942 The Tree of Life

[Oedipax]

Blu-ray release schedule so far: September 27 - Canada

Of course the Canadian release would be first out the gate - isn't Paradox notorious for lousy transfers?

[swo17]

Keeping the epicness going...

I've only ever been a real booster for Malick's '70s films, and obviously didn't rush to see this when it first came out, but I found it all quite moving and powerful, if a bit overlong in the mid-section. I was a little surprised to hear someone outside the theater say it was "pretentious, because it was trying to do too much," partly because that is not what 'pretentious' means, but also because it seemed fairly simple to me:

Spoiler

The tree of life is family, all that came before you and all that will follow. Our parents are like gods to us. Note how Pitt's portrayal of the father mirrors God in the Book of Job, stern (at times to a point that some could consider unjustifiable) but loving. Jack as an adult is the main character, and the whole film is him struggling to come to terms with his place (and the place of his pain) in the grand scheme of the universe. The beach is not an afterlife, but Jack's feeling of unity with all that came before him after giving himself over to them (stepping through the doorway). This represents the moment that he chooses grace over nature, a choice which does not necessarily answer all of his questions so much as it replaces the perceived need to ask them with a sense of comfort and community. Note how the film briefly returns to him smiling after this scene. The film mostly relates Jack's epiphany by means of Christian symbols, but primarily I think because this is how his character was raised and how he relates to the world. I would think the film's themes could be equally relatable to anyone who believes in a higher power in some form or another.

[eerik]

October 11th

[Jeff]

Sean Penn can't figure out what he's doing there either.

[Giap]

See, this is what happens when you let actors direct.

[tarpilot]

I don't really care for most of his directorial work since, but The Indian Runner is a great film (and one I'd take over Tree of Life in a heartbeat, personally)

[Roger Ryan]

That first posted response from the guy who claimed to have worked on the film made me smile: when asking Malick at lunch for advice on film-making, the director reportedly responded "use Nature because it's free"!

[ArchCarrier]

Jim Emerson: Did Sean Penn really pee on The Tree of Life?

[Jeff]

Blu-ray art

[Finch]

They better not make any changes to this, other than the Blu-Ray + Digital Copy banner it's perfect.

[colinr0380]

Here's a nice piece from Glenn Kenny about the Penn thing, talking about how filmmakers have to grapple with star iconography.

[MichaelB]

Here's a nice piece from Glenn Kenny about the Penn thing, talking about how filmmakers have to grapple with star iconography.

This reminded me of watching a Polish film called Before Twilight, set in a retirement home for elderly actors - the casting gimmick being that just about every part was played by a genuine megastar from decades gone by: the local equivalents of Olivier, Gielgud, Peggy Ashcroft et al.

Naturally, I wouldn't have had a clue about any of this if I hadn't had someone sitting next to me helpfully whispering who these people were - and even with those 'footnotes' I'm sure the significance of much of the casting went way over my head. And I also suspect that this is partly why the film never troubled the international marketplace, though I remember enjoying it a great deal.

[stroszeck]

I have to say I agree with the article and particularly when it comes to Malick's film the whole concept of star iconography is somehow much more punctuated. Malick is a filmmaker obsessed more with mood, nature and the mystery of Life, and when you put movie stars into that canvas it just makes things seem contrived. If there is any filmmaker who should cast unknowns, which serve as a blank canvas for the audience and thereby prevent them from inserting their own preconceived notions about a particular star into their composite of a character, it would be Malick. Watching Sean Penn walk around looking haggard and confused for about 15 minutes of screen time was distracting. Could not an unknown given just as decent a "performance" without the Penn baggage? The only other filmmaker who overused the presence of stars without needing them was Altman (think back to everything from The Player to A Wedding etc.) Sometimes it just takes away from the focus of the picture and introduces unnecessary distractions...

[Grand Illusion]

It's nice to be theoretical, but when casting for a project like this, I have to believe Malick is asking himself very pragmatic questions, such as, "If I get Brad Pitt and Sean Penn attached, can I actually get funding for this CGI-filled epic?"

[MichaelB]

It's nice to be theoretical, but when casting for a project like this, I have to believe Malick is asking himself very pragmatic questions, such as, "If I get Brad Pitt and Sean Penn attached, can I actually get funding for this CGI-filled epic?"

And Brad Pitt was one of the producers, and undoubtedly played a major role in getting the project off the ground in the first place.

