Only one pick this time. Have to
maintain a little suspense. Plus I run a bit longer than usual here
because I have a lot to say about this particular movie.
2. THE TREE OF LIFE (Malick, 2011)
When Terrence Malick's “The Tree Of
Life” was released, it met with general critical acclaim as well as
a small but vocal skeptical contingent that presaged the withering
criticism Malick would draw through much of the rest of the 2010s. He
would find himself increasingly charged with pretentious navel-gazing
and an exasperating lack of interest in coherent narrative (this is a
bad thing?). He became the butt of endless jokes about all the
twirling and the fields of wheat and perfume ads, and other snide
shots from viewers not capable of doing much more than binge-watching
cooking shows on Netflix.
Malick is easily my favorite American
filmmaker of the 2010s. I would also have included his critically
lambasted “To The Wonder” (2012) on my Top 20 list had I not
arbitrarily decided to limit myself to only one film per director. I
still think about “Knight Of Cups” (2015) all the time. OK, fine,
“Song To Song” (2017) wasn't quite as good – it was still
great. And, oh yeah, “A Hidden Life” is one of the best films of
2019, one hell of a year for cinema.
Anyway, the end of the 2010s finds “The
Tree Of Life” near the top of many best-of lists, perhaps the
consensus pick for best film of the past ten years, if a consensus
pick is actually possible. Far be it from me to argue.
Following is an edited version of my
original review, written at a time when I was really excited about
the movie. Come to think it, I'm still just as excited.
Review:
The newest chapter in the book of
Malick-eye leaves viewers unable to agree on precisely what they have
seen. I don’t mean that the film is divisive, but rather that it
can be difficult to process its richly textured imagery after a
single viewing, or even after several. Emmanuel Lubezki’s gliding
hand-held camera and the kinetic editing construct a landscape out of
impressionistic sense memories, flurries of shapes, movements, faces,
bodies moving towards or away from the camera. Traditional
perspective is skewed, context isn’t always clear, and the sheer
volume of images can overwhelm the senses. Add in the film’s
tendency to traverse multiple time frames ranging from the beginning
of the universe to 1950s Texas to the final days of our solar system
and even the most attentive viewer will ask, “What did I just see?”
Is that mom greeting her son as he rises from his grave at the end of
the world? Did I really see Sean Penn smile at the end?
And what about God? Does this film
which depicts the creation of the universe also show us its creator?
“The Tree Of Life” begins and ends with a flickering ring of
light, perhaps a flame or a cloud of interstellar gas that could,
like many circular or oval shapes, be taken for an eye. Is this the
eye of our creator looking at us? The film offers one hint. The third
(I think) cut to this image is synched to the word “Lord”
whispered (lots of whispering voiceover here) by the grieving mother
in the film. But this is hardly definitive. She could simply be
projecting. Maybe this ring of light is just… a ring of light. And
if it is a creator eye, does it see like we do? Or is it so alien we
can’t even conceptualize its perspective?
God or not, “The Tree Of Life” is
suffused with a sense of wonder, the wonder of How. How did we get
here? In his book “Wonderful Life,” Stephen Jay Gould marvels
over the diversity of life during the Cambrian explosion and notes
(somewhat controversially) that the extant fossil record shows us a
myriad of possible ways evolution could have occurred. The route that
led to the emergence of homo sapiens and of consciousness was so
staggeringly unlikely it seems difficult to attribute it to chance,
and yet, if it had happened any other way, we wouldn’t be here to
ask, “How did it happen this way?” But we are here, and so we ask
the question and we keep asking it, whether we expect to get an
answer while communing with the beyond or by studying the contents of
a Petri dish.
“The Tree Of Life” deals with these
heady matters in the grandest fashion, but it is primarily motivated
by a more specific kind of “How.” The film opens with a mother
(Jessica Chastain) receiving a telegram, the kind of telegram no
mother wanted to receive in the 1960s. Her 19-year-old son is dead
(most likely in the war, but we aren’t told) and her grief is so
vast she must reach back to the dawn of time to ask “How could you
let this happen?” and “Where were you?” Similarly deep is the
grief of eldest son Jack O’Brien, depicted as an adult (sometime
around our present day) by Sean Penn who looks as morose as Sean Penn
usually does. At least on this (present) day, Jack is consumed by
thoughts of his long-lost brother, and much of the film is loosely
structured around his childhood reminiscences. Flash back to 1950s
Waco, TX where young Jack (Hunter McCracken) and his little brother
(Laramie Eppler) are both still alive and playing, and vile telegrams
are a decade away. Then wait a few minutes and flash back to the Big
Bang. It’s not as long a trip as you think.
As dense and convoluted as the film’s
visuals can be, the epoch-leaping narrative of “The Tree Of Life”
is fairly straightforward. Writer-director Malick, making his usual
liberal use of voice-over, lays out his thesis as bluntly as
possible. Mom states that you have to choose either the way of nature
or the way of grace. Grace equals mom, and nature equals Jack’s
father (Brad Pitt) who subscribes to a dog-eat-dog view of humanity
tinged by disappointment at his failure to become a “big man.”
