The Tree of Life (2011)

Posted on June 26, 2011
Filed Under contemporary, films

Terrence Malick’s stunning visual poem is about what it means to be human in an uncaring universe, our existential joys and terrors, the fraught wonders and painful mysteries of childhood, the end of innocence and the dream of redemption, the terrible beauty of Creation (no matter how it came to be) and our appalling distance from God (whatever that means to you). This simple story about a troubled, loving 1950s family in small-town Texas is urgently contemporary. The Tree of Life is a film about our stormy times, our riven country, our stubborn American Way, about what we do right and what we do wrong and the way we keep doing it all over and over and over again. For Malick the first fork in life’s tree divides nature and grace, and we cling to the wrong branch. The Tree of Life confronts our magnificent, soulless, trivial, violent American world with an achingly beautiful scream of protest: It doesn’t have to be this way.

Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain are extraordinarily good as the parents of three young boys in Waco in the years after the Second World War, and the performances of the children—Hunter McCracken, Laramie Eppler and Tye Sheridan—are unforgettable. Much of the story is presented as the memories of the adult Jack O’Brien (Sean Penn), now a successful middle-aged architect trying to make sense of his life. Malick paints the humanity of the O’Briens against a literally cosmic background that includes a dizzying montage of the birth of the universe, the dawn of life on Earth, and the explosive diversity and abrupt end of the age of the dinosaurs. For Malick, life’s chief lesson is that it can be snuffed out like a candle. Horror can fall upon us without warning, and we must fashion a way to live with the damage, and the knowledge that there is more to come. Mrs. O’Brien points to the sky and tells her little son, “That’s where God is.” That’s where the Big Rock came from, too.

Malick juggles a kaleidoscope of archetypes and symbols. Pitt is remarkable as Mr. O’Brien, a strong, solid man with a chin like a clenched fist and a shirt pocket full of pens. He’s an engineer with dreams, a frustrated musician, a man trying vainly to control his anger at an uncooperative universe. He sees life as an ascension—right living will cause one to rise in life—and Malick represents him with staircases and elevators. This is the nature half of the argument, the part of us that makes kids climb trees and generals ask for more troops. Grace is embodied by Chastain’s luminous Mrs. O’Brien, who is represented with water; her life is compassed by her fierce love for her children, and the obligation to endure her husband’s occasional bursts of hurt rage. Their children are pulled between these two poles, and Jack, at least, pursues the path of his father. His salvation comes late in the film, when we see the adult Jack riding down in a glass elevator attached to the side of one of Houston’s glittering office towers, and Malick segues to the film’s climactic, redemptive beach scene.

That scene, and the film’s repeated invocation of sacred symbols and language, permits the viewer to impose a religious reading on The Tree of Life. That’s a legitimate interpretation—Malick is cinema’s greatest Impressionist, and his work provokes a variety of readings, none two exactly the same—but I think it wholly misses the point. The Tree of Life is a long protest to God, but God never answers. We are left to our own devices, never assured of success, always at the mercy of impersonal catastrophe. And yet we are surrounded by wonders and marvels, and we are capable of happiness, and even joy. The Tree of Life says the grace we seek is in ourselves. It demands that we embrace the glory all around us—the glory of this world—and insists that the only way to be happy is to love. Malick is our Jeremiah, and our Renoir.

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