[knives]

Actually I think Pitt works well in the role because of his star power. The character isn't supposed to be this blank slate the way that the Penn character is and Pitt's history works to the film's benefit (it also quickly fleshes out the character because of our connections with Pitt). The Penn thing goes down to name on the poster though it seems.

[colinr0380]

The other thing that the piece alludes to is that Sean Penn was of course in The Thin Red Line, making him one of the few actors to have worked with Malick more than once (next to Jessica Chastain in Tree of Life and the upcoming Burial, and who could be seen as someone brought into Tree of Life without too much of that kind of 'star iconography' to distract from her major role there), therefore he might probably have had an inkling that he would be used in such a way, even if he didn't fully understand his importance or was perturbed that he couldn't be more of a presence in the film.

[Brian C]

I'm sure there have been some complaints in places that Penn was misused, but most of the criticisms I've read have been that his character's storyline seemed ill-fitting within the rest of the movie. I wonder, would things have been any different if an unknown had played the role? Substitute "some guy" for "Sean Penn" (e.g., "what's with the scenes where some guy does nothing other than sit or stand around looking deeply perturbed?") and I think most of the criticisms would have still been the same.

If anything, those complaints might have been amplified, because that character would have been even more of a blank slate. We wouldn't have had Sean Penn's presence, which allows us to make some iconographic assumptions about who the character is and what he's like.

[zedz]

That's a good point. Apart from the really obvious fact that if Malick was casting unknowns we'd never be seeing these films in the first place, the presence of a name actor in the role reassures us that yes, this material is central to Malick's conception of the film. And I think that the problem people really have with that material sits squarely with Malick's conception of the film, not with who happens to play the role. (In fact, I really can't understand the reasoning behind the unknown-would-be-better-than-established-star complaint.)

[Johnbnb]

Three Tree notes:

1. There is one astonishing shot in The Tree of Life nobody talks about. Although very brief and technically simple, in my modest opinion it is probably the most powerful thing Malick ever did. It is the first thing we see inside the house after that Chastain’s “I just want to die...”. Brad Pitt is filmed in profile against the house. And then we see their bedroom, from the corridor. The bed touched by the sunlight in the complete quietude of the afternoon. I don’t think it is there just to make the transition to the next scene. Malick never does that, like Murnau, for example. For me, at least through the “eyes of grace”, it is the equivalent to the Book of Job quotation: “Where were you?” A tremendous and tremendously disturbing shot.

2. There is a painting, or more probably a photograph, that is very important in this film. It is the one that is removed from the dining room wall in that shot we start to hear: “Please God kill him.” Is there anybody out there capable of identifying that image? Here is a video that shows it (not very well, I am afraid: sec. 23).

Maybe an Ansel Adams photo? A mountain seen throught the clouds? Malick is a great admirer of Adams work. I think his influence is very obvious in some images of The Tree of Life (the desert, the way he films the church against the sky, etc.).

3. There is one name we read very clearly in the cemetery: “Gracy”.

******

The Tree of Life is just packed with allusions to films important to Malick. There is one essential moment in “Badlands” that is pure and simple “Pickpocket”: Kit putting the handcuffs on himself. And I thought: there must be Bresson around here. The film is full of “hands”, but I think there is more Bresson than that (Bresson is the “filmmaker of the hand”, I think Deleuze once called him something like that).
O’Brien announcing his wife in the dining room they have to leave Wako: can’t you feel Bresson (“Pickpocket”) there? “Ô Jeanne, pour aller jusqu'à toi quel drôle de chemin il m'a fallu prendre.” I think he even prepared Chastain to look a bit like “Jeanne”… And this is the film of the “ways (les chemins) throught life”…

******

I think it was already alluded in some reviews, but it is never too much to underline how gothean that I give him to you. I give you my son/sun moment with the three women is.

As you know, Faust ends with the vision of the Virgin Mary/eternal feminine (ewige weibliche). Chastain is as explicitly as possible associated with the Virgin in the arriving of the telegram scene. That is simply an (inverted) Annunciation with the postman playing Gabriel (you certainly also noticed that RL is associated with Christ during the sermon: he looks at an Ecce Homo stained glass).

I could start the quotation earlier, but I let you just the end:

Doctor Marianus (prostrate, in adoration)
Look up to salvation’s eyes,
tender penitents,
so that you may gratefully
be reborn for heaven! –
May all nobler spirits be
eager for thy service;
Virgin, Mother, Queen, Goddess,
Keep us in your grace!

