The Tree of Life


First, three moments. After jumping back and forth between three distinct periods of time (evoked primarily through architectural signifiers), in which the off-screen death of a secondary character reverberates with a transcendental solemnity, Terence Malick steers the viewer way, way, way back in time, delivering a visually stunning, ontological investigation into the beginnings of life on Earth. After much fire, fluid, flora and fauna, we come across two dinosaurs: one in the foreground collapsed, perhaps dying or maybe only sick; the other towering above in the background, eyeing the vulnerable creature with some interest. The latter approaches and suddenly I’m on the lookout for an objective correlative – maybe one openly referencing Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. I mean, the guiding principle of the film arrives in voice-over (and has been on a constant media loop since the emergence of what must certainly be the greatest trailer ever made): “There are two ways through life: the way of nature, and the way of grace. You have to choose which one you’ll follow.” And so I sat and watched, and I waited, and yet . . .

Another moment, later in the film, also involves water and is the shot of a black, carnival mask slowly sinking down and out of the frame. This proved to be something of a visual non sequitur, a frustrating image disassociated from all that has come before yet opening up a legion of clichéd mental associations.

The third is of a woman, dancing on air, gravity suspended, awe and wonder.

I don’t have a tidy thesis here. These are simply three out of hundreds and hundreds of surprising images – some profound, others’ simply confounding. Formally, Malick’s The Tree of Life is one of the most brilliantly inventive films I have ever seen. It continually mesmerizes relying less on dialogue than sound and movement and non-verbal bodily expressions, the camera cascading like water or rising and falling like blustery wind as it records the easily recognized complexities of one family in 1950s Waco, TX. At times the images unfold like a dream (a haunting sequence in an attic especially comes to mind), but there are also moments that seem far too earthbound, unironically embracing tired, nostalgic tropes of boyhood play and loss of innocence. The film traffics in binaries: male and female, father and mother, adult and childhood, nature and grace, life and death. Think Stephen King’s Stand By Me as reimagined by Walt Whitman and you’re not too far off the mark.

The central sequence (which runs about ninety minutes or so) focuses on the formation (and, dare I say, evolution) of an American family: romance, pregnancy, birth, a toddler’s first steps and discoveries, then the birth of another child, and then a third. There are some gorgeous, funny, loving images and actions in this sequence. Again, Malick’s ability to mesmerize is not overstating his talent nor his commitment to the material. Eventually, time settles down a bit and the film narrows in on its central character, the now twelve or thirteen-year-old Jack (Hunter McCracken). The first-born son of a controlling, angry father (Brad Pitt) and passive, life-affirming mother (Jessica Chastain), Jack rails against the competing forces of nature and grace, cautiously opening himself up to the world – its unfairness, its unyielding asymmetries – while also tentatively negotiating his own complicated desires. We watch him engage in acts of cruelty, defying his mother while, unwittingly, brushing up against the rough textures of the father he wishes were dead. There are moments in this section which work so damn well, particularly as Jack confronts and registers problematic emblems of difference and the abject. Still, I wish Malick had pushed harder into his archetypes . . . Indeed, I wish Jack wasn’t so ARCHETYPAL (and that the myth of Oedipus as well as Cain and Abel didn’t emerge to the surface so explicitly). Jack was also such a chaste rebel. If you are going to plunge into the heart of an angry, inchoate boy on the verge . . . well, stealing a silk slip from the mom next door and setting it loose into a rushing creek ain’t going to do it. Twelve-year-olds are complex, mercurial creatures, and Malick probably could have infused the character with a few more surprising revelations. Again, the formal elements were remarkable, but the content didn’t take me anywhere I haven’t been before.

