Terrence Malick (2011)
When I see an advert at the cinema that visualises the life-enhancing effects of a deodorant or beer, I can easily succumb, in the moment, to the pyrotechnical image and the schlocky inspirational music. It doesn’t make me any more inclined to buy the product in the real world but it does make me wonder: could an actual transcendent experience live up to the look and sound of this? I was reminded of this during The Tree of Life, which includes a substantial sequence that encapsulates the creation of the universe, the beginnings of life on earth, prehistoric creatures, etc. The sequence is so wondrous to watch that you suspect that what really happened would have struggled to compete with the images that Terrence Malick and his special effects team, led by Douglas (2001: A Space Odyssey) Trumbull, have devised. Yet the only part of this passage that’s stayed in my mind (just two days after seeing the film) is the one bit that’s dramatic and ambiguous as well as visually arresting: a big, raptor-like creature looks set to end the life of a smaller one but doesn’t – yet, when the dinosaur rampant places its great foot over the face of the dinosaur couchant then removes it (then does this again), it’s hard to tell if the beast is being cruel or kind. (What’s interpreted by Nick James in S&S and others as altruism on the part of the superior creature I read more as ‘I could finish you off but you’re going to die anyway so it’s not worth bothering’.) Otherwise, the impact of the history-of-the-universe sequence is just about as transient as that of those supernal commercials. Malick’s images are (I know already) less memorable than the animated ones in the equivalent ‘Rite of Spring’ episode in Fantasia.
The main events of The Tree of Life involving homo sapiens take place in suburban Texas in the 1950s, the home of the O’Brien family – father (Brad Pitt), mother (Jessica Chastain) and their three young sons Steve (Tye Sheridan), R L (Laramie Eppler) and the film’s protagonist Jack (Hunter McCracken). These fifties sequences – put together as an impressionistic collage but with emphases and repetitions that produce some kind of narrative – are occasionally juxtaposed with ones featuring a middle-aged Jack (Sean Penn), who is as miserable-looking as he was as a child. We see the older Jack at his place of work (although not actually doing work): he seems to be an architect and is trapped within a nexus of dazzling skyscrapers. (Does this signify that Jack is somehow the designer of his own enveloping weltschmerz?) The one moment in the film that takes place at a different time occurs within the first few minutes: Mrs O’Brien (neither of the parents has a forename) opens a telegram which tells her that her son R L is dead; Mr O’Brien, at work, receives the news from his wife on the phone. We’re not told how the son has died but we are told that he was nineteen years old – so he must have died in the early 1970s (in Vietnam?). In his relationships with his sons, Mr O’Brien is an aggressively controlling disciplinarian. When he goes away on an overseas business trip, there’s a sense of liberation in the household – father’s absence presents an opportunity for the boys to enjoy their mother’s company. Mrs O’Brien is an idealised figure and, for Jack especially, an increasingly alluring physical presence. Because she’s never fully sexualised, she retains an angelic inviolability but we can’t be sure if this is thanks only to repression on Jack’s part. In any case, the set-up is strongly Oedipal and the oppressive antipathy between Mr O’Brien and his eldest son makes Jack, if not a dull boy, a monotonously unsmiling one.
This is Malick’s fifth feature in 38 years, although the six-year interval between his previous film (The New World) and this one is shorter than usual (only Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1978) came closer together). His movies’ lengthy gestation and formidable seriousness have combined to give Malick an auteur status unusual among contemporary American film-makers and his approach to film-making might seem antithetical to the traditions of American commercial cinema. He favours historical-mythical subjects (although never before on the scale of The Tree of Life) and his works seem designed to be masterworks. I’m all for the ambition of the themes in The Tree of Life – why a benevolent God would allow suffering and evil, the fundamental importance of relationships between parents and children – even if Bergman was exploring a similar combination of existential themes, penetratingly and persuasively, half a century ago (in films like The Virgin Spring), and even though it’s hard to see how the Freudian elements fit into Malick’s larger spiritual scheme of things here. But the film’s self-importance is claustrophobic: it’s literally full of great shots – there’s no relief from them. As I watched, I kept thinking what Pauline Kael would likely have written about the picture and the phrase she used about the dancing in West Side Story kept coming into my head – ‘It’s trying so hard to be great it isn’t even good’. I don’t agree with that judgment of West Side Story but it sums up The Tree of Life.
A legend on the screen at the start of the film quotes from two proximate but not consecutive verses from the Book of Job:
‘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?’
The news of the death of Jack’s brother R L quickly chimes with what we think of as the essential theme of the story of Job. Malick also needs this death to allow himself the climactic sequence, when the older Jack is reunited with everyone who’s mattered in his life (although the fact that the reunion takes place on a beach and Sean Penn’s Jack is dressed in a sharp suit rather confusingly evokes the final scene of La dolce vita[1]). Beyond that, the death of R L – even though there are early indications that it’s what has made Jack’s life unalterably unhappy and in spite of the suggestions throughout that Jack wants to do R L harm – struck me as increasingly superfluous. Jack’s a misery while he and R L are still young kids. There’s no indication of how the younger brother’s death did any more than confirm the older one’s state of mind (or how it affected his relationship with the surviving brother or with either parent, or the relationship between the parents). Malick could still have captured the Job connections and staged the beach party through what happens to two other local kids during Jack’s childhood (one is drowned, the other maimed).
