THE TREE OF LIFE

US, 2011, 138 minutes. Colour.
Brad Pitt, Sean Penn, Jessica Chastain, Hunter Mc Cracken, Fiona Shaw.
Directed by Terrence Malick.

Whether one likes The Tree of Life or not – and right from Cannes 2011 where critics split into both camps but the International Jury awarded it the Palme D’ Or – one has to admit that the film is ambitious in content and scope.

Those in favour see it as creative in ideas and cinema storytelling. Those not in favour prefer to see it as pretentious. But, one person’s pretentions are another’s earnestness.

With Kubrick’s 1968 2001: a Space Odyssey, which many quote in comparison with The Tree of Life, I found it immediately overwhelming. I didn’t find The Tree of Life overwhelming, but there was a great deal to respond to and to reflect on.

Terence Malick has not made many feature films. In the twenty years between Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line, 1978-1998, he made no films. Since then he has made The New World and The Tree of Life. Malick values the visual and is at pains to make every sequence perfect. He does not hurry over his films. This time has both poetic realism in his narrative about an average American family and special effects in his cosmological and biological portrait of the evolving world as well as a visit to a surprising land of life after death.

The film opens with a quotation from the Book of Job, chapter 38. The Job allusions would repay study. They are a challenge to humans in the face of the reality of God, creation and the sustaining of the universe. Who are we really? How do we compare with God? I wonder did Malick go to Job: 42 1-5. It contains the answer to Malick’s initial quotation. It is a profoundly humble acknowledgement of human empty-headed words in the face of the mystery of God. Job must be silent in the face of God’s grandeur and majesty.

Malick then follows this with comments on nature and grace. He states that nature can be competitive and destructive whereas grace offers a spirituality of humility, honesty and integrity and respect and regard for others. This is important for his portrait of the family.

As regards the universe, there is much to admire in his visualising of what looks like an interpretation of the Big Bang or a creative Theophany. The dinosaurs make an impression. The changing earth looks cosmically arresting.

Malick does not quite begin with the cosmology. It comes after our introduction to a family, the O’ Briens in the 1950s and so there is a jolt as we are taken back into prehistory. Once Malick establishes that our world has evolved and here we are.

The first episode in the life of the family is the news of the death of a son n war, the delivery of the sad telegram to the mother and the grief of the father. In a way, or in many ways, the story of the family is particularly ordinary. There is a value in our seeing the average family. There is a disadvantage insofar as this is not so engagingly dramatic.

The mother (Jessica Chastain) is a fine and beautiful woman, devoted to her husband until she has to face the challenge of his changing and his frustrations and the sometimes erratic treatment of his three sons. She seems the personification of Malick’s grace. The father is basically a good man who can face the reality of his failings and can apologise. He also lives through life’s ups and downs, his family growing up, his work achievements, humiliation in unemployment. This is an interesting role for Brad Pitt as he nears fifty, not a glamorous or celebrity role but rather an embodiment of the American male who is a personification of nature with moments of grace.

Actually, the real focus of the film is the oldest son. He is played with quite some intense hostility by first-timer, Hunter Mc Cracken.

Whatever it is in Mc Cracken’s face and eyes, I became mesmerised by him and his struggles with his love for and dislike of his father. Brad Pitt is very good in portraying the father who is torn by his strong-willed discipline which cowers his son and his deep-seated but too often unexpressed love. We see a lot of Jack and even viscerally share his tormented transition from young boy to teenager. Many of these scenes are with his brothers, the younger the one who is to die, the littlest just hanging in there.

As has been noted, this is not a particularly interesting family in itself or in what it does, but it can be seen as a typical, even archetypal average American family.

Since Malick does not seem to need narrative order, accuracy or coherence, we move in and out of flashforwards, to Jack as a middle-aged adult, working in skyscraper offices, puzzled by life and in a context which seems loomingly apocalyptic. So, this is how Jack turned out. And he is portrayed by a time-ravaged Sean Penn.

Since Malick has shown us his interpretation of the past, the recent past and the present, he then ventures into the future.

