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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