Chorus Mysticus
All that is transitory
in only a symbol;
what seems unachievable
here is seen done;
what’s indescribable
here becomes fact;
Woman, eternally,
shows us the way.

In my opinion, Faust is an essential source of The Tree of Life. I would advise anyone interested in Malick to read it carefully.

******

I want to recommend a site by Ashley (assumedly fictitious name), a writer that in the end of 2006 published some curious literature: conversations between father and son, poems about trees and forbidden fruits, dinosaurs, the love for the ocean, a woman that suffers alone in silence beside her husband, about life, death, and everything else, as the author says.

I choose to quote When I was Young:

Once when I was young
I went for a ride on a plane
And I stopped believing.
For where else can Heaven be
If not on the tops of clouds?
A kingdom that vast,
Cannot be invisible.
Angels are not cruel enough to hide.
Where did the castle made of clouds
And miracles go?
Was it ever even there?

RL: Tell us a story from before we can remember.
MOTHER: I went for a ride in a plane once. It was a graduation present.

For those less attentive spectators of The Tree of Life, there are two porcelain angels in the dead son’s room, by the window. In the architect’s dream, we see something filmed against the sky that could be called the disappeared house, but I believe it would also be properly named the castle made of clouds. It even has something in the front that remembers a drawbridge.
And one more thing: Holly and Kit go on the plane as prisioners. And what is the last shot of “Badlands”? The tops of the clouds.

Curious poem, no?
Does anybody know who Ashley is?

[John Cope]

Adrian Martin's characteristically excellent piece on Tree and the validity of cosmological ambition in cinema. I actually take issue with some of his points but that seems like a good thing to me and as it should be. Still haven't seen it yet though so it's hard to say for sure.

[Johnbnb]

About John Cope's recommendation The Tree of Life: Great Events and Ordinary People, by Adrian Martin.

Adrian Martin mentions Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter (1955). He heard Malick admires it very much. The Tree of Life and Malick’s cinema, from Badlands (just see how Holly’s house is filmed in the night of Kit’s crime), is full of The Night of the Hunter. It has been noted in more than one review.
Martin’s text is very interesting. He gets that the whole film is in the dinosaurs’ episode. He was never so right as when he said that apprehension, doubt, fear, the ever-present hint or threat of violence is present in the entire film. We are like Jack. Things we got to learn. “How can we know stuff before we know it?” Grace cannot endure forever for the spectator of The Tree of Life. Like “father Haynes” says in the sermon, We must find that which is greater than fortune or fate. Nothing can bring us peace but that.

Malick wanted this film is to be a theological experience, not a theological reflection. I am afraid that “Ashley’s” 2006 “dinosaurs” + “rides in planes” + “father to son conversations” + “love for the sea” + “forbidden fruits” etc. literary milkshake is too particular and too good not to be Malick’s (see my previous post, or click here). Like Brad Pitt promised in the trailer, but it wasn’t included in the final version Someday you will fall down and weep. You will understand it all. All things. Such a strange thing in O'brien's mouth, no?

Martin talks about the “glory”: Look, the glory around us... There are many “glories”, not only Witt’s “glory”. This one is put in relation with “shame”: “I lived in shame”. I would really like to have an opinion about one thing, after all, this is a forum. In one of the skyscrapers rooms, the one with the aquarium atmosphere, we distinctively hear “attenzione” (Italian for attention). I checked this, I am sure. Eccentric, no? Like a warning, like that “exit” sign that Malick films very intentionally in the office. Maybe it is a reference to Alberto Moravia’s L’Atenzzione (The Lie, 1965; I will translate from a translation...). It’s an interesting hypothesis. L’Attenzione is a book about a writer watching himself writing it, a mirror reflecting a mirror. That book is a very particular kind of diary, a diary [that] is always sincere, always true, you just have to search its sincerity and truth beyond the events. The identification between the narrator and the author is total, this is, factually a lie, psychologically true. Why Moravia gave that name to his book? In the end, he gives one reason: I am afraid that the narrative might seem a bit complex, and so it will also be a way of inviting the reader to concede this book the same benevolent attention that, like we should admit, he usually grants the facts of life.
L’Attenzione is also a book about "shame", about a man that was able to surpass it. Shame of what? Nothing can be excluded from reality, not even dreams, lies, those vital illusions that for a certain time made me feel shame of being alive. Adrian Martin forgets one very simple but important thing: he was seeing a “film”, the “glory” of Malick’s cinema. O’Brien’s I’m nothing sends us back to Welsh’s speech to Witt in The Thin Red Line: A man in this world is nothing. Welsh also says in that film: Only one thing a man can do. Find something that’s his... make an island for himself.

