I finally got to see Terrence Malick’s Tree Of Life and it was well worth waiting for. I only wish I could have seen it on a big Imax screen rather than on my humble laptop. It was still awesome in the true sense of the word.
It’s so complex and multi-faceted that any summary of the plot or speculation about meaning will fail to do it justice. It is a movie to be experienced rather than deconstructed. Still, I can’t resist putting down some of my impressions.
The voiceover by Mrs O’Brien (Jessica Chastain) at the start affirms that people must choose the way of nature or a way of grace.
Her stern husband, played brilliantly by Brad Pitt, seems to represent to harshest aspects of the path of nature. He’s a man who wants to be in control of his own destiny and rules over his three sons with a hard patriarchal force. His belief that you have to be cruel to be kind and often veers off course so that at times he is also cruel to be cruel. Inevitably, his oldest child Jack (Hunter McCracken/Sean Penn) rebels against this authority.
The mother is the nurturing figure (grace). In one scene, while playing with the boys outdoors she looks to the sky and says “that’s where God lives”. This simple trust that the family are being watched over by a benevolent being and governed by an unseen hand is one that is implicitly or explicitly questioned in the movie.
When a boy drowns at a local swimming pool, Jack says (again in a voiceover) “where were you – you let a boy die – you let anything happen”. His words are whispered as though afraid to voice these thoughts out loud.
The long sequences of the origins, and perhaps also the destruction, of the universe have, not surprisingly, been compared to Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey. The connection doesn’t end there. Both directors are single-minded, reclusive and possess a meticulous attention to detail and a tendency to use actors as cyphers.
In Malick it is often the case that the wonder of the natural world makes people seem like merely passing, even irrelevant entities, suggesting that real permanence lies in the landscape. Yet there is great humanity in his movies and The Tree Of Life is an astonishing bold and affirmative work.
The scenes at the end are like some form of rapture where the dead are now living once more and the family are reconciled. Like much of the movie the images draw much of their power from the minimalist dialogue. So much more is communicated by gestures than by words.
Malick’s genius lies in suggesting that the mystery of life is the very thing that makes it worth living. Therefore flickering flame at the beginning and end of the movie for me represents,not a celestial force, but the light in the darkness that burns as long as we are alive and alert enough to see and feel it.