As the film moves forward into an anxious, post-industrialized present, Jack (now an adult and played by Sean Penn) works his way through what must be the anniversary of the death alluded to in the film’s opening minutes. Some critics have suggested Malick takes us on a trip to the afterlife, but I’m not sure that’s the “answer.” I read somewhere that the ending was not “paradise” or “heaven” or whatever, but Jack’s interiority – Malick staging a kind of cosmic, subjective, out-of-body making of peace with the past in which his central character returns to Earth’s primordial origins (the filmmaker taking us full circle) to confront, reconnect or maybe simply embrace all he has left behind. But there’s the rub. We know nothing about Sean Penn’s Jack (short the buildings in which he works and a very oblique reference to a lover of some sort in his meticulously arranged, emotionally sterile apartment). What happened in the intervening forty years or so? We don’t know anything about the older Jack except that he is working through two losses bound up in the past (the loss of a sibling and the loss of his childhood home and playing ground – maybe three if we count his conception of a God). The former two, I guess, serve as some sort of psychic map into Jack’s subconscious, utilizing memory as a spiritual guide into the present moment . . . but then he is walking on some foreign beach and we have no idea how he got there or why? There are faces we recognize and many, many more that we do not. It’s an odd sequence that lacks the texture and depth of what has come before.

In the end, as much as I enjoyed watching the film, I was surprised by how emotionally distant I felt. I guess I wanted to fall in love with a few of these characters (and then, probably, mourn their losses and their lessons). That’s probably the Spielberg version, but the film might have benefited from a bit more sentiment and bit less cosmic effluence.

21 thoughts on “The Tree of Life”

  1. i haven’t read jeff’s review (or any others) as i don’t want to know anything before i see the film, but i do have a question for jeff: did you watch this at the landmark uptown theater? how large is the screen it’s on?

  2. Would Tree of Life be better on an IMax screen? Or in 3D? Just asking because I’m guessing that is the best bet for it showing anywhere on the westside of Cleveland.

  3. It’s playing at the Uptown and the screen is large, but you have to be tricky finding the right seat in terms of comfort (a number of the seats are simply uncomfortable) as well as vision (you don’t want a big head of hair in your line of sight). Still, the picture is clear and bright and the sound is very good (and the audience was reverent and this is a film that demands reverence). And Chris, The Tree of Life is playing in Cleveland at the Vedar Lee 6 in Cleveland Heights.

    I doubt we’ll be seeing this in IMAX or 3D ever.

  4. That’s the problem I have with Malick: the “reverence” he generates. jesus! Even the paltry output is provided as evidence of genius or, worse, a kind of cinematic saintliness. The high point, from what I’ve seen, was the first film Badlands , each successive film becoming more obscure. The title “Tree of Life” does not inspire confidence that he has become sharper. Of course, I will give it a chance. But I’ll also prepare for the deluge of reverential critical attention that will no doubt ensue regarding the film-maker who is so pure that he can only put out “projects” with cosmic significance every few years.

  5. Well, yeah, I hear you . . . I guess what I meant to convey was that audience members weren’t sharing opinions about “The Voice” or checking their cell phones, or accidentally dropping beer bottles which then clinked down the floor, etc., etc. For good or bad, and I am decidedly ambivalent, Malick’s film requires some focused concentration (I do think it is far superior to The Thin Red Line and The New World, both films were really hard work for me). There is a lot of voice-over (per usual) and you do need to concentrate if you want to catch every word (I swear I missed about 8%). I think a more mainstream cineplex audience might be challenged by a film that relies more on visuals and sounds as opposed to dialogue (where we get to watch the mouths move) and a firm commitment to continuity style. So, yeah, I’m glad I saw it at an art house theatre. I’m pretty sure when it opens wide (July 8, I think), I’ll want to see it again at the big ole AMC with their uber screens and their stadium seats. I also know there will be more audience “resistance” at the mall, and, probably, deservedly so. Hell, I recently saw Bridesmaids and these two girls two seats away were drunk and talked throughout the last half hour (I guess the alcohol had really kicked in at that point). I wanted to wring their necks mostly because what was happening on the screen was fucking hilarious (and, at times, poignant), and the girls’ inappropriate chatting was interfering with the comic rhythms. This has become almost inescapable over the last 48 hours, but man do I appreciate the ethic.

