942 The Tree of Life

[matrixschmatrix]

The loss of his brother doesn't haunt him so much because he can't get over the death- and if I recall, we never actually see his reaction immediate reaction to it- as because his brother was the person who could bring him back from 'going wrong', and help him to reconnect to the side of himself and of life that he (and the movie) found more admirable, the one his mother represented. His relationship with his father wasn't haunting him because he had a bad childhood- I think it would be difficult to find someone with a more lovely childhood, and the movie makes the point that Pitt is not at all a bad man more than once- it haunts him because he feels that he shares his father's faults, and finds those faults largely unforgivable because they're his faults as well.

Thus, he's alienated as an adult because he's continued to be like his father, with no way to reconnect to the other side of himself- and what we see of him, as a successful seeming businessman in a world whose spareness recalls Kubrick, fits that. The vision on the beach, whatever it is, allows Penn to find grace again, to find his mother and lost brother, and thus to forgive his father.

[MoonlitKnight]

A scene where the living commune with the dead "as we remember them".

That's not how I remember them!

Get over it already.

[jwd5275]

Did you even read beyond the sentence you quoted? The one where I said it doesn't even matter if it's actually Heaven as afterlife or just some variant of some sort of spiritual realm?

I think it's fallacious to imply this is Penn's memory, since there are other "lost souls" meandering that Penn doesn't seem to recognize. Still, it really doesn't matter what this exact space is.

What matters, to me, is that it's played out in an entirely banal manner, contrary to the sense of wonder that I got from the rest of the film. The second Penn walks through that doorway on the beach, I could've given you a play-by-play of the next twenty minutes.

There is no shift to another spiritual realm. That is my whole point. Just because there is a doorway passed through, this does not mean that he has passed to some new realm. It is a visual representation of the character making a choice. Realigning his life from life by 'nature' which is in a desert, to a life orientated towards 'grace' represented by the appearance of water (used in a similar way to Tarkovsky).

How are we to know who the character has interacted with through out his life? How can one assume he does not recognize all the people on the beach from his long life just because we don't recognize them. There are many characters on the beach from his childhood that he does not interact with (I specifically remember the boy with the burnt head). And yes, he does expect us to to empathize with Sean Penn's character and has shown us much of his childhood to accomplish that, however that does not mean that we know his whole life and everything that may have happened to cause him to be 'mopey'. There is a strong element of apophaticism at work here.

Sure call it too esotaric, philosophical or religious (even too western or christian) and I will give you that as matter of taste. I can understand how this does not work for a great many people for various reasons, but to criticize it as banal or new age is not a valid criticism to me.

[knives]

Actually even on those three accounts one could argue that at best it's only a matter of taste because at least by themselves there's nothing inherently wrong with those things thus similarly negating them as valid criticisms. Maybe talking about how it mismanages it's philosophy would be a good start point for a valid criticism though I'm not certain if that's where the problems lie.

Rather, in agreement with Finch, I think it's portrayal of it's characters' mentalities especially in the climax is a tad overly sentimental. The esoteric design of the film prevents this aspect from being as deadly as in a Spielberg film, but I think the overall mentality is along the lines of some of The Beard's more notable incidents. What and how the beach ultimately portrays for me at least makes this conversation with god a little too steeped in a feeling of unbridled nostalgia. Luckily he doesn't do a Zemeckis and paint the past as a golden time, but the scene suggests loving the past is important to loving the present and future and I have a hard time abiding by that. While the past in a vague sense is important the ending takes away some of that universal personality forcing it into unearned sentimentality.

That, again, isn't to say that this is a devastating blow to the film. It's still for me a great movie, but it doesn't match up to Mirror nor Neo Genesis when it comes to their similar climaxes.

[hollyharry]

The beach stuff is an epiphany. That's why it comes to him after exiting the elevator (there is an argument to be made that the majority of the film takes place while Penn is riding down). I actually find Penn's emotional arc rather simple (he finds the grace and beauty around him, unlike his father, who was bitter at what he didn't have). Not simplistic, mind you, but simple enough.