Martin says: It is a film about a house. The house is Malick’s main theme. And I think he finally built his Xanadu with The Tree of Life. There is a bit of every movie Malick did in that “paradise”: the mountains (Badlands), an Indian man (The New World), the beach filmed from a low angle, R.L. entering the water with mother and a “tree” (The Thin Red Line), the beach pavilion with transparent curtains (the Days of Heaven pavilion). Don’t you guess why? Think in Fellini’s 8½.

Adrian has one fine intuition. I wonder whether, with the years, he has also worked (this is pure speculation) to divest himself of some good deal of this apparatus of learning, this cultural and intellectual sophistication. He is just one step from understanding what kind of tree Malick planted in the garden of cinema: Grey, my friend, is every theory / And green is Life’s golden tree. (Faust) While Jack kissed his arm, R.L. played with a pine cone, a very complex symbol. I can’t precise Malick’s intention. Bataille’s “pineal eye”, that one that is like a tree, is a good clue, a very good clue: "delirium escapes from necessity, casts off its heavy mantel of mystical servitude, and it is finally only then that, nude and lubricious, it plays with the universe and its laws as if they were toys”.

One problem. From my point of view, the author is absolutely incapable of understanding what is the sea in Malick, that wave, that fabulous wave Steve makes “sing” in “paradise” with the seagulls. The Tree of Life (not to talk about The New World, a film that ends with a shot of a tree…) is full of maritime imaginary: O’Brien is in the navy and wears its uniform, the sea wants to enter through the skyscraper (we can hear the water), that just before the architect enters that passage over the road (Find me.) seem just like a ship starting to depart; Steve’s t-shirt had a boat in the scene he plays at the window with Jack, before leaving the house; R.L. buried a fish and a shell under the tree with his toys; there were even pirate’s games with the father in the kids’ room; and that night Jack heard his mother crying, after playing in the doorway steps, he was reading the Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, or so it seemed to me. More examples: the paintings, the ship’s wheel lamp mother turns off, mother showing Jack the boat in the chinaware. And there was the sound of the sea under Wilfred’s Lumia and even in the architect’s house. Michel Foucault’s Of the Other Spaces:

… the boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea and that, from port to port, …, it goes as far as the colonies in search of the most precious treasures they conceal in their gardens…

… the boat … has been … the greatest reserve of the imagination. The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates.

The moment you see the kind of policemen Malick filmed since Badlands, you get that Michel Foucault’s Of the Other Spaces is the best guide through his cinema. But first you must leave the “way of grace”.

Adrian asks: That kid who dies swimming, is he one of the central three brothers? I immediately found myself straining to catch a glimpse of all three of them alive again, as the shots and the bodies flew past me.

The Tree of Life shows you most clearly that Steve died in that river, that he was that boy with no face, you just have to search its sincerity and truth beyond the events (Moravia). Why do we see GRACY (diminutive of Grace) just in front of our eyes in one of the graves of the cemetery, the cemetery where Steve ends buried alive (Was he bad?)? Steve (diminutive of Stephen), “mother’s boy”, is a portrait of the artist as a young man (Joyce)...

Just follow the River of Life (RL) to which Malick prays (Keep us. Guide us. To the end of Time) – And that strong youth, the river, was rushing on down / To the plain, sorrowing-glad, like the heart that overflows / With beauty and hurls itself, / To die of love, into the floods of time. – and you will get to “mother”: Long have I loved you and for my own delight / Would call you mother, give you an artless song,… (Heidelberg, Hölderlin). And to Malick’s nature, his cosmological ambition:

What super-earthly ecstasy! at night,
To lie in darkness on the dewy height,
Embracing heaven and earth in rapture high,
The soul dilating to a deity;
Feel in your labouring breast the six-days’ birth,
With prescient yearnings pierce the core of earth,
Enjoy, in proud delight what no one knows,
The earthly lost in beatific vision,
And then the lofty intuition –
I need not tell you how – to close!

