If you read my post about Malick's first film Badlands, you'll recall that I mentioned he has a deep adoration for nature. During the first 45 minutes of The Tree of Life, he takes us on a visual adventure of epic magnitude. The movie opens with a slow-moving digital image of what looks to me like a mix between a far-away galaxy and a 3-D ultrasound. It is beautiful and mysterious. As I've mentioned before, Malick uses close-up shots to put us right down inside what is occurring at that very instant. During the first part of this movie, he shows us visuals of the cosmos one minute and microscopic life forms the next; dinosaurs then jellyfish; volcanoes then waves; trees then desert. It reminded me of the Planet Earth series. The narrative doesn't begin until 45 minutes in and I would venture to say that many film-goers will become very impatient with the visual barrage. At one point, I was shaking my head in disbelief, waiting for something to happen - waiting for the story to actually get going. Get on with it!
During these sequences, Malick peppers in his famous soft-spoken (more like whispered) voice-overs. Much of the dialogue questions God's reasons for doing what he does. Upon being told that her son is in God's hands now, the mother questions, "He was in God's hands the whole time, wasn't he?" Malick raises the age-old question here about why God allows bad things happen to good people. Jack witnessed a good friend drown in a pool at a young age and asks his father whether this boy died because he was "bad." Although Mr. O'Brien (played by Pitt) demands that every family meal begin with a prayer, he contradicts himself by telling his boys that they have control over their own destiny and they "must not be too good" if they want to succeed in this cutthroat world. This dichotomy is confusing to the three boys, and is one of the causes of Jack developing a large amount of hostility and resentment toward his father.
Jack's journey throughout the film is in his attempt to find his way back to just being a kid, without all of the anger towards his difficult father. His ire brews and develops as he finds himself desperate to figure out how to "get back to where they were" before he saw that life is painful and unfair. Jack's father, a former military man turned engineer/inventor who currently holds over 25 patents for his creations, is very hard on the boys, demanding that they refer to him as father rather than dad. There is verbal and physical abuse, especially when the kids interrupt or question him. Although Malick is careful to show Mr. O'Brien being loving at times, the vast majority of the interactions between father and sons is hurtful and punitive. The mother, on the other hand, is loved by the boys. She is a fun-loving, warm woman who spends a lot of time playing and running around with the children, especially when "father" is away on business. Jack wants his father dead and in one scene even asks God to kill him. "Father, mother, always you wrestle inside me. Always you will." Jack finds it impossible to talk to his father openly about any subject, so he often speaks to him as if he were praying to him.
Malick captures brotherhood very well. The fun times that the three boys spend playing outside remind me of my childhood growing up with four brothers and a sister. Adult Jack says that his younger brother died when he was 19. A letter that his mother received from a courier would certainly lead one to believe that he was killed in active duty overseas. It seems to me that rather than looking to God for spiritual guidance through this tough time of loss, the family begins to speak directly to the dead son. Malick is telling us that the family is losing faith in God, but more importantly he is raising some thought-provoking questions about what causes people to lose their faith. Whatever it is that you believe, most people would hopefully agree that these questions are worth exploring. Before the young man's death, God seemed to be the answer to everything, but now nature and reason seem to explain the world. Jack struggles in adulthood with his unanswered questions about why his innocent brother had to die. He seems to continue to reach out to his parents for support. He fails to truly believe in any higher power, but rather does his soul-searching while speaking to his brother.
We feel sorry for Jack as an adult because he was raised to believe that it was virtuous to be good, but he wonders why he should be good when God isn't even good. Jack's stormy relationship with his father only caused him to become closer to his brothers, and when his younger brother died, it left Jack more lost than ever before. As an adult, Jack pleads to the sky, "Brother, keep us. Guide us to the end of time." There are several iconic shots of Jack wandering through an open landscape, crossing through open doors, searching for himself in a confusing world.
The final shot, which appeared three or four times throughout the film, is of the galaxy/ultrasound image slowly changing and evolving against a black background that I mentioned at the start of this post.
This is a difficult film to digest and I am fairly certain that I did not do a very good job at explaining it. I desperately want to see this movie again, probably more so than I've ever wanted to see a movie a second time before in my life (even though it was well over two hours long). As with the other Malick films I have seen, this one explores very deep existential and spiritual themes, but he seems to be digging down into these depths further and further each time he makes a film. I enjoyed it immensely.
I haven't been able to clearly draw the link between the movie's central theme and the opening quote from Job: (Job 38: 4,7) God asks Job "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth ... when the morning stars sang together?"
ReplyDeleteHere are the thoughts of Rabbi David Wolpe from the Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rabbi-david-wolpe/tree-of-life_b_868717.html