such hard times for the first 37 chapters.
The first 37 chapters are like much Christian discourse in other words: "blah blah blah blah blah blah blah." They babble, then leave. It's like one long modern evangelical service, a whole lot of bullshit and preaching, only without any rock tunes. I could never be a low church protestant, getting preached and sung at all the time like that. I'm so glad we have liturgy and generally short homilies..
Anyhow, it's when Job is alone that God shows up and puts a pile driver through things. Job had been a bit upset that all these horrible things had befallen him, and was annoyed at God. But he never took up his so called friends' challenge to simply curse God and die. He kept on keeping on, cranky but faithful to the end, enthroned on his pile of shit.
Malick quotes the perfect line for every jackass who thinks they understand what the Book of Genesis "really" means in "historical" or "scientific" terms.
Where you there? Who are you to lecture me about what I did? You know nothing.
That no mere man may boast before He Who Lives and Reigns.
Malick leaves out - and this is telling, I think - the lines just before this, where God says to Job "Stand up. Gird your loins like a man. I will examine and I will judge you."
Judge. You.
This movie treats creation with such poetic power, and then casts the lives of this particular family against that cosmic backdrop in a way that is neither condescending or gimmicky. The grandeur of the human being, the human person, of our collective consciousness and our love, is as astounding as everything else in time and space - in fact, it is apparently the only thing that gives any of the other astonishing things that are any meaning. Only we contemplate, only we worship. Malick's film is one long testament to that truth.
But despite the proto- Christian themes in the film, and the repeated prayers in which every primary character prays and seeks the intercession of other characters ("I" love "you") in religious language, even addressing God as a person ("I give my son to you") the full blown presence of that transcendent Other is not felt. The film dances around this felt near absence gently, which is why it seems to verge on a sort of "new age" vibe..
The mother (Jessica Chastain's character) also makes a powerful statement at the beginning of the film that opposes grace to nature ("there is the way of grace and the way of nature") where grace is described as being selfless, liberating and free, while nature is described as grasping, controlling and selfish. The mother seems to be meant to be taking the way of grace, while the father and his oldest son follow the way of nature.
While I get the point, and somewhat credit it, I thought to myself that this is not technically true. I think nature is a manifestation of grace, and departing from grace disfigures, and is un-natural. The fall is the deprivation of grace in nature, that is evil, sin and death. Nature itself is good, being created by God (who is the only "super" natural being, even spirits and angels are natural, whether fallen or not, on this point I refer you to Aquinas) and in the Catholic economy of grace redeemed by the Church which is Christ's sacramental action, the energies of God that take on "material" expressions.
That's in a way a quibble (and note that I typed that off the cuff, so my way off expressing it may not be as precise or correct as it should be) but it's an important one.
I was left wondering about Malick's deeper agenda, whether he was thinking in terms of the Kabbalic or ancient Egyptian "Tree of Life" or other variations of that idea, and how much those ideas may have impacted his film.
I incidentally bought a beautiful papyrus of this depiction of the Egyptian mythological Tree of Life when I was living in Cairo, which I gave to Rich & JD. They've framed it beautifully, and it looks fantastic:
I really like it, and may need to go back to Cairo to pick up a few more.
The thing about this movie though is that while this is definitely affirming of the immense beauty and dignity of the individual human person, it sort of goes vague on the ultimate source of that personhood.
More unitarian than trinitarian in the final analysis, it seems to me. Not that that is a bad thing. I'm merely observing for the record.
Final word: see this film if it sounds at all interesting to you.
Just stay away from that third pint. It'll mess you up.
[Footnote: I just watched the video about the casting of the film that I post at the head of the review.. I apparently misunderstood what happened entirely, in that I thought the eldest son was the one who died, but apparently it was one of the younger ones. Sean Penn depicts the eldest son as a middle aged man.. i leave my review as is, because thaat confusion is a testament to the discursive, non- linear style of the film. I normally don't get confused by movies, but this one was unusually indeterminate. ]
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