terrence malick - the tree of life
My instant response to Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life was 'pious, obvious and overlong'.
This coming from someone who likes Malick's previous films and wondered after reading mixed reviews whether The Tree of Life might be a contemporary American analogue of Tarkovsky. It isn't.
Occasionally good things surface and I'll come to them - but let's deal with the problems first. The film opens with a quote from Job - a book that shows the Old Testament God at his worst: 'Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation...while the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?'
This could be read as a claim for divine precedence by seniority. I was here first and made you therefore you must do what I say. This would identify the deity with the father in the film.
But in fact Malick seems to have a much more traditional reading of Job in mind: 'Why do the righteous suffer?'. The answer in Job appears to be that God gets into a willy-waving contest with the devil. The answer in Malick appears to be that we are limited creatures in a complex universe and that we are driven by contradictory impulses. There is perhaps also an implication that we have a degree of freewill through which we can prove our character.
On the face of it this should make for an interesting and complex film. Unfortunately that promise isn't realised. The first image of the film is a section from Thomas Wilfred's Opus 161 which recurs through the film.
I'm not familiar with Wilfred's work but while it's visually compelling here I can see the potential for it to be pretty and empty.
Malick pins Wilfred's piece to a narrow interpretation by adding devotional music and a whispered voiceover asking obvious existential questions. Both music and voiceover start as gratingly literal devices that only become more grating as the film proceeds.
Worse to my mind are the multiple binaries that rigorously prevent real complexity ever entering the film. This starts with the explicitly stated division between 'grace' represented by the mother in the film, and 'nature' represented by the father.
I'm still hazy about what Malick means by either 'grace' or 'nature'. 'Grace' appears reasonably close to the Christian concept of grace, an unearned divine love that each much choose or reject for themselves. This would seem to make 'nature' something like wilfulness, human will, freewill, a rejection of God.
Now I'm an atheist but my father was a vicar who continually studied and was happy to discuss theology. But for me - and I suspect most people who describe themselves as practicing Christians - Malick's definitions remain vague. I actually had to search online to refresh myself on the concept of grace to begin to guess what he might be banging on about.
The mother - representing 'grace' - is played by Jessica Chastain. She copes well in an almost entirely mute and passive role that simply requires her to be beautiful and float around with a benign half-smile. While this might well be true to the experience of many children by the time we reach adulthood we develop more nuanced ideas of our parents.
It also indicates another binary here - the very conventional definitions of masculinity and femininity that the film trades in.
There are very few women and girls, and arguably none are developed into characters. Perhaps the closest is the Grandmother played by Fiona Shaw who appears maybe twice. The fact she comes closest to having a defined character of all the women in the film probably has more to do with Shaw's abilities as an actor than anything in the writing.
Generally the women and girls are pretty, passive, mute, enigmatic, in love with nature - both that wilful contrast to grace as embodied by men, and the natural world. For instance the wife or partner of Sean Penn - the eldest son of the family seen as a middle-aged man - brings a leafy green tree branch into the otherwise sterile and clean-lined kitchen. It's this kind of scene I have in mind when I call the film obvious.
Men and boys on the other hand are active, violent, conflicted, and not coincidentally have the majority of what dialogue there is. This means that however dreamy the women might seem to be it's actually the men who are represented as thinking beings. It's men who have built the world in which we live.
This is either an overly schematic representation of 'grace' versus 'nature' or a simple inability to create halfway convincing female characters. Or perhaps both.
Another binary is the contrast between the natural world and the human-made environment. That this ignores the extent of human interference in what we think of as natural is one of the more obvious objections. In fact we see father played by Brad Pitt planting a tree with the help of his eldest son.
The natural world is green and lush, or is represented by rivers, oceans, waterfalls. The human-made environment is represented by tall glass buildings, by industrial structures of steel, and by hard-edged contemporary interiors. The two meet on the lawn of the house where the family live, the grass patchy with great areas of earth where it won't grow.
Once again this is true to lived experience but is also another example of thumpingly obvious mise-en-scene that occur throughout the film.
Moving on from these binaries the film is also given to empty visual flourishes. One of the earliest and most jarring is the appearance of behaviourally rather anthropomorphic CGI dinosaurs. They seemed to be there to show that death and conflict are as much a part of life as wonder and pleasure. And in one case to prefigure in a literal way the relationship that Sean Penn's character as a child has with his father, and with his brothers.
Then there is a scene in which the mother is seen floating under the tree in the garden. This is neither as beautiful nor mysterious as the similar scene in Andrei Tarkovsky's Mirror.
Worst of all is the gathering of people from the Sean Penn character's past on a beach.
There are precedents for this. At the begining of the film the movements of the camera - whether swooping, looking up, or moving in some other way are intoxicating. The film feels alive. But gradually you become aware that every imperfection has been excised from the frame. The images become more static - or at least feel more static.