His afterlife is symbolic (we hope), people wandering an empty landscape, bypassing each other, but many connecting. It is hard to portray an afterlife on screen. Film-makers often opt for what seems a purgatorial state or experience, a prelude to what we might hope is heaven. The afterlife here is akin to ‘The In- Between’ of Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones. But, father and mother and the children arrive, wander, but are reunited with the adult Jack. It would seem that our lives and our after-lives are times of grace.

The Tree of Life (and there is a symbolic tree at the family home) is a religious film in the broadest sense. It would be interesting to hear an atheist’s interpretation, probably dismissal of these spiritual dimensions except in so far as they are the aspirations of most humans whether they are fulfilled or not. For the believer in the broadest sense (which includes the agnostic who does not disbelieve but claims that we cannot know God), there are many of what Peter Berger called ‘signals of transcendence’. Malick avoids much explicit connection to religion, but he is showing us a basically Christian culture, with reference to Job and the language of grace.

Christians can well appreciate his attempt to portray this religious perspective. After all St Thomas Aquinas, following the arguments of Aristotle, for a basic mover, cause and imaginer of the universe, acknowledges that people express this belief in their own ways. But he adds, for the Christian, this source of all being, we call ‘God’.

1. Terrence Malick’s career over decades, his emphasis on technique, visual skills? Ideas?

2. The film as a blend of the cosmic and the ordinary? Of poetry, narrative, science, philosophy, religion, spirituality?

3. A very American film, a story of Middle America in the 20th century, post-World War Two, technological change, employment and unemployment, family customs, respect? Children? War, death in war? A 20th century retrospective?

4. The structure of the film: the introduction to the family, the grief at the telegram for the death of the son, the tree in the yard as an icon? The grandmother consoling the mother? The return to cosmic origins? The resumption of the narrative? The portrait of Jack in the future? The afterlife? Past, present and future?

5. The quotation from the Book of Job, the theological implications, spirituality? God and creation? Providence? The explanation of nature and grace, definition? Pervading the film? Malick’s option for grace?

6. The cosmic dimensions, the special effects, the beauty? A big bang or a theophany? The emergence of the universe, its energy, development and evolution, vegetation, creatures, the dinosaurs, the changes, the meteors? Transformation of the earth?

7. The 1950s look, Texas, clothes and fashion, the formalities, the house, the interiors and exteriors, the streets? Ordinary life? The tree, the swing? The surroundings for the children at play? Shops and cars? The musical score?

8. The focus on the O’ Brien family, the father and his patriarchal attitudes, his sternness, his sons calling him Sir rather than Dad, emphasis on manners? His love for his wife, their courtship and marriage? The years passing? The wife as dutiful but a woman of grace? Her love, forgiveness, care for her sons? The tensions, the physical violence? Meals and tension? Her upset in the kitchen? Her husband’s absence, his return? His being fired from his job? A man of nature, flaws? A woman of grace?

9. The father with his boys, Jack and the strain, with the other sons, his severity, his love, tough love?

10. Jack as a focus, the eldest boy, with the other two, his look, his eyes, resentment and surliness, his changes of moods, the difficulties of how to respond to his father? His sullenness? His father hitting him? Making him call him Sir? His wanting affection? A reconciliation and hug, clinging to his father?

11. Steve, a nice young lad, the one to die? The little brother and his place in the family?

12. Jack in the future, the office buildings, the skyscrapers and glass? Jack’s purpose in his work, questions? The other workers, the formalities of work? In his room, looking out the window? The city and its soul or soullessness? Ominous threats – hints of apocalypse? Jack’s character in the light of his past as a child?

13. The visualising of the afterlife, a barren landscape, souls wandering, the disconnect, the gradual connections, the O’ Brien family, mother and father, the children, Jack as an adult, the other little boys? All embracing?

14. Malick and his moving from nature to grace?

15. A serious probing of issues? Imaginative interpretation – but the accusations of pretentiousness? The nature of Malick’ imagining and visualisation?