Film is a language, we often forget, with its own grammar and vocabulary. To watch The Tree of Life, the new film by Terrence Malick, is to visit a strange and marvelous country. It is almost lost to us, shouted down by a market that demands the familiar and reassuring.
How thrilling it is, after a steady diet of blockbusters that require you only to park your ass in a seat, to see a movie that calls for the use of your mind. Your preconceived notions will not help you here. We understand the words coming out of the actors’ mouths, but it is not enough.
Shot by Emmanuel Lubezki (Children of Men), each frame of The Tree of Life is beautiful enough to be... framed. The images go by almost in a rush — you wish the camera would linger on a curtain or a leaky faucet or sea foam, but it moves along with brisk unconcern. In any event these scenes, events, life itself, is merely a blip in eternity.
Because it is eternity that concerns Malick in his fifth feature film in four decades. (Reports have it that he began working on The Tree of Life in the 20 years between his first movie Badlands and his second, Days of Heaven.) Filmmakers are always talking about their “personal” projects; independent cinema is said to be founded on “personal” vision. Tree of Life is rooted in the personal — the experiences of a boy growing up in suburban America with his brothers in the 1950s — but it presents them as universal. The characters are hardly ever called by name because it doesn’t matter. They could be Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel; every family is alike. Love, hate, the apocalyptic grief over a dead brother that begins this movie, are common to all. (Admittedly this caused some confusion: initially I thought Sean Penn’s character was the second son; my friend thought he was the youngest.)
There are emotions, sensations, memories shared by the entire human race regardless of ethnicity, culture, class. The nurturing mother, the stern father, childhood games and pranks, disappointment, early encounters with death, Freudian longings. We like to think that we are unique; we insist upon it to the extent of declaring war upon each other. But how different are we, really? Our ancestors crawled out of the same primordial slime.
The mother (Jessica Chastain) compares the way of nature and the way of grace. Nature seeks to impose its will, she says, grace accepts insults and loves everybody. These two ways are expressed by the loving and beloved mother, and by the father (Brad Pitt), an autocratic man feared by his sons. “You will not call me Dad, you will call me Father,” he admonishes his firstborn (Hunter McCracken in his film debut acts rings around the fine cast; when Sean Penn appears as his grownup version we are disappointed).
“Could you be quiet unless you have something important to say,” the father says at the dinner table. He is not an evil man, merely the product of his time; likely he had fought in the war. The father had been an aspiring concert pianist — he plays the organ in church and waxes about Toscanini while grilling hotdogs in the yard. This is a man who has traded his music for a wife, kids, and a job. He has filed 27 patents, he tells his kids; his goal is to become rich.
Much of the film takes place in the 1950s, a more innocent and optimistic time. America had emerged from the war a superpower; everyone bought into the American Dream. There is a scene in which a truck sprays the pesticide DDT all over the neighborhood — this was before the ill effects of DDT became known—and as the children bathe in clouds of spray we see the words on the truck: City of Waco, Texas.
Terrence Malick was born in Waco, the city where the Branch Davidian cult led by David Koresh settled down to wait for the apocalypse. An apocalypse did come, though not the one they’d expected: the 1993 assault by the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the FBI and the Texas National Guard, in response to reports that the cult was stockpiling illegal weapons.
Throughout The Tree of Life the characters address questions to God. “Why?” “What are we to you?” The answer to this is a sequence that covers the Big Bang, the expanding universe, the formation of nebulae, the cooling of the earth, the rise of single-celled organisms, dinosaurs, sharks, the birth of an infant. What does this have to do with Brad Pitt? Everything. We humans consider ourselves the center of the universe, we are so engrossed in the mundane details of our lives that we miss out on what is truly amazing: the fact that we exist at all, when we could just as easily not be.
“Where were you?” “You let a child die — was he bad?” The answer is the vast, unknowable, majestic indifference of the cosmos. The answer is silence.
Your issues are less than trivial in the face of this grandeur. There is only one thing you can do.
Live.