Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line, The New World, and The Tree of Life – with only 5 films directed in the last 40 years Peter Biskind was on the money when he called Terrence Malick, “the runaway genius.” Elusive, eccentric, and deeply secretive Malick shuns interviews and refuses studios the use of his image rights to help sell his own films. With The Tree of Life Malick’s audience could finally work out what makes this maverick director tick.
The Tree of Life deals with the lofty themes of life, death and existence, family, god, love and loss: exactly the kind of weighty material you’d expect a 67 year old intellectual to sink his teeth into. Malick’s film delves into his 50s childhood memories for the answers to his philosophical questions, a visual stream of consciousness that is both beautiful and relentless.
These are not the heavy-handed musings of a crotchety old man but rather the light, lucid dreams of a “silver-surfer” running his hands over his brand new I-Pad 2, selecting his stand out memories in much the same way as he would pick out his favourite album tracks or newly scanned photographs of his past. Sean Penn’s character Jack is our loose connection to Malick’s fragmented narrative as he ponders his life after speaking to his father on the phone.
We learn that many years earlier Penn’s brother is killed aged 19. The telegram suggests a military death, maybe in Vietnam but we never really know and the cause isn’t what concerns Malick but rather the effect it has on their father Mr O’Brien-a buzz cut Brad Pitt. On the surface Mr O’Brien is a classic 50s father, war-veteran, god fearing, authoritarian, pillar of the community, capable, stunted emotionally.
The beauty of Pitt’s strong-jawed performance is the nuanced vulnerability. Every manly rub of his sons’ hair, every punch he teaches them to throw, and every grace said at the dinner table is tinged with a masculine love that can never be allowed to boil over into sentimentality. Mr O’Brien is a mythical figure to his young sons, passing in and out of their lives like a touring god, “Dad-where was he born?” muses the young Jack as his father’s armour of invincibility gradually erodes as the years unfold.
Mrs O’Brien in contrast is an ethereal beauty floating across 50s suburbia. She glistens in the sunlight her flame red hair suggests Badlands and the 14-year-old Holly grown up and free from Kit but not her childlike sensibilities. Her sons run rampant under her charge, released from the bonds of their father to explore their habitat but every run, jump and football thrown draws them closer to the inevitable tragedy, the inevitable platitudes, “Life goes on, people pass along. Nothing stays the same. You still have the other 2.”
Malick’s depiction of these childhood memories is mesmerising. His use of steadicam is a fluid ballet half circling his subjects before jump cutting to another episode. The first 50 minutes are really an extended montage of an earthly paradise disturbed but not shattered by that telegram. Voices ghost in and out of the screen accompanied by Mahler, Brahms and Bach.
And then the dinosaurs. Malick plays God (or is that Kubrick?) by vaulting back to the dawn of creation. Nebula rise, fire and water clash like Titans, jellyfish pulse, the first tree soars from the first grass, a Plesiosaur regards a fatal wound and a stricken Parasaurolophus is spared immediate death by a merciful Troodon. By framing mankind against such gargantuan wonder mankind is also rendered wondrous. Millions of years from now will humans be depicted with the same awe as dinosaurs after our extinction? And who will be watching?
How Malick balances his grand vision is nothing short of miraculous itself. In Michel Chion’s elegant deconstruction of The Thin Red Line he points out that in that film the mind is referred to as the “moving box.” His conclusion of Malick thus: “Cinema is the “moving box” that can contain people and objects, things that exist and have nothing in common, starting with words and sensations. In the hands of Terrence Malick, this box becomes magic. The beauty of things, woven together with the beauty of voices and words, becomes once more alive and human.”
In The Tree of Life this humanity is Malick’s own. In Mr O’Brien we sense his regret in not being more prolific as a director, “I got side-tracked.” In the adult Jack, surrounded by the man made beauty of skyscrapers and bridges we believe he helped create we glimpse the slightest of smiles and we sense his pride as an artist. Man made beauty it may be but beauty it is nonetheless.
i have gone to see Tree of Life almost every
evening since it came out. A member of my
family died recently, and the film gives me
comfort.