[Grand Illusion]

The vision on the beach, whatever it is, allows Penn to find grace again, to find his mother and lost brother, and thus to forgive his father.

I readily accept your explanation of what Penn's crisis is about. After all, he does say that he's become more like his father.

But I don't accept that Penn has always been like this, so to get some idea of the person I am looking at, I would want to know some impetus (other than putting "Sean Penn" on the poster) of why we're seeing him now and in this current state. It's not enough to say that this is the same kid as 40 years ago because it's not. People grow and change.

And worse, Penn's salvation isn't a process by which normal humans, real people, find forgiveness or reconciliation. It doesn't just magically hit you upside the head one day. Here's Penn's journey:

Penn mopes around -> Psychotic delusion -> Penn's acceptance

I would argue that Malick is telling a somewhat conventional narrative. Jack's problem is his upbringing and crisis between nature/grace. How will he overcome his natural urges that come from his father to come closer to grace? By deus ex machina, of course.

Whether you want to say that Malick is telling a "normal" story or not, the ending plays like a deus ex machina, which is lazy storytelling and lazy characterization.

There is no shift to another spiritual realm. That is my whole point. Just because there is a doorway passed through, this does not mean that he has passed to some new realm. It is a visual representation of the character making a choice.

You cannot definitely say that it's not a spiritual realm. The beach is certainly not reality, and many of these signifiers, such as a gate to heaven, white light, lost souls, dead people appearing, otherwise sparse but "pure" environment, etc. are all used in other films to signify Heaven or spiritual realms.

But let's say that Malick is using all those codes, embued with meaning as they are, to just show a visual representation of Penn's psyche. Even if it's not a spiritual realm, it's still hackneyed. It's reusing those same signifiers that we've seen before to show a transformation of the Penn character that is wholly unearned. It just happens to him. And no reason is given as to why this revelation happens to him here and now. It just does. It's lazy, and I'm not going to forgive it because the story is told in a slightly unconventional manner.

[matrixschmatrix]

I readily accept your explanation of what Penn's crisis is about. After all, he does say that he's become more like his father.

But I don't accept that Penn has always been like this, so to get some idea of the person I am looking at, I would want to know some impetus (other than putting "Sean Penn" on the poster) of why we're seeing him now and in this current state. It's not enough to say that this is the same kid as 40 years ago because it's not. People grow and change.

And worse, Penn's salvation isn't a process by which normal humans, real people, find forgiveness or reconciliation. It doesn't just magically hit you upside the head one day. Here's Penn's journey:

Penn mopes around -> Psychotic delusion -> Penn's acceptance

I would argue that Malick is telling a somewhat conventional narrative. Jack's problem is his upbringing and crisis between nature/grace. How will he overcome his natural urges that come from his father to come closer to grace? By deus ex machina, of course.

Whether you want to say that Malick is telling a "normal" story or not, the ending plays like a deus ex machina, which is lazy storytelling and lazy characterization.

I strongly disagree with that- I think the 'earned' part of the ending, the thing that establishes the parameters of it and makes it something that emerges from what we've seen and not an external imposition, is the amount of material we've seen about his family and his childhood, and about the nature of God or the universe or Grace or whatever you want to see it as being. Whether it's the afterlife or a psychological process or a freefloating image not connected to any particular point in the narrative, it's a depiction of a supernatural/transcendental version of something we've already seen

Spoiler

At the end of the series of scenes where Jack has been doing or imagining doing nasty things, stealing the nightdress and launching the toad and contemplating killing his dad, there's the scene in which he "finds his way back" with the aid of his brother, which leads to the scene where Jack tells his father that they're alike.

I suppose you could argue that whatever the actual mechanism that allows Jack and his brother (and younger self etc.) to reunite is not established, but I don't think that makes it a deus ex machina- it's the fulfillment of the sense of the transcendental that the creation and destruction scenes had brought, even if not concretely established.

[MyNameCriterionForum]

...but seriously, the creation vision stuff (courtesy of John Dykstra...