Malick, while straining to make large points about human existence, is evidently uninterested in creating human beings. The world-shattering moments of childhood are exteriorised in a way that both feels alien to your own experience (what’s often most powerful in such moments is the discrepancy between the violent upheaval inside your head and the lack of evident change in the world outside it) and looks false on the screen (Mr O’Brien stares meaningfully at Jack when the point is surely that the boy’s felt something his father hasn’t felt or perceived). The parents may be meant to embody the two oppositional ways of the world noted early on in the reverently hushed (to put it mildly) voiceovers – the way of nature vs the way of grace. Yet while the characterless Mrs O’Brien purely embodies the latter, there are tensions in her husband that complicate (and therefore unbalance) the situation. Mr O’Brien, perhaps a distant descendant of that ambivalent dinosaur, is not only a martinet but also a classical pianist manqué; his aggression towards his kids is displayed not just in a hostile way but also in how hard he hugs them when he’s feeling affectionate. Brad Pitt isn’t ideally cast as a man with any kind of artistic pretension but I felt sorry for him in this role because he’s all too clearly trying for an unaccustomed depth: a pity he chose to do this with a writer-director who asserts what the characters are, instead of giving his actors the material needed to bring them to life. (It’s striking how much stronger Pitt is with a phone in his hand: the moment when Mr O’Brien receives the news of his son’s death is the strongest acting I’ve seen from him, except for the phone call sequence in Babel.) I felt even sorrier for Jessica Chastain, who may be a fine actress but who’s required here to do no more than incarnate Jack’s conception (and Malick’s preconception) of Mrs O’Brien. (The similarity of Chastain’s hair and skin colouring to Sissy Spacek’s disconcertingly evokes Malick’s first 1950s female protagonist in Badlands.) Jessica Chastain does this beautifully but there’s an uncertainty too – inevitable because the couple don’t have any kind of realistic relationship. I appreciate that Malick has bigger things on his mind than realism: the problem is that his failure to create any sense of a happy family life means the O’Briens have nothing to lose – even though we’re surely also supposed to believe that the father’s behaviour is gradually corrosive. It’s typical of this director’s approach too that he shows the O’Briens as members of a community only when they’re attending a church service or a funeral – they don’t seem to have any friends or other family, except for Mrs O’Brien’s mother (Fiona Shaw), who appears briefly as a Job’s comforter.
The older Jack has no context other than his temporally distant childhood. How has he got through the intervening decades if he’s always been this unhappy? Is the woman we see with him in an early scene his wife, or a longstanding relationship he can’t commit to, or a one night stand? Even Sean Penn can’t do much with this cipher but Malick’s still lucky to have him: Penn’s able to dramatise, in his face and his walk, a man who has grown layer upon layer of despair. There are a few bits featuring an infant Jack reacting to the birth of the brother who becomes his rival which are effective because the little boy playing Jack is too young to act consciously. That’s not the case with Hunter McCracken as the older boy. His tight, unhappy face signals that he knows how he’s going to end up – even if the shape of his head and ears suggests he’d be more likely to have grown into Pete Postlethwaite than Sean Penn. (By contrast, Laramie Eppler as R L is believably Brad Pitt’s son. The third boy, Tye Sheridan, doesn’t register much.) It was never clear to me in The Tree of Life from whose point of view we were seeing the world being described. There’s no suggestion of any difference between the way Jack sees things and the way things are – or between how the child Jack saw them and how his older self remembers them. Perhaps we’re seeing everything, including the history of the universe, simply (if that’s the word) from Terrence Malick’s point of view.
It would be surprising if many of the critics who’ve praised The Tree of Life subscribe to the religiosity of the film, amorphous though that is. Nick James in S&S makes clear that, as a ‘non-believer’, he can go only so far with Malick – yet James still goes overboard in his enthusiasm for this ‘hymn to life’. Of course it’s possible to admire a work of art without sharing the artist’s point of view if the artist makes a convincing case. With the help of Trumbull and the cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, Malick creates beguiling things to look at but the spiritual insights and metaphysical questions voiced by the characters are (except for the Biblical quotations) dimly conventional. You really do need not to listen to these words if you want to suspend disbelief in the film (although it’s true that they’re as hard to hear as most of the rest of what’s spoken in The Tree of Life). It’s inconceivable that a novelist could impress like this by cloaking vapid spirituality in seductive prose: Terrence Malick is benefitting, to a spectacular degree, from acceptance of the commonplace that cinema is ‘all about images, not words’ (which hasn’t really been true since the advent of talking pictures).
Robert De Niro chaired the jury at Cannes this year, where The Tree of Life was awarded the Palme d’Or. He was quoted afterwards as saying that the film had ‘the size, the importance, the tension that seemed to fit the prize’. De Niro’s vagueness may simply have been diplomatic: it seems the jury’s decision wasn’t unanimous. Yet his words also convey the sense that many people seem to have that the movie has the aura of a great film. Its cultural appurtenances will, for others, confer artistic substance on the piece: the Biblical epigraph; the many classical composers whose music features on the soundtrack (Alexandre Desplat has done well to blend the score he’s written for the film in with all this); the recurrent use, in the mysterious lambency of an image of a wavering light, of ‘Opus 161’ by the ‘visual musician’ Thomas Wilfred. But The Tree of Life doesn’t stand up to much mental scrutiny. Its fans, however, include people who would normally deplore abandoning yourself to a film’s sensory overload as a dereliction of intellectual duty. As someone who, in the darkness of the Odeon and the ABC in York in 1976, was transported by the Martini ads and awed by the Universal globe-in-space (and who hasn’t progressed much since), I think I understand how these fans feel. I don’t understand, though, how they can take themselves – or The Tree of Life – so seriously.
17 July 2011
[1] I’d misremembered the latter: Marcello Mastroianni wears a white suit, whereas Penn’s is black (and he also wears a tie). But they still stick together in my mind.