Everything is beautifully framed, beautifully lit, perfectly in focus, and devoid of any kind of life. They're like the technically perfect photos you might expect to find in offices and other personality-free public or semi-public environments where the aim is to brighten the space with 'artworks' that couldn't possibly offend anyone. Like advertising imagery.
The gathering on the beach could easily be an advert for bland clothing, skin cream, or the unifying and liberating power of free minutes on your mobile. Or it could be a record sleeve for Muse or Pink Floyd or any other band whose sense of self-importance far outweighs their achievements. It's interminable and appears to represent if not redemption then sean Penn's character's acceptance of grace, forgiveness of himself and his father, and reconciliation with the past.
I actually spent the last 20-40 minutes cringing and desperately hoping for the film to end.
Which perhaps indicates where some of my frustration comes with the film comes. All of its themes have been dealt with more compellingly and economically by other filmmakers using much less vapid imagery.
The rest of my frustration comes because there are indications of a better film that could have been made.
Thomas Wilfred's Opus 161 that appears throughout is visually ambiguous and beautiful. There are scenes of urban traffic that are more alive and impressionistic than anything in the equally portentous and irritating Koyaanisqatsi. The camera movements early on are beautiful. The optical effects portraying the birth of the universe and beginnings of life are brilliant and sometimes quite moving, especially where there are familiar images of distant parts of the galaxy.
The performances of the boys as Sean Penn's younger self and his brothers are brilliant and disruptive. They demonstrate the contradictions and complexity of human motivations and behaviour better than anything else in the film. Not just in their activity and violence, but in the moments when they are simultaneously on the brink of adulthood or adolesence and vulnerable and childlike.
There is a scene where the boys and their mother go to a place where she helps the disadvantaged which perfectly summarises both the strengths and weaknesses of the film. The weaknesses are in the question one of the boys asks after seeing all the physically and mentally impaired men: 'Could it happen to anyone?' The strengths are on the way there where the boys are obviously frightened of the physically impaired but also imitate the walks of a few men and laugh at them. The boys are compassionate and afraid and mocking. But none of it needs to be spelled out.
For a more interesting exploration of many of these themes I think I'll go back to Tarkovsky's Mirror and Stalker to begin with.
Sadly though The Tree of Life is a real missed opportunity. Like I said, pious, obvious and overlong - and with very little to keep you coming back or justify the evident ambition it has.
This coming from someone who likes Malick's previous films and wondered after reading mixed reviews whether The Tree of Life might be a contemporary American analogue of Tarkovsky. It isn't.
Occasionally good things surface and I'll come to them - but let's deal with the problems first. The film opens with a quote from Job - a book that shows the Old Testament God at his worst: 'Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation...while the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?'
This could be read as a claim for divine precedence by seniority. I was here first and made you therefore you must do what I say. This would identify the deity with the father in the film.
But in fact Malick seems to have a much more traditional reading of Job in mind: 'Why do the righteous suffer?'. The answer in Job appears to be that God gets into a willy-waving contest with the devil. The answer in Malick appears to be that we are limited creatures in a complex universe and that we are driven by contradictory impulses. There is perhaps also an implication that we have a degree of freewill through which we can prove our character.
On the face of it this should make for an interesting and complex film. Unfortunately that promise isn't realised. The first image of the film is a section from Thomas Wilfred's Opus 161 which recurs through the film.
I'm not familiar with Wilfred's work but while it's visually compelling here I can see the potential for it to be pretty and empty.
Malick pins Wilfred's piece to a narrow interpretation by adding devotional music and a whispered voiceover asking obvious existential questions. Both music and voiceover start as gratingly literal devices that only become more grating as the film proceeds.
Worse to my mind are the multiple binaries that rigorously prevent real complexity ever entering the film. This starts with the explicitly stated division between 'grace' represented by the mother in the film, and 'nature' represented by the father.
I'm still hazy about what Malick means by either 'grace' or 'nature'. 'Grace' appears reasonably close to the Christian concept of grace, an unearned divine love that each much choose or reject for themselves. This would seem to make 'nature' something like wilfulness, human will, freewill, a rejection of God.
Now I'm an atheist but my father was a vicar who continually studied and was happy to discuss theology. But for me - and I suspect most people who describe themselves as practicing Christians - Malick's definitions remain vague. I actually had to search online to refresh myself on the concept of grace to begin to guess what he might be banging on about.
The mother - representing 'grace' - is played by Jessica Chastain. She copes well in an almost entirely mute and passive role that simply requires her to be beautiful and float around with a benign half-smile. While this might well be true to the experience of many children by the time we reach adulthood we develop more nuanced ideas of our parents.
It also indicates another binary here - the very conventional definitions of masculinity and femininity that the film trades in.