Father says,“Your mother’s naive. It takes fierce will to get
ahead in this world, son.” Jack has a tough choice to make.
“The Tree of Life” is not
particularly subtle in this fashion, but subtlety is not inherently a
virtue. After establishing the high stakes (a family grieving over
the loss of a son), Malick ups the ante even more by cutting from
rural Texas to the cosmos shortly after the Big Bang. In an elaborate
special effects sequence that draws obvious and valid comparisons to
Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” (Douglas Trumbull provided
visual effects for both films, working here along with Dan Glass of
“Matrix Reloaded”), nebulae expand, galaxies race away from each
other, the Earth forms, volcanoes erupt, the planet cools to a point
where multi-cellular life emerges, thrives, and then is almost wiped
out by a meteor strike. And yes, as you may have heard, there are
dinosaurs.
This section of the film is
spell-binding (and also the make or break point for potential
walk-outs) but what follows is even more extraordinary, one of the
most extraordinary things I’ve ever seen in on a screen. After
showing us the origin of life, Malick shows the origin of a life,
that of Jack who is depicted living in an underwater house (the womb)
before swimming to the surface to be born (Is that mom swimming
alongside him? It’s hard to see…) Here “The Tree Of Life”
fully reveals its epistemological concerns. Baby Jack is trained to
see (he is gobstruck by the sight of mom’s distorted hand in a
water-filled fishbowl) and to hear, how to speak and read, learning
the “proper” way to make meaning of a chaotic pre-linguistic
sensory field. He learns the concepts of “No!” and “Mine!”
which can be traumatic enough, but under his mother’s care (the way
of grace) the lessons are gentle. He is soon, however, handed off to
father (“Don’t call me dad.”) who immediately begins to teach
him about borders (“Do not cross this line!”), etiquette, and,
most importantly, exactly who’s in charge. A life from the womb to
the brink of adolescence condensed into a series of primal scenes,
and rhymed directly with creation itself, each equally important,
each flowing in the same river. Call it bold or call it pretentious,
but there’s no denying Malick’s chutzpah or his virtuousity. I am
left gaping.
The film mourns the loss of innocence,
not just the loss of childhood and family, but also the loss of an
innocence of perception. The defining tension of the childhood scenes
(most of the film’s lengthy middle section) is Jack’s resistance
to his father’s lessons. He doesn’t blindly accept all the “Shit
My Dad Says” and turns initially to God for wisdom: “I want to
know what you are… I want to see what you see.” Not the way
father (with a little f, although he acts like he’s a big F) sees.
If adult Jack is still disillusioned, perhaps it’s because these
requests were never fulfilled, at least not to his satisfaction.
How? Why? The very need to ask is the inevitable burden of acquired
language. As Kaspar Hauser said, “It seems to me that my coming
into this world was a terrible fall” or, perhaps more relevant
here, “Mother, I am so far away from everything.”
Though cosmic in scope, Jack’s
reminiscence in “The Tree Of Life” is narrowly focused. To the
best of my recollection, there are no traditional pop culture
markers, no signs of film, television, or radio, as we would expect
in a more nostalgic reverie. Everything is centered around the family
and particularly the home, a theme most vividly manifested in a shot
of the house high on a hill (a hill we have not, I believe, seen
before), an ocean of clouds wafting above, as if it was the only
house in the universe. As well it might be.
Jack’s lonelyache, whether embodied
by Sean Penn’s trademarked grief-face or Hunter McCracken’s
stolid rebel, is fueled by desire: for God, for meaning, for his lost
brother, for rapprochement with his father and, above all, for his
mother. Chastain, so often limned in the light of a sunset, is the
archetypal figure of a pure, perfect mother, young and beautiful and
all-forgiving. She is a precious memory, no doubt inaccurate,
jealously guarded by Jack (at all ages) against any erasure or
deformation. Yet she is still elusive, always there but just out of
reach, often receding from the camera with a laugh and a billowing
dress. I have seen these same images in my dreams many times, and it
is startling to see them created by someone else. “Tree of Life”
evokes the defining presence and absence of mother more vividly than
any other film I know.
Noël Carroll once described the sights
and events in Malick’s films as “too much there,” a reference
to a sense of immediacy and force that goes beyond language,
narrative and psychology, the unmediated and inherently alien
experience they provide. I would describe the pictures and moments
in “The Tree Of Life” as being “too much now.” The elemental
raw-scrape of the photography and the film’s unique editing style
present each image as fresh and as monumentally important as any
other: the Horsehead nebula, a lace curtain, an eclipse, a
nightlight, the cosmic and the domestic woven together. We are always
at the center of our universe and even though each cut in the film
can span millions of years or a fraction of a second, everything we
see and hear is always now, always everything.
