The sheer artistry employed in director Terence Malick’s ‘The Tree of Life’ is such that to simply experience the film is just as much an endeavor of internal discovery as it is external. With a fatalistic barrage of beauty at every frame and an impressionistic narrative that requires just as much construction within the viewer’s head as appears on screen, ‘The Tree of Life’ exists as an unapologetically grand meditation on the human experience.
Inherent in the narrative of ‘The Tree of Life’ is a philosophical struggle between the differing paths of nature and grace, and the eternal state of conflict in which they seem to persist within the mortal psyche. Raising three young boys in the 1950s, Brad Pitt stars as the physical manifestation of the way of nature, a highly self-motivated if not outright cynical, prideful man who believes in clawing his way to the top of the American dream and empowering his sons, often through unabashed cruelty, to do the same. As a foil to Pitt’s Mr. O’Brien, Mrs. O’Brien, played by Jessica Chastain, embodies the way a grace, which in her character’s words, “doesn’t try to please itself. Accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. Accepts insults and injuries.” This dichotomy comes to implant itself and fester in the minds of their sons, mostly notably Jack, whose adulthood we also see portrayed by Sean Penn in present-day flash-forwards as a successful yet miserable business man still desperate for answers.
This conflict between nature and grace is exacerbated by the death of the middle child (as featured opposite Brad Pitt at the top of this post), which thereby subjects the respective life-views of the mother and father to a state of existential armageddon. The film opens with a quote from the biblical book of Job, in which God asks of an accusatory Job, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?”, and it is this statement that becomes the focal point for contextualizing the loss of a child on screen, as we are fantastically thrown back to the start of everything, the big bang, and proceed to experience the entire history of the universe in fast-forward, from the beginning of time all the way to the death of the boy. Malick at once elevates the family’s loss to that of the cosmic while simultaneously identifying it as the tiniest of pin-pricks in comparison to the unknowable infinity of the universe as a whole.
Given the archetypal strife of Nichean proportions that exists within the minds of Malick’s characters, it is easy to assume the director has given up on any sense of relatable humanity for pure allegory, but this too would be a fallacy. It is true that the disjointed narrative we are given exists as a three dimensional drawing on a two dimensional surface, in which it is the human mind that must render the illusion of depth through self-deception, but what is revealed through the will of the viewer’s eye is a universal story of the travails of three young brothers and how they function within the space that their parents have created for them. Undeniably empathetic moments manifest themselves in the simplest of childhood interactions, whether it be the decision whether or not to throw a rock through an abandoned farmhouse window, or the ability to once again illicit familial trust after a very unbrotherly betrayal. For all it’s musings within the ethos of consciousness, Terrence Malick has managed to keep ‘The Tree of Life’ relatable on the most basic of levels; he tells the truth.
As are its characters and their incomplete conceptions of existence, “The Tree of Life” is also beautifully and too often tryingly imperfect. While flawlessly portrayed, the narrative itself requires the utmost concentration of its audience, often consisting of vignettes of action with voiceovers or dialogue from completely different, yet tangentially relatable scenes. Simply put, the most nimble of cinematic minds will find him or herself diminished to oatmeal by the end of this film’s 138 minutes. Additionally, and as touched upon previously, what fills the space between the pieces of the film’s pointillistic story is a series of jaw-droppingly beautiful nature shots meant to allow the movie-goer to better process in the abstract. While unarguably gorgeous, these images can just as easily come to be called painfully so over the course of the movie, and ultimately ring flat as self-indulgence on the part of Malick. Brilliant self-indulgence, but self-indulgence nonetheless.
It’s impossible to determine whether ‘The Tree of Life’ exists under the confines of ‘art as film’ or ‘film as art’, and admittedly, most likely unimportantly so. Instead, what is paramount is that while Terrence Malick’s opus will not entertain or even please many film-goers, that it will most certainly challenge all of them. To not be measurably moved by certain scenes and themes within ‘The Tree of Life’ would be inhuman. To not be enraged and devastated by others, equally so. The greatest triumph of Terrence Malick in ‘The Tree of Life’ is that perhaps more than any other film in history it will play differently in the mind of each person who experiences it, and yet remain relatable to all.
‘The Tree of Life’ is currently playing at Baxter Avenue Theater. Terrence Malick’s previous work includes ‘The Thin Red Line’, ‘Badlands’ and ‘Days of Heaven’.
