Faced with a world that seems unjust, struck by personal tragedy we feel we don’t deserve, there is a natural inclination to ask, “why?” If you believe in a creator, that’s where you might direct the question. A Texas housewife, Mrs. O’Brien (Jessica Chastain), just robbed of her teenage son due to an unnamed tragedy, does just that in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life. But her question — posed in a bereft, nearly whispered voice-over — is phrased as the more accusatory, “Where were you?”
Those same words also open the film, in a Biblical quotation from God, who asks the put-upon Job, “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?” In other words, I’ve kind of had bigger things to worry about, buddy. In response to Mrs. O’Brien’s question, Malick goes back to the foundation of not just the earth, but of the universe itself — perhaps answering her question himself, as the omniscient storyteller, or, if you prefer, from God’s perspective, answering Mrs. O’Brien’s question and illustrating to Job the wonder of creation. For the next half hour of the film, the director speeds through a maelstrom of creation and evolution: spinning galaxies, colorful nebulae, forming planets, cells dividing, developing, evolving into jellyfish, hammerheads and dinosaurs, before finally winding up right back in 1950s Texas, as Mrs. O’Brien gives birth to one of her three boys.
It’s a sequence that has all the grand visual poetry of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Like that film, this is a movie that might appeal equally to philosophers, theists and college stoners. Malick has a solid grounding in the first two at the very least: he grew up in a religious family, taught philosophy at M.I.T. and nearly earned his Ph.D. in the subject from Oxford, where his thesis was on, in part, the Christian existentialist Søren Kierkegaard. He gathers together trains of thought from that background, as well as the cinematic grammar that has defined the four previous features that he’s made since 1973 — the whispered narrations, the meticulously framed compositions, the slow and balletic camera movements and the loving attachment to nature, here often manifested in shots looking heavenward. The Tree of Life feels like the logical destination for all those years of thought and work, a movie of massive questions asked with breathtaking beauty.
The questions may be big, and that brief tour of the evolution of the universe certainly has a nearly unimaginable scope, but Malick realizes that we live our lives on a much smaller scale. So most of his consideration of our place in the vast expanse of the cosmos takes place in that tiny corner of Texas. There, Mrs. O’Brien and her husband (Brad Pitt) raise three boys, all of them involved in the same daily struggle to figure out how to navigate the often opposing forces that drag on us through life.
Mrs. O’Brien articulates the core dichotomy of those forces in a moment when she tells her children that there are two ways to go in the world: the way of nature and the way of grace. “No one who loves the way of grace will come to a bad end,” she says.
She is the manifestation of that grace. The temperamental Mr. O’Brien — whose capacity for love is matched and often exceeded by his capacity for anger, unpredictably triggered by the stormy and chaotic swirl of his feelings of responsibility, stewardship, and failure with regard to his self and his family — is nature. Pitt is riveting in the role, a complex and demanding turn that requires a square-jawed toughness that can sneak over the line into abuse, blended with a real sadness and tenderness — and he must do it all with a bare minimum of dialogue. In terms of Kierkegaard, he is the animal, she is the angel: Malick even shows her floating, dancing divinely above the ground in one scene. The children, then, illustrate the anxiety that exists as we try to reconcile these animal and angel selves.
Much of these scenes of the life of the family seem to spring from the memories of Jack (played beautifully by Hunter McCracken), the child that Malick concentrates most of his attention on. As an adult (played by Sean Penn), he lives in a cold, modern world that sharply contrasts the earthy, warm images of his memories. The past scenes play out like snippets of those recollections, favoring impressions and episodes rather than plot and narrative. The present-day scenes with Penn are even more adrift and undefined than those in Texas, mostly showing Penn looking lost, isolated, and unable to connect with people in his life.
If this sounds overwhelming and like a potentially intimidating two hours and eighteen minutes in the theater, you’re absolutely right. Malick’s film isn’t wallpaper, it isn’t entertainment, and it doesn’t look for easy explanations. You’re going to have to do some work here, and that work is thinking. But just as The Tree of Life is the sort of movie we rarely see, the kind of thinking it provokes isn’t the kind we engage in regularly. Malick makes a strong case for the notion that perhaps we should.
Some people will find it to be a slog. Conversational non-starters like “boring” and “pretentious” have been thrown around by some, and it drew spirited boos along with heartfelt praise at its Cannes premiere — where it also went on to win the top prize. This is a dense, dreamy, abstract and thoroughly gorgeous piece of work. But it is not a story in any traditional sense; where narrative drives interest in most movies, ideas and impressions — punctuated by ample time to get lost in your own head while watching — are the engines that pull you from beginning to end here. If you don’t hitch your wagon to those, you’ll be in for a long, stationary two-plus hours.
Malick does something truly daring here in making a movie so indefinite, so open to interpretation, which is why it has the potential for appeal to so many disparate groups. The allusion to a Christian God might be viewed as a selling point for evangelicals. The evolutionary suggestions of the history of time sequence, perhaps not so much. One could also see arguments for a dispassionate universe overseen by an uninvolved but observant creator. Or, if you’re so inclined, you could find an analysis of why faith in the unknowable is so vital to so many. The ambiguity is built in without the film becoming wishy-washy, such that each individual’s reaction is a reflection of their own thoughts as much as what Malick has put onscreen.
That explains the widely varied reactions, some rapturous, some downright hateful. For me, that’s part of what makes the film so fascinating: its ability to both inspire and anger. But its ability to initiate heated conversation, not just with fellow moviegoers, but within our own conflicted heads, is a rare and underappreciated artistic quality. Malick is never impenetrable for the sake of being mysterious, or confounding just because he can be; if you come out of the theater feeling an unsettling mixture of fatigue, confusion and bliss, that’s by design. Tree of Life nudges the viewer steadily upwards on a pathway of thought, challenging us to choose which branches to explore as we continue to ascend.
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The Tree of Life
Written and directed by Terrence Malick
Starring Brad Pitt, Hunter McCracken, Jessica Chastain, Sean Penn
Running time: 138 minutes
Rated PG-13 for some thematic material.
Opens today at Bethesda Row and expands to more local theaters next week.