(Mephistopheles, Faust, Goethe)

Thanks for your recommendation, John Cope.

[Johnbnb]

Notes on the June/2007 script.

Reading the script is only profitable after seeing the film several times and having built a general solid idea about it; or you will only get more confused. Who wants to have an idea of what to expect from Voyage in Time is advised to read it.

The script is different. The narrative’s structure is more traditional but the events, dialogues and dreams are more eccentric. I don’t know if Malick ever wanted to film much of it. Probably he didn’t want to advance all his ideas then.

That supposedly Christian tone of the film is more discrete. The order of events was greatly modified in the film. Words sometimes changed from character. For example, it is father that says I give you my son! (to God, blessing Jack during their reconciliation). Overall, Malick reduced dialogue and the more excessive situations. Jack’s friends have more relevance in the script. We will know them better if that 6 hour version is released some day.

Some notes:

You won’t find some of the film’s key elements: the Grace vs. Nature speech; he died when he was 19; the dinosaur’s episode; that ride in a plane; Keep us. Guide us…

The film is much more suggestive. Some of Malick's intentions (not all) are more explicit, too explicit, in the script: there is a scene with adult Jack imagining himself drag by a river and one with him inside a burning house.
The grieving is too developed.

Steve is a very wild and pagan character, not at all like in the movie. He asks more than one time Am I dreaming? And he says something extraordinary: Why does the moon follow me? In the film, when he crosses Waco with mother (Look… the glory around us!), we see a shop sign that says FULL MOON (with a smiling moon)...

Adult Jack calls RL the true artist. That tree they plant (a sweetgum tree in the script) is a way to mark RL’s birth. In the script RL speaks to the oak tree.
I am convinced for some time now that RL is the River of Life (this includes the waterfall). Malick uses this expression in the end of the script: A locomotive approaches the end of the tunnel. The light draws closer. Soon it shall burst out into the day. No longer a blind mechanism, it has become (quick dissolves, quick cuts) a river – living, flowing – the pure waters of the river life rushing down from a mountain peak. It is very curious to verify that the first time we hear that train that threatens Jack is when he confronts with RL in the garden (mother: “No! No!”).

Jack’s birth has Fritz Lang’s Destiny atmosphere. It is much more developed. A bride shows the boy a little book, not exactly but more or less like in the film (he has to eat the book, like John in Patmos; this film is Malick’s Apocalypse, he likes this kind of joke). She shows him a field of sunflowers. I was not surprised. It was clear to me that this little book was the Grace vs. Nature introduction. As I was not surprised with young Jack’s considerations about his dog: He accepts being teased, slighted, ignored. A dog “full of grace”.

There are pearls of Malick’s very particular humor. Like when during the baby’s first times he writes: But in a picture from the story book – the crocodile pulls on the elephant by his nose. Why? Why does he do that?

Mr. O’Brien is even more aggressive and obsessed with “will”, competition, etc. The idea of education is fundamental. Malick believes he is giving us all a very important lesson: I didn’t get an education. You will.
Father is making one of those lectures to Jack. He must get to school, mother points it. He says: This is more important. This is school.
But he is a big child: Sometimes he acts so much like a child that children themselves are embarrassed.
You absolutely must read O’Brien’s final confession. How he treated his sons with deliberate and rational malice. Do you understand? You can’t. You will! Forgive me. I’ve not only lost the light myself, but the power to give it to you – my children. I’ve give you my darkness instead. And it will take you years to find your way out of it.
I made the other’s think I am something I am not.
He is not really worried about leaving: But this could be an exciting new opportunity for us. I mean, I am not really being fired, just --reassigned. I have gone about as far as I can go here.

There seems to be a reference to Badlands. I wanted to die in your arms, says mother during a discussion. Holly said: He wanted to die with me, and I dreamed of being lost forever in his arms.

Malick names that beach the shore of eternity.

[Alan Smithee]

I appreciate the brief observations on the script. I would love to see the six hour version of the film and hope it comes one day but I can't escape the feeling that Malick just took the script and made it a FILM. I imagine that the extra stuff is in the film by implication. He found a way to do it with economy and experience rather than words. The man himself won't speak so it's hard to know what is preferred cut is.

[domino harvey]

Replace "Malick" and all references to him with "Jesus" and you'll get some idea of how hard this thread's become to read