Malick's 'Tree of Life' Is Profound (Don't Snicker)

Terrence Malick's new film The Tree of Life is not something you see very often. It is a serious film. The question is whether it's too serious. In this flip and modern age, where the young and not-so-young converse in the style that often feels like a third-rate Seinfeld rip-off, what chance does a film really have to be taken seriously?

A pretty good one, as the case may be. The film won the Palme d'Or, despite a few howls of protest. The film has been lauded by some august critics, and in a few cases, pronounced a masterwork. But it is also a film that I am tempted to make fun of almost immediately, which begs the question: why do I want to laugh in the face of all creation?

In the beginning there was light, and a few cool special effects. There are also vast ice shelves, volcanic eruptions, crashing waves, space gas and other neat stuff. It is the origin of all existence unfolding before your very eyes. The dinosaurs show up, they eat and are eaten, before the arrival of a rather large comet resets the clock.

God knows, I am no theologian, having been raised without benefit of religion, but even if you have only the barest grasp of Christianity, you can read the parables here.

God the father

Malick's film is about life and death in the grandest biblical sense, but it is especially about the latter. Death is studded all the way through, popping up in gonzo-fashion in the least expected moments, like a cosmic banana peel. One moment, you're swimming in the pool with your friends, the next you’re on astral beach with Sean Penn and Brad Pitt. Whether you think that sounds heavenly or hellish depends on your tolerance for American actors, I suppose. The distance between these two places is paper thin, which is where the film, itself, begins, with the delivery of a piece of paper announcing the death of a young man.

His parents, stricken with grief, practically reel through the streets with their pain. They are played by the luminous Jessica Chastain and Brad Pitt, two actors whose physical beauty already renders them somewhat God-like, an impression that Malick takes to interesting new places with the extended centre section of the film. If God the Father is inscrutable, mysterious and violently unpredictable, so too was your own father. In the 1950s universe, in which the story takes place, Mr. and Mrs. O'Brien are the parents of young three boys.

The origins of their family are likened to the beginning of universe, a coming together of two beings, who give rise to an entire world. In this verdant paradise, kids play "kick the can" long into the gloaming of the evening. Mothers are kind and beautiful and fathers are strict and brutal. The boys themselves, with their downy necks and sun-browned skin are exquisite in their tow-headed glory. In windows lit from within by golden lamps, women clad in silk slips move from room to room. This part of the film, filled with an almost holy loveliness, is a thick slice of an Eisenhower Americana, where behaviour was governed by iron clad dictates such as "Don't talk back," "Don't put your elbows on the table," and most importantly, "Honour your mother and father."

Stifling or wonderful or both?

God the hypocrite

Anyone who has ever read the Bible knows that God can be a terrible hypocrite, what he says and what he does being entirely different things. It is the same with the family patriarch here. A man embodies a paradoxical mixture of sanctimony, failed ambition, love and cruelty. As the boys grow, the eldest son Jack begins to fall away from his family, to fall from grace as it were. These scenes have the feel of genuine memory, especially when the slippery serpent of sex comes down out of the tree. The erotic instinct is fundamental to all of life, and the sight of his mother washing her feet with a garden hose is almost unbearable. Trading the bosom of his family for real bosoms and the raw tang of rebellion (Jacks asks God to kill his father), the loss of paradise is assured. Oh Oedipus, here we go again...

Growing up is a painful process, and, if there is one thing the film gets extremely right, it is just that. The scenes in which Jack first tastes sin possess the ferocious exactitude of genuine experience. A personal moment with a neighbour's silken underwear and a fit of agonized shame, in which the offending slip of material is sent down the river is a just a little too real. As the boy lurks in doorways, eyeing his parents askance, unable to voice the raging impulses that are beginning to tear him into pieces, Malick's camera turns and turns in a widening gyre. Cast forth from their Edenic world by greed, lust and pride, the family drive away from their house, with its enormous tree dominating the front yard, cut off from God's love and grace. 

This is pretty weighty stuff, but the film for all its celestial scope asks one central question: if we are born to die, what was all this about? Why all this beauty, complexity, suffering and joy? What is the meaning of all this stuff? The question of mortality clings to every moment in the film, whether it's a dinosaur sparing another dinosaur, seemingly because it blinked nicely, or the loss of your little brother.

A recent article in Harper's Magazine argued the case that American society has lost of the ability to deal with tragedy, citing the example of Martin Scorsese. Writer Vince Passaro argues that tragedy is fundamentally and finally the essential fact of all life. We are born to die. And die we do. What happens after that is the big question.

'Family of secrets'

The Tree of Life suggests the essential mystery of existence is a little like wandering in the desert. In the film's final coda, poor old Sean Penn does exactly that -- although he wore the wrong shoes for a long slog through the endless wastes. But here is where things get a little goofy. 

The autobiographical impulse is deep inside every artist. You wouldn't make films if you didn't feel that you, yourself, were a pretty interesting character. A 1999 Vanity Fair magazine profile of the reclusive Mr. Malick indicated the origins of the film thusly:

"The Malicks were a family of secrets, marked by tragedy. Terry was the oldest of three boys. Chris, the middle son, had been involved in a terrible automobile accident in which his wife was killed. Chris was badly burned. Larry, the youngest, went to Spain to study with the guitar virtuoso Segovia. Terry discovered in the summer of 1968 that Larry had broken his own hands, seemingly despondent over his lack of progress. Emil, concerned, went to Spain and returned with Larry's body; it appeared the young man had committed suicide. Like most relatives of those who take their own lives, Terry must have borne a heavy burden of irrational guilt."

The dead brother, the saintly mother and the asshole father are alluded to in Malick's biography. Even a little boy who was badly burned shows up in The Tree of Life. That the film is autobiographical is pretty self-evident. That's not a problem, but taking your own self a little too seriously is. A filmmaker of Malick's stature probably has few people to challenge him during the process of making a film. The balloon just kept swelling with no one prick to let out the gas.

The Tree of Life is also a film that has long been in the works, and as such, it packs a portentous weightiness that threatens to upend the entire enterprise. Like a boat too top heavy, it goes tits up in the water occasionally. As much as I was affected by Malick's film, I was also resistant to it, unwilling to simply let the hooey of the ending take me over. The thing I am appreciative of, however, is the process of thinking about a film, wrestling with it, even if at the end you decide it was bunkum. Or not...

The film begins by asking, "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?"

When was the last time anyone asked you such a question?