Where do you get this Dykstra business? What did he have to do with the film?

[dad1153]

^^^ My bad, mistook him with Douglas Trumbull (another SFX ace wizard). Fixed.

[eerik]

Excuse me for not reading every post in this thread, but what was the reason for cancelling the wide(r) release? Limited release seemed to be quite successful. Largest number of theatres was 237 last weekend and now it is decreasing.

[domino harvey]

The limited release was not successful, and therein lies the answer

[Jeff]

The fact that it more or less tanked certainly bodes well for Criterion's chances of picking it up. I'm sure that Malick would push for such a thing, and Fox needs for it to get the attention and cachet that Criterion provides.

[matrixschmatrix]

It's done really good business overseas, so hopefully it won't make it difficult for Malick to make more movies.

[dad1153]

Has Fox ever done a co-publishing deal with Criterion for a debut home video release before? Paramount did it ("Benjamin Button") and Disney also did it (for Wes Anderson's Touchstone Pictures' "Royal Tenenbaums" and "Life Aquatic") but I'd think Fox would rather keep their Fox Searchlight brand prominent by keeping the home video exclusivity of "Tree of Life," at least for the initial (probably bare-bones) release.

[ianungstad]

I don't think it's fair to say the movie tanked. It's final gross will be in the same ballpark as films like Win Win, Jane Eyre, The Conspirator. For an independent art film it's done healthy business, even if it's not a commercial cross-over. The budget was relatively low and they probably covered 1/2 to 2/3 just from distribution sales. I don't see how the film won't wind up in the black.

[Brian C]

I don't think it's fair to say the movie tanked. It's final gross will be in the same ballpark as films like Win Win, Jane Eyre, The Conspirator. For an independent art film it's done healthy business, even if it's not a commercial cross-over. The budget was relatively low and they probably covered 1/2 to 2/3 just from distribution sales. I don't see how the film won't wind up in the black.

...but it still hasn't done the kind of business that would demand a larger rollout, which was the actual issue under discussion.

[Jeff]

It is often said that a film actually needs to gross twice it's production budget in order to break even.

The production budget was $32 million, and P&A is usually figured at about 50% of budget, or another $16 million. That means that it cost roughly $48 million to produce the film, strike the prints, and market it.

So far, it has made a little over $10 million in the U.S. and a little over $23 million in other markets. It's still roughly $15 million away from making back what was likely spent on it, and reporting a profit. That's if you're being generous and not saying that it actually needs to hit $64 million to break even. That larger number comes about because after a certain point in release, theaters start getting a bigger percentage of the box office take.

Then, if and when that profit eventually comes, it gets split between River Road, Plan B, Fox, and foreign distributors all of who are going to be scrambling to recoup their investment. I also wouldn't be surprised if Pitt and Penn didn't agree to take some of their compensation in gross points, which would further diminish any potential profit for the producers. I really can't envision a scenario where all the investing parties feel like they've made a profitable investment.

When and if it does make money, it's going to be on video. I'm just suggesting that a Criterion release seems more likely to generate sales for a long period of time than a Fox release would. Studio releases rely on the first couple of weeks of video release, when their products are sitting on endcaps and "new release" sections. After that, sales fizzle. Criterion releases don't sell as much initially, but are sought after long after their release. If Criterion produced and Fox distributed, they could benefit from the Wacky C Effect and still get it into Walmart, Costco, et. al. They could catch all of the people who will see it on the shelves and say, "Ooh look. It's got Brad Pitt and Sean Penn!" and all the people who are interested in Malick and Criterion.

[Alan Smithee]

It didn't do bad considering the amount of screens it was on but I think the limited release was as much to gauge word of mouth and critical reaction as it was to gauge box office. Unfortunately it was kindof divisive. So I imagine the studio didn't want to sink more money into it unless they could say "See the movie everyone is talking about!"

But yes multiple editions, directors cuts, voyage of time, all culminating in a Criterion, could turn it profitable.

[mfunk9786]

"See the movie everyone wants to be refunded for!"