  6. I had the privilege of seeing this film last night at the Max Linder theater in Paris that has digital projection and panoramic screen. I found myself very moved by the film, though I understand your ambivalence to it, as well, Jeff. I understood the images on the beach to be, as you say, Jack’s “interiority” and the random unfamiliar people present there to be his understanding of the journey of life’s realizations, struggles and desires common to us all. He achieves grace – his mother’s view of life – at the end, I think, realizing that love is indeed the answer. I also found the film visually stunning, though yes, sometimes cliché in that imagery. The carnival masks?: for me, the masks we all wear in life floating in that great primal sea, discarded at last as he comes to realize what really matters. At Max Linder there was absolutely reverent (that is the right word) silence throughout the film. Viewers did not leave their seats until the credits scrolled through completely and the lights were turned up.

  7. Hey Aida! I wish I had more access to the “masks” these characters wear. The adult Jack, for instance; what is he stripping away in his process of making peace (with himself, his brother(s), his childhood, his father)? A bit opaque but not necessarily a bad thing. I’m not one who needs to have everything spelled out, but I do sort of want to be in on the play of ambiguities and open-ended questions. Did the Max Linder screening include sub-titles? I’m really curious what Jack said at the table that made his father so angry. I think I heard: “You’re a liar.” But someone I know who has seen the film a few times wrote that Jack says: “Be quiet.” Anyway, sounds like a great way to spend an evening in Paris, at the cinema with cinaphiles. Hope you’re having a nice time and a much needed escape from the American midwest.

  8. Actually, I decided to see the film based on the great conversation you were having on your Fb page about it. The discussion piqued my interest and I was not disappointed. I realized in seeing it that the imagery was so complex and so rapidly unfolding that it offered much for analysis, so much one would have to see the film multiple times to begin to see its patterns (the use of repeated images, the music, the elements of myth and archetype, even references to art and other films, etc.) For example, near the end of the film I picked up with the use of the candle in the hand of the Mother, I believe, references to the 17th-c. French paintings of George DeLaTour of Mary Magdalen – they are vanitas/memento mori images — an interesting play on the Virgin Mary associations with Mother throughout the film. The Max Linder screening included subtitles into French. I found them a bit distracting as I was looking at text rather than the imagery itself sometimes. I don’t recall exactly what Jack said to anger his father so, but it may indeed have been “you’re a liar”. What is Jack stripping away in his process of making peace? I would posit that it is the anger and resentment that had come to define him as he gains the realization of others’ weaknesses and finds in his heart compassion for them — including his Father and thereby himself. What I found particularly moving about the film was the visual/aural capturing of the exuberance of childhood experience and the gradual dampening of that boundless capacity for joy. For me the scenes of childhood play were not at first specifically male or just cliché images of boyhood. They were symbolic of that unthinking visceral relation to physical sensation and experience of the natural world that evokes innocence and capacity for pure joy. This is gradually replaced by the violent and competitive play of the boys (particularly Jack) as they act out what they have learned from Father and then gradually become “men” as defined by him. There is then the eventual sexual awaking which greatly troubles Jack (here I found myself wondering how a similar female awakening might be portrayed and wondered if it would indeed be as troubling for the young person involved) and further marks a separation with Mother as this relationship is now definitively changed. Jack reflects on all this in the film as he (and we) sees his childhood in light of an adult understanding and coming to grace, and thus to peace within himself. Seeing the film on the Max Linder screen was really fantastic. I do hope that it is shown in the Twin Cities in an appropriate venue. I don’t think it can be experienced properly without this. The dialog seemed intentionally obscured in some places — perhaps as dim echoes, barely remembered, of the past. It is unapologetic in its treatment of the theme and I felt, to great extent, that the audience there in the theater responded to that sincerity by giving the film their full consideration and attention.