There are very few women and girls, and arguably none are developed into characters. Perhaps the closest is the Grandmother played by Fiona Shaw who appears maybe twice. The fact she comes closest to having a defined character of all the women in the film probably has more to do with Shaw's abilities as an actor than anything in the writing.
Generally the women and girls are pretty, passive, mute, enigmatic, in love with nature - both that wilful contrast to grace as embodied by men, and the natural world. For instance the wife or partner of Sean Penn - the eldest son of the family seen as a middle-aged man - brings a leafy green tree branch into the otherwise sterile and clean-lined kitchen. It's this kind of scene I have in mind when I call the film obvious.
Men and boys on the other hand are active, violent, conflicted, and not coincidentally have the majority of what dialogue there is. This means that however dreamy the women might seem to be it's actually the men who are represented as thinking beings. It's men who have built the world in which we live.
This is either an overly schematic representation of 'grace' versus 'nature' or a simple inability to create halfway convincing female characters. Or perhaps both.
Another binary is the contrast between the natural world and the human-made environment. That this ignores the extent of human interference in what we think of as natural is one of the more obvious objections. In fact we see father played by Brad Pitt planting a tree with the help of his eldest son.
The natural world is green and lush, or is represented by rivers, oceans, waterfalls. The human-made environment is represented by tall glass buildings, by industrial structures of steel, and by hard-edged contemporary interiors. The two meet on the lawn of the house where the family live, the grass patchy with great areas of earth where it won't grow.
Once again this is true to lived experience but is also another example of thumpingly obvious mise-en-scene that occur throughout the film.
Moving on from these binaries the film is also given to empty visual flourishes. One of the earliest and most jarring is the appearance of behaviourally rather anthropomorphic CGI dinosaurs. They seemed to be there to show that death and conflict are as much a part of life as wonder and pleasure. And in one case to prefigure in a literal way the relationship that Sean Penn's character as a child has with his father, and with his brothers.
Then there is a scene in which the mother is seen floating under the tree in the garden. This is neither as beautiful nor mysterious as the similar scene in Andrei Tarkovsky's Mirror.
Worst of all is the gathering of people from the Sean Penn character's past on a beach.
There are precedents for this. At the begining of the film the movements of the camera - whether swooping, looking up, or moving in some other way are intoxicating. The film feels alive. But gradually you become aware that every imperfection has been excised from the frame. The images become more static - or at least feel more static.
Everything is beautifully framed, beautifully lit, perfectly in focus, and devoid of any kind of life. They're like the technically perfect photos you might expect to find in offices and other personality-free public or semi-public environments where the aim is to brighten the space with 'artworks' that couldn't possibly offend anyone. Like advertising imagery.
The gathering on the beach could easily be an advert for bland clothing, skin cream, or the unifying and liberating power of free minutes on your mobile. Or it could be a record sleeve for Muse or Pink Floyd or any other band whose sense of self-importance far outweighs their achievements. It's interminable and appears to represent if not redemption then sean Penn's character's acceptance of grace, forgiveness of himself and his father, and reconciliation with the past.
I actually spent the last 20-40 minutes cringing and desperately hoping for the film to end.
Which perhaps indicates where some of my frustration comes with the film comes. All of its themes have been dealt with more compellingly and economically by other filmmakers using much less vapid imagery.
The rest of my frustration comes because there are indications of a better film that could have been made.
Thomas Wilfred's Opus 161 that appears throughout is visually ambiguous and beautiful. There are scenes of urban traffic that are more alive and impressionistic than anything in the equally portentous and irritating Koyaanisqatsi. The camera movements early on are beautiful. The optical effects portraying the birth of the universe and beginnings of life are brilliant and sometimes quite moving, especially where there are familiar images of distant parts of the galaxy.
The performances of the boys as Sean Penn's younger self and his brothers are brilliant and disruptive. They demonstrate the contradictions and complexity of human motivations and behaviour better than anything else in the film. Not just in their activity and violence, but in the moments when they are simultaneously on the brink of adulthood or adolesence and vulnerable and childlike.
There is a scene where the boys and their mother go to a place where she helps the disadvantaged which perfectly summarises both the strengths and weaknesses of the film. The weaknesses are in the question one of the boys asks after seeing all the physically and mentally impaired men: 'Could it happen to anyone?' The strengths are on the way there where the boys are obviously frightened of the physically impaired but also imitate the walks of a few men and laugh at them. The boys are compassionate and afraid and mocking. But none of it needs to be spelled out.
For a more interesting exploration of many of these themes I think I'll go back to Tarkovsky's Mirror and Stalker to begin with.
Sadly though The Tree of Life is a real missed opportunity. Like I said, pious, obvious and overlong - and with very little to keep you coming back or justify the evident ambition it has.
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