[zedz]

I wish I could have liked this more than I did. There are plenty of wonderful sequences, and I understand and sort of admire what Malick’s doing, but I found it thin at the conceptual level and somewhat repetitious (though for understandable reasons) formally. I think my main problem with the film was that the film’s big idea was clear to me after ten minutes, but then the film runs for another two hours, in which it merely illustrates that idea at great length (and in some beautiful and unexpected ways) without developing it. And, even though I admired how everything in the film contributed to or derived from that idea, it wasn’t an idea I found all that interesting in the first place.

Spoiler

The Idea is clear as soon as you understand who the real main character of the movie is – God – and realise that he appears in every single frame, because in this film the character of God is played by Light. So whenever the other characters, in voiceover, ask those big questions about his existence or purpose (and bear in mind that sometimes they’re asking those questions even when they think they’re asking about something else), He is right there, flaring into the lens, reassuring them that everything has His Inscrutable Reasons, If Only They Had Eyes To See. Ultimately, Sean Penn realises this and is consoled, and the film, and the world, ends

As I said, after you get the point, all the film can do with it is hammer it in relentlessly with every ensuing shot – which, I admit, is sort of intrinsic to the nature of the point. And that really applies to a lot of the film’s ‘issues’. Much of the criticisms I’ve read of the film only stand if you refuse to accept Malick’s precepts about grace and transcendence. As far as I can see, the film’s form and content are naturally fused with its fundamental idea. The editing scheme, which tends to flatten out experiences and thus underplay big dramatic moments, like the deaths of characters, while overplaying ‘minor’ ones, is again to the point, since all of these things

Spoiler

are by the grace of God, equivalent in His creation, yada yada yada. And this extends all the way back to the creation of the universe and forward to the death of the planet: Malick doesn’t shy away from the implications of his big concept. Thus it seems to me that people who find the prehistoric stuff irrelevant, or the family stuff pretentiously aggrandized in its implicit equation with that material, are wilfully missing the point.

Throughout the film, I kept thinking about other versions of the film I’d rather see, but to be honest, I don’t think those would work any better. An entire, drifting wordless epic of the history of the world / universe would be fabulous, but, unmoored from the Waco material, it would hardly get across the point Malick wanted to make. Similarly, a more conventionally structured, if still fragmentary and wafty, film about the family (with Sean Penn struggling to come to terms with loss) could be great, but could equally be crushingly banal.

And while I think Malick’s central metaphor is smartly conceived and thoroughly explored, it too, in concert with other aspects of his filmmaking, drifts too often into the banal, in a way that compromises his ultimate message.

Spoiler

Grace / God being represented by glowing light and heavenly choirs is rather old hat, but I could buy it better if there were a bit more visual variety on show. It seemed like we were treated to hundreds of shots that swoop up into the sun, though to be fair it was more like dozens. Talk about hitting the audience over the head with your ideas. I also had a problem with just how uniformly pretty everything was. If God = Divine Light, then does that mean that if the world you live in doesn’t look like a Terrence Malick film then God doesn’t exist? The whole film has a kind of ‘loaded dice’ problem, but since the message is primarily an assertion of faith, it’s always going to have a take it or leave it aspect.

Things I did like:
• The fragmentary nature of the family material, which it seemed a lot of the audience I was with hugely resented, worked well for me, and seemed psychologically true, as when the brother who died first emerged as less distinct in memory than the one who died at nineteen. Also, the lack of exposition about who everybody was and what their relationships were (a.k.a. the Fiona Shaw issue) seemed far more realistic to me than most Hollywood films, which go to absurd pains to ‘introduce’ people to their lifelong companions for our benefit.
• The ‘visionary’ flashes that occur from time to time. Again, they work because of their lack of explanation, not despite it, and it helps that they look good. Among the 50s/60s material there are those Lynchian shots of that cramped attic room, including one with the weird man and the tricycle. It doesn’t matter whether this is an actual event that’s all but effaced or an image from a dream. Either way, its incongruity seems to me true to the way memory functions. More obvious is the shot of the boy escaping (into the light, of course) from a submerged house. Again, it works as a dream image, but its placement in the film makes it an obvious metaphor for birth (and as such I like the way it translates this once-in-a-lifetime experience into more familiar experiential components). The imagery surrounding Sean Penn at the end of the film – the salt flats, that doorway – offer a little piece of precious narrative ambiguity, since we never know for sure whether or not the occasion for the film is

