The
Tree Of Life
For a film that sends
most critics and reviewers in search of philosophical and religious
meanings it's hard to escape
the weight of evidence: The Tree of Life
is a film full of particular details. If it has a metaphysical theme
it is that the particular not the universal is the central concern of
philosophy. If it has a religious theme it lies in the experience of
the characters, in how they try to figure out suffering, resentment
and malice with inadequate articles of faith. The film is the story
of a boy and his family, not a philosophical or religious credo. No
review of the film had prepared me for this, or for the virtuoso
display of narrative in The Tree of Life.
There
are four narrative sections. In chronological order: the paleobiology
of Earth up to the catastrophic end of the Cretaceous; the childhood
of Jack from conception to puberty and, at the same time, the life of
his parents and two younger bother, the childhood house and yard and
town in the 1950s in all its times, weather, moods — the great
central story of the film;the grief of the parents when, a few years
later, the middle brother dies at the age of 19; and the reflections
of the middle-aged Jack on his childhood, including a 'dream of
Elysium' in which he meets the people of his childhood. The plot runs
a different order, more or less as follows: the grief of the parents;
the history of Earth; Jack's childhood; the middle-aged reflections.
Some
might take the reflections and memories as a framing story and see
the childhood story as memories, although this is not consistent with
the use of the voiced over thoughts of Jack and his mother and father
as they live. Malick doesn't use a simple framing device or point of
view. The mise-en-scene is free and indirect. Some seem to read the
history of Earth story as a grand metaphysical statement or as one of
the film's 'great tracts...astonishing in their bombast', when what
it is is backstory, part of the exposition of a plot about human
experience lived in its immense physical context, making it at once
tiny, precious and strange.
I
don't want to write about The Tree of Life by responding to
what critics have said about it, especially not a writer like Helen
Garner — the astonishing bombast line is Helen's — but I don't
seem to be able not respond to what she said in her review in The
Monthly (July 2011). Her criticism are signs pointing to the
delights of the film.
Of
the family members she says '..these are signs, not characters. When
you are making windy generalisations about archetypes you don't need
anything as plodding as dialogue or plot.' Nothing is further from
Malick's method. 'Long after its tremendous meteors ... have become
dated perhaps it will be remembered for certain accurate and tender
passages about young boys at play.' These 'certain accurate and
tender passages' of the boys at play — but also in there relations
to their parents and to the townspeople — make up almost the whole
of the film and the substance of its plot, not plodding plot but
dazzling, restless, ceaselessly moving. Some might call it poetic,
but it is not lyrical cinematography sugared with pop classical
music. It's not Berlioz et al are 'doing the heavy lifting'.
Its narrative poetics at its best — dense and intricate. People,
habituated to simple and familiar narratives, seem to call films
poetic precisely when the narrative becomes too much for them. Malick
constructs the drama of Jack's building resentment of his father from
a constellation of incidents. It is a moral drama, a drama of
emotional and cognitive struggle.
The
great tradition of linguistic fiction — of drama and novels —
shows drama through dialogue and indirect description of inner life.
The great actions of drama are spoken actions, to which the novel can
add indirect descriptions of the internal actions we call thoughts.
Yet film, unlike writing, is a relentlessly empirical rather than
phenomenological medium. Malick has developed, especially since The
Thin Red Line, a way of revealing the emotional, ethical drama
from images of actions and incidents and snatches of dialogue and
voiced-over thoughts. I picture the shots catching Jack, suspicious,
resentful, looking over his shoulder. The drama of Tree of Life
comes to an understated, gentle climax after Jack contemplates
kicking out the jack and letting the family car fall on his father,
and when the father, his ambitions thwarted, his job gone, faces the
awkward recognition that he has been mistreating his family. The
climax, grows at first from no more than the withholding of violent
or cruel action, like in an earlier scene, where we see somewhere
sometime in the Mesozoic era a dinosaur do no more than not bother to
harm to a vulnerable beast.
Where
the intense never resting narrative particularity evokes the
universal is at its two extremes. First, in order to disambiguate the
complex detail of a narrative we draw on a common stock of
archetypes: the stern father, the compassionate mother, the restless
son, or whatever. That is how any narrative works. We have to follow
its plot by drawing on our shared understanding of life. If 'we grasp
that darkness has entered the archetypal family by the usual routes
and that the usual guilt and anguish will ensue,' that is the same as
every family narrative, from Oedipus on. Malick is not telling a
story about no more than archetypes, but we bring our understanding
of these character types to sort out the particular story unfolding
before us.
Nor
does the namelessness of the characters have anything to do with
their being archetypes. To say so ignores the intensity and
individuality of physical existence that film with its living actors
can scarcely avoid. It is hard to imagine more individualised
characters. That they are not named has no bearing on the
individuation of their existence. It suggests that they live under
the influence of a common human fate but that as individuals they
don't need the redundant individuation of naming
And
second, as Adrian Martin said, 'every individual open to the film
finds — often in a delighted shock — some miniscule detail
directly from their own young lives'. This is the reply to the
criticism that 'when the magisterial voyager tackles intimate human
matters, he cannot resist images of shop-worn sentimentality.' For I
too have run down a lane talking with with another boy as we went. I
too have played in clouds of insecticide, stood awkwardly in the
black part of town, held my finger over the barrel of an air rifle
for a dare. Just like this film shows. The same goes for the
sentimental images of Jack's baby feet, or of a butterfly landing on
a wrist, or the middle brother and father playing together on guitar
and piano while Jack lurks resentful and excluded. Such apprehension
of likeness indicates what is universal lies precisely in the moments
that are so particular. I can think of no other film so startling in
this feature. Not Andrei Tarkovski's Mirror, Charles
Laughton's The Night of the Hunter, Robert Mulligan's The
Man in the Moon, all of which belong to a filmmaking tradition
that strives to tell the drama of childhood and all of which have
moments comparable to Tree of Life. Besides The Tree of
Life the work that most has this effect on me are Proust's
chapters on childhood in Combray.
There
is another scene that strikes me in this way too: the scene in which
the middle-aged Jack meets the people of his