The Tree of Life,
Terrence Malick, 2011, USA
I received, firstly, the advice that if I could last the
first half hour, I would be okay. “Tree of Life” starts with a whispery,
portentous, frequently one-word voice-over (“Brother.” “Father.” etc.) that is
guaranteed to set my teeth on edge and my sneer twitching. Oh, such resonance
and poetry in these words! But these hushed voices are less narration than
fragments of disembodied thoughts that sporadically appear, intending to
elevate the poetry and occasionally offer insight into the characters, as little
as we are offered (“Mother. Make me good.”). And these whispers do not guide
the film: they just annoy with drawing attention to the film’s portentousness.
Rather what steers the film is the vertiginous camera, a
hand-held vision that is aggressively mobile, often as disorientating as any
found-footage excursion. In “The Tree of Life”, the camera swoops
insistently, often to napes. When a camera that glides through an office
complex is intercut with a camera that glides through nature and back without
losing a beat, the magic of the film starts to come to life with this
juxtaposition. A nineteen year-old is dead: the mother is devastated; the
father tries to retain a square jaw; a brother reflects – and this triggers off
the memories that will be the bulk of the narrative.
Where did it all begin? And here Mallick throws in his most
audacious conceit by taking us back to the forming of the universe and the
world in a prolonged spectacle that offers gorgeous, dazzling visuals rather
than story. It is a special-effects sequence that can’t help but provoke memories
of “2001: a space odyssey” (and indeed, Douglas Trumbull was involved in
the creation of this sequence). It also prompted my friend to recall that
moment in “Ed Wood” where Ed professes enthusiastically that he could
make a whole film out of a bunch of stock footage. Indeed. And then Mallick becomes
even more audacious and throws in the thing that probably is the film’s
greatest contention: suddenly, we are looking at a dinosaur on a beach. Filmed
mostly in low light and tones, these CGI creations look real enough and they
are presented as prettily and with as much reverence as everything else that
precedes it and is to follow. And, for the record, I liked the dinosaurs. This
first sequence gives us a chapter that references evolution. Later, this will
conflict with the fall into a mundane family drama and their reliance upon
religion. And by “mundane” I mean that it is the simple and unextraordinary
qualities that the film triumphs and considers most vital. The universe was
created by incredible processes, and so was the earliest life on Earth, and
then there were dinosaurs and, eventually, there were these three brothers and
their loving and strained relationship with their parents. How wondrous and remarkable
these things are, how grand and great the differences in size these moments
seem, and where does one lead to the other? Of course, this can also be read as
tapping into human narcissism, that we and our individual experiences are the
true centre of the universe…
To that end: a tale of a boy growing up during what seems
like a short period of a couple or years or so in a certain house in smalltown
America (the memories end when the family has to move). This is, as the ominous
voiceover tells us from the beginning, a tale of fathers and brothers, just in
case we aren’t sure. Strange, then, that aside from the two brothers we become
most familiar with there is also a third brother who seems superfluous. Indeed,
it may be hard to work out which younger brother will die: this death is like a
Hitchcock “McGuffin”, there mostly to set the story of memory in motion. The
father spins from being affectionate, dictatorial, protective and unreasonable.
Mother is rendered mostly in moments of dancing around: on the grass or sometimes
in the air, for example. She is cast as angelic and therefore barely needs a
complex personality until called upon to render maternal grief at the loss of
one of her boys. She is “Grace”, but with little to do for herself, the film is
imbalanced towards her apparent primal opposite: the father.
Aside from our main protagonist, the boys too have vague
characters. They run and play charmingly and as they grow older, they start to
experiment with meanness and unhappiness brought about by their stern father and
messing around with other kids. Our protagonist becomes increasingly troubled
and complex as time goes on and he starts to move away from the confines of the
house; we often see him wandering around the streets, occasionally so slow he
might just as well stand still. The bulk of character interest is the father,
who comes a fully rounded character: charming, conflicted, authoritarian,
loving, et cetera. This is probably more achieved by Brad Pitt’s exceptional
performance than the screenplay. He manages to fight off most of the symbolic
imagery to become a character.
This is a story of where we come from, of memory and loss.
It also appears to be a tale of the union and conflict between the natural
world and God. If you find inspirational meme’s insightful, then you may be
stirred by the religious symbolism, the whispery voiceover and themes that
permeate the film: life is a waterfall, cascading magnificently; we are but
grains of sand in the wind; and so on. Many may be seduced by the religious symbolism
and probably feel that is where the poignancy lies, but this is the laziest of
signals. Tales of people, of time and place and growing up, the forming and
conflicts of the young and the failings and struggles of adults, these are the
things that speak truth and the nods to God here are but pretentions to
poeticism that drag insights down to man’s most narcissistic interpretations of
existence.
And that brings us to the beach at the end, where Sean
Penn wanders and meets the cast of his past. There are reunions of a sort and
the mother gives over her son to God – all on a pale beach. It certainly feels
a little confused and confusing. However, I prefer to read the beach as less
some kind of afterlife or Heaven’s Gate – which the sentiment and otherwordliness
might imply – but rather as a plateau of (Jack’s) memory, where its cast wander
in Jack’s mind; as a place where he can bring them all together again, as if
they had never aged, as if they are forever on call from that time in his childhood.
I do so to sidestep the triteness of the afterlife depicted as a beach of the
soul.
The opinion seems to be that Malick is aiming for ‘pure’
cinema, one unburdened by narrative constraints, that is given to the visual
rather than story and dialogue. This usually means the cinematic version of a stream-of-consciousness tone poem.
Malick’s film shares more with, for example,
Tarkovsky’s “Mirror” and Korine’s “Gummo” where visual aesthetic
wrestles and fragments with often simple tales to elevate them into something
universal, metaphysical and cultural. Their contrivances are more audio-visual
than plot. As it is, the visual splendour and audacity of “Tree of Life”
fights for supremacy with the intimacy of the bildungsroman which reaches deep
to remind us of growing up and what it is to be besieged by memory and dwarfed
by the universe.
“Tree of Life” is definitely going to reward repeat
viewings and is the stuff that books and criticism will be written upon for,
oh, as long as people are interested in film. It is a splendid experience, not
only visually but it has emotional weight despite the its obviousness and
pretensions. But then Malick has a total new edit for the Criterion release –
an extra fifty minutes (!) – so maybe that makes all this review redundant? This
speaks to the film’s fidgety and impressive portrayal of restless memory and
cinema and also to its inability to pin itself to anything deeper than the emotional
gestures of commercials and stale aphorisms.
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