Spoiler

Jack’s death (passing through the portal, being reunited with his dead loved ones etc.), or merely his revelatory epiphany about The Nature of All Things, spurred, it’s suggested, by his contemplation of his mother’s deep-seated, but nevertheless shakable, faith.

• The visual rhymes that unite the mundane and cosmic material. Again, these range from the obvious (Hey look! A dinosaur bone!) to the subtle (the way a billowing curtain resembles a pulsating jellyfish, or a water-spoiled child’s painting a nebula), and all serve to reinforce Malick’s main point.
• The ways in which the film’s fundamental relationship is echoed in the relationship between Jack and his parents – again that same trick of finding analogues in the everyday.

Spoiler

Thus God is at once both the stern, punishing father and the unconditionally loving, generous mother. Though it must be noted that this aspect of the film is extremely variable in its execution. It’s generally suggested, rather obviously, by the way that the earnest, whispered voiceover applies to the divine even when it’s apparently directly addressed to a family member – that ambiguity between “you” and “You”. I think it works much better when it’s interpolated into the actual memories that play out in the stream of consciousness, as when Jack confronts his father with that line “you want to kill me, don’t you?” – to which we can imagine God placidly replying, “Yes. So what?” It doesn’t work at all for me at the end, when, during that mawkish lovefest of the spirits, Jack’s mother says to Jack’s wife, “I give you my son,” thus becoming the Voice of God gifting Jesus to the world. Considering the implicit pantheism of the film, with the Sun as the most important and obvious stand-in for the Big G, this explicitly Christian moment seems rather baldly reductive.

I think the problems I had with the film fundamentally boiled down to a lack of subtlety, exemplified by that moment mentioned just above or scenes like the one where

Spoiler

Jack asks where God lives and his mother points to the sun and says, “there he is, up in the sky”, and the camera, for the zillionth time, swoops up to show us the Face of God.

This particularly hurts when you consider that Malick delivered pretty much the same message in much more artful camouflage in The Thin Red Line, and in the context of a film that was also doing a lot of other things, very well, simultaneously. The Tree of Life is pretty monomaniacal and monotonous by comparison.

The other option to subtlety, ambiguity, is understandably not a viable one for the filmmaker, and it seems like Malick took pains to scrub any trace of it from his message. So, ultimately, I guess this film just isn’t for me, even though there’s an awful lot I can appreciate about it, and it’s a case of Malick preaching to the unconvertable.

[knives]

Well you just did a better job explaining it than I ever could. I'm left with much the same impression especially the last part about Malick being more successful on this point with TTRL. Part of that I think is him infusing himself onto an other work that he respected so that he didn't have only one thing to say.

I must admit though that the repetition in structure didn't bother me because of how it ties into music which is an other important aspect to the film. Especially with the Wako scenes the film basically does three movements over and again like you would find in a song.

[matrixschmatrix]

Spoiler

The Idea is clear as soon as you understand who the real main character of the movie is – God – and realise that he appears in every single frame, because in this film the character of God is played by Light. So whenever the other characters, in voiceover, ask those big questions about his existence or purpose (and bear in mind that sometimes they’re asking those questions even when they think they’re asking about something else), He is right there, flaring into the lens, reassuring them that everything has His Inscrutable Reasons, If Only They Had Eyes To See. Ultimately, Sean Penn realises this and is consoled, and the film, and the world, ends

I think the message goes a bit beyond that-

Spoiler

It's not just a meditation on the inscrutability and ineffability of God- though it's smart enough not to try to provide pat answers for questions about pain, I think it also refuses to resolve them entirely, and suggests that pain is a real and perhaps an unanswerable problem- but that in answering it, both humanity and nature are capable of showing themselves at their best and most filled with grace. I'm not sure the idea that "Oh, God does know what he's doing, even though I still don't" would be a consolation- and to me it's a sense of connection, to his mother and his brother and also to Nature/Creation that helps Penn through his crisis, not an answer to his questions of theodicy.

