The Tree of Life (Friday, May 27, 2011) (36)

If you go into Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life expecting a standard narrative film with three acts and a story that moves forward in time from one point to another, you will be disappointed. The film has a structure unlike just about anything I have ever seen before. It is really a visual symphony - and I do not mean that in the superlative sense that it is just really beautiful (though it is really beautiful, of course). I mean that the film has more in common with the architecture of a symphony than it does with standard narrative feature films.

There is one big story that's broken up into movements that are each broken up into smaller passages that tell a rather complete story when experienced together. Almost nothing is told in standard narrative scenes with dialogue, rather atmospheric, impressionistic memory moments are shown and impressionistically convey story and emotion. Individually these elements are very pretty and really function as short stories, but their impact can only be fully experienced when connected to the other moments. There are visual motifs that pop up in various places (trees and water are very common) that allude to bigger themes and are not always specifically thematically relevant to the moments they are in.

The overall narrative of the film deals with the life of Jack O’Brien (Sean Penn). As a middle-aged man he remembers back to his childhood on the anniversary of his younger brother's death years earlier. He grew up in a middle-class neighborhood in Waco with a stern father, Mr. O’Brien (brilliantly played by Brad Pitt), and loving mother, Mrs. O’Brien (Jessica Chastain). His father was a failed-musician-cum-mechanical engineer who was never really happy in his own life and always a tough disciplinarian with him and his two younger brothers. Most of his time was spent playing with them and other boys in the neighborhood, doing what kids do: running around, breaking windows, launching frogs on rockets and getting interested in girls.

Malick takes the unusual step of not just showing Jack's life, through his memories, but rather showing a history of the universe up until Jack, and then showing the boy’s story. There is the Big Bang, the first sea-creatures in the water, dinosaurs, an asteroid collision into Earth that killed the dinosaurs, and the ice age. Despite the fact that this is ostensibly the view of the world of the grown Jack in the present day, it seems like his memories are some sort of collection of everyone’s memories or a projection of what he imagines unseen events looked like. Clearly there is a connection between his intimate memories and the story of all things everywhere.

To understand this link, it is necessary to examine the symbolic story Malick presents. The film opens with an epigram of two lines from the Book of Job (38; 4 and 7) where God tells Job that he is the creator of the universe and suggests that Job is ignorant, saying: "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth ... when the morning stars sang together?" Immediately after this, in voice-over, Mrs. O’Brien, the much more religious parent, says that there has always been a dichotomy in life between Nature and Grace, where Nature is a harsh, unforgiving, unbending character and Grace is a loving, accepting, nurturing force. This duality is the emotional and thematic center of the film.

As the story moves along, the conflict between Nature and Grace exists in almost every moment. On the surface, Mr. O’Brien is Nature (stern, unrepentant, sometimes cruel or apparently irrational) and Mrs. O’Brien is Grace (happy and loving, willing to overlook mistakes). But the relationship is actually not so straightforward as this. Despite his base in Nature, Mr. O’Brien seems to be like God - he's certainly the dominant force and ruler of the house - but he lacks the understanding and kindness that really leads to Grace. It almost seems that he is the Old Testament God, the God of Job, who would be cruel, punishing and unclear about his desires, while the mother is a New Testament, Christian God, a loving and forgiving one. It seems that Malick is showing the real conflict between the God of the Hebrew and Christian Bibles. One is a God of creation-out-of-chaos, floods, wrath, exactly what one thinks about the cruel side of Nature. The other is a God of love and peace, of understanding, exactly what one thinks about the New Testament and Jesus’ teachings.

The Job story is very important for understanding the film. In that story a man has lost everything and is asking God why he has done this to him. God's response is cryptic and Job is left to figure that only his deep faith will pay off in the long run. In this sense, Jack as a boy (or Jack as a grown man looking back on his childhood) could be a man of faith who sees that he was either being tested by God with a very difficult father or that his father, as the wrathful weather God, was always testing him, ultimately making him see that the only choice he had was to submit to his father entirely.

From the point of view of Jack as an observant and faithful person, the entire history of the universe lead up to his birth and childhood and everything in the world conspired to test him - that the history of the universe (dinosaurs and all) is God and he feels, much like Job did, that God had it out for him for some unexplained reason (suggesting that the history of the universe sequence in the film is grown-up Jack's own view of history).

But on a secular level, a Nature level, there is the idea that Jack and Job are just merely overly self-centered and don't understand the hard ways of Nature. Sometimes things just seem random and unfair; there is not a cosmic plot against individual people. Sometimes people have strict fathers, sometimes their wives die and they lose their money, sometimes a bigger dinosaur comes to step on their heads or they die when an asteroid collides with their planet. It's all very cruel and bitterly irrational, as Nature frequently is.

The non-traditional structure of the film, brilliantly allows one to watch and take in all of the biblical matter, or merely watch the secular story and enjoy the amazing technical details: the amazing photography and camera work of Emmanuel Lubezki (who previously worked with Malick on The New World), the wonderful score of Alexandre Desplat (most of the music is from the classical cannon; Desplat just adds smaller elements, frequently on the piano), and the beautiful editing of a team of editors. This is a sensually rich film filled with bright colors and beautiful sounds. Much like a symphony with beautiful passages, each shot of this film gives a powerful image and functions as small sub-story within a bigger work. Each shot, being only a memory in Jack’s mind, is filled with nostalgia and melancholy for a time long gone. Even though Malick only shows small or partial moments, a bigger picture of those stories emerges and, in an impressionistic way, whole subplots emerge from only a few incidents.

Almost all of the film is shot in a style that falls somewhere between a Steadicam and a hand-held camera, giving the view of a camera that seems to float just behind or just above all the action. This gives the sense of a third-party observer to the action, floating in every room just above the action, who is constantly present, non-judgmental and all-knowing. This is God's view of the action. This is not a typical third-person voice/view for story telling; the audience becomes a constant party to all the action, a strange, kind-hearted, voyeuristic viewer. Much like how the story of the Universe is not just Jack’s memories but a collection of everyone’s memories, so too is this view not any one person’s view, but a communal view, a sort of collective window into this one family’s actions. Just as how God is all things and states of being, so too is this God’s view and everyone’s view.

Being that this is a symphony, the use of music is a crucial means of telling the story. Symbolically, classical music represents Jack's dad as he is a failed classical pianist and still plays the piano in the house and the organ in church. That individual moments of grown-Jack's memories include specific sound leitmotifs is an important thing when dealing with Jack's relationship to his father. Grown-Jack is haunted by the man who cast a shadow over everything he remembers from his childhood. He is obsessed with the way his father wielded his power, the way Job ultimately recognizes and succumbs to God's power. He clearly remembers his father as rigid and difficult, but is impressed by his force and majesty.

Given the title of the film, it is no surprise that trees appear frequently throughout the film, however in the world of the grown Jack, many of these trees appear in relation to buildings. Grown Jack is an architect, a man in charge of building structures (the same way that God is in charge of building life). Several times Malick shows the lobby of his office building, which has a big tree growing in it. This shows that people try to control Nature (that is, try to control violent forces), but don’t really understand it. It is such a strange juxtaposition as it seems very healthy and green, but is totally surrounded by constructed materials.

Clearly humans can never totally know and understand Grace, but we can try to control things on Earth, like trees and land. In effect we become the heartless controller of Nature, an unforgiving, graceless disciplinarian, unaware of our cruelty. We are the dinosaur stepping on weaker one's head, the father who tells his son to stop talking at the dinner table. Our narcissistic search for Grace has turned us into truculent beasts.

Stars: 4 of 4