  9. Nice. One thing I have not mentioned is the way Jack awkwardly and without proper guidance (or maybe his father is providing guidance of sorts) opens himself up to difference and diversity (the drunk on the street and then the man with, I think, cerebral palsy; the explicit hierarchical power structures at work when visiting the African-American family selling BBQ on the side of the road – reminding me so clearly of similar encounters when spending my summers with my uncle and grandparents in South Carolina’s low country in the sixties and seventies; the boy with the burned scalp, the drowned youth at the lake; the Latina(?) classmate for whom Jack develops an impossible crush (or am I reading too much into that sequence), his own complicated sexual awakening. Jack seems to be aware that there is so much more to the world than the constricting boundaries of his father’s house. And yet his childhood playing ground (the liminal greenspace in which he thrives and risks, destroys and conquers) does serve as a sort of utopic ideal which is lost and never to be recuperated (the reoccurring image of a tree surrounding by towers of glass and steel is telling). The paradox here is intriguing. Which path did Jack take: his father’s or the one defined by a sensitivity to life’s unfairness? So, yeah. So much to ponder. I look forward to seeing it again soon.

    Curious, if he is traveling with you, how did Gianni respond?

  10. Gianni didn’t like the film at all. He generally dislikes films with mystical content or supposedly grand themes. For him such films become too preachy and that puts him off. He wasn’t that impressed with the visual aspect either, finding it too heavy on special effects and pretentious in its attempt to manipulate the viewer with what he considered banal imagery.

  11. Gianni sounds like a sensible man–whoever the hell he is. I don’t object to grand themes or even a sort of pretentiousness (see my love of Antonioni and Dreyer); it’s just that many people seem to confuse in regards to Malick a heavy reliance on images of the natural world with powerful visual imagery–is a lingering shot on a lizard in the midst of the battle of Guadalcanal
    necessarily “powerful?”

  12. Gianni is Italian – that makes him an authority on film. Actually, he’s my husband and an academic (history and philosophy) who came to his senses and retired. I’m an art historian and colleague of Mike’s and Jeff’s at Hamline. If we’re tweeting our personal preferences to Malick, I suggest a lizard singing Heartbreak Hotel.

  13. Do Italians still make films? Of course, I kid…..nice to meet you, Aida. I’d put in a request for the lizard to do some Tom Jones, perhaps “What’s Up, Pussycat?” I doubt we’ll see a talking lizard in any Malick soon….

  14. Ah, but there are a few of lizards in the film. Dinosaurs, yes? But also more prosaic varieties. They do not, however, talk (then again not a lot of talking in this film). I’ve seen it a second time and liked it even more. Maybe three times will be the charm. I’d really like to take Nicola to see it . . . and its still playing in the TC. For all its frustrations and faults, I have not seen another film this summer that holds a candle to even fifteen minutes of The Tree of Life.

  15. Jack said “Be quiet”–and that led to his father blowing up. I appreciate all these comments, and can’t add too much. I find myself most attuned to–or seduced by–Malick when both character and meaning fade into the surround. I am in love with whole long stretches of “Days of Heaven” where people labor, where fields seem to burn in the dusk, or do actually burn at night, where the community feasts. As here, where you get lost in impressionism. But (as with “The Thin Red Line”) cut the voiceover entirely, and avoid the more definitive arc of archetypes and Capital-letter Character and Theme, and damn I’d think it brilliant. I like him best oblique. And there is so much I loved watching here. But…. Be Quiet.

  16. This is spot on, Mike: “But (as with ‘The Thin Red Line’) cut the voiceover entirely, and avoid the more definitive arc of archetypes and Capital-letter Character and Theme, and damn I’d think it brilliant.”

  17. Well, yes . . . the images here don’t always need words (though after three viewings, the constant questioning of the universe does serve the “big picture”). Plus, after rooting around a few months ago, it became very clear to me that The Tree of Life is very personal for Malick, who (SPOILERS) lost a brother to suicide in the late-sixties (a classically trained guitarist) as well as another brother in 2009 (who had been badly scared in a fire some time ago). If you are really obsessive, you can find patents online filed by Malick’s father, Emil, from the fifties and sixties.

  18. finally got around to watching this. a lot of beautiful moments but i’m not sure they added up for me. on the whole, i think i preferred this when it was made by tarkovsky. but it did make me want to watch the wondrous trailer over and over again, and i think i’m going to go and do that now.

Leave a Reply