Spoiler

As I said, after you get the point, all the film can do with it is hammer it in relentlessly with every ensuing shot – which, I admit, is sort of intrinsic to the nature of the point. And that really applies to a lot of the film’s ‘issues’. Much of the criticisms I’ve read of the film only stand if you refuse to accept Malick’s precepts about grace and transcendence. As far as I can see, the film’s form and content are naturally fused with its fundamental idea. The editing scheme, which tends to flatten out experiences and thus underplay big dramatic moments, like the deaths of characters, while overplaying ‘minor’ ones, is again to the point, since all of these things

Spoiler

are by the grace of God, equivalent in His creation, yada yada yada. And this extends all the way back to the creation of the universe and forward to the death of the planet: Malick doesn’t shy away from the implications of his big concept. Thus it seems to me that people who find the prehistoric stuff irrelevant, or the family stuff pretentiously aggrandized in its implicit equation with that material, are wilfully missing the point.

I think I do largely agree with this- I think the form of the movie is very much to a specific purpose, and it's reasonable if that purpose doesn't work for you.

Spoiler

Grace / God being represented by glowing light and heavenly choirs is rather old hat, but I could buy it better if there were a bit more visual variety on show. It seemed like we were treated to hundreds of shots that swoop up into the sun, though to be fair it was more like dozens. Talk about hitting the audience over the head with your ideas. I also had a problem with just how uniformly pretty everything was. If God = Divine Light, then does that mean that if the world you live in doesn’t look like a Terrence Malick film then God doesn’t exist? The whole film has a kind of ‘loaded dice’ problem, but since the message is primarily an assertion of faith, it’s always going to have a take it or leave it aspect.

I didn't feel hammered by that aspect, both because a lot of it felt like the subjective glow imparted by thinking back to a gorgeous childhood, and partially because it felt as much anchored to specific situations or people as it did an intrusive God-looking-in thing-the mother floating, dancing, and exploding with sunlight, for instance, seemed to anchor all that beauty to a connection with her as much as one with God.

Spoiler

The fragmentary nature of the family material, which it seemed a lot of the audience I was with hugely resented, worked well for me, and seemed psychologically true, as when the brother who died first emerged as less distinct in memory than the one who died at nineteen.

Spoiler

Did a second brother die? I thought that was a family friend, a first experience with death but not a loss of a brother.

Spoiler

It doesn’t work at all for me at the end, when, during that mawkish lovefest of the spirits, Jack’s mother says to Jack’s wife, “I give you my son,” thus becoming the Voice of God gifting Jesus to the world. Considering the implicit pantheism of the film, with the Sun as the most important and obvious stand-in for the Big G, this explicitly Christian moment seems rather baldly reductive.

Spoiler

That seems really key to the fundamental analogy of the movie to me, the love of God for his creation to the love of family- the idea that that letting the one you love grow by moving away from them, and that doing so represents an even greater feat of love, is vital to the message of grace-through-empathy, else God's seeming distance from humanity would feel inexcusable. The Christ metaphor here isn't the sacrifice part, is the incarnation- which, again, begins as fundamentally a story about childhood, families, and God.

[knives]

That was indeed a second brother.

[MyNameCriterionForum]

Spoiler

It doesn’t work at all for me at the end, when, during that mawkish lovefest of the spirits, Jack’s mother says to Jack’s wife, “I give you my son,”

Spoiler

Jack's wife? No, I think she's speaking to God, regarding the middle brother who died.

That was indeed a second brother.

Spoiler

No, only one brother died. The drowning was someone unrelated.

[knives]

Than explain why the mother ran over to him ect. All evidence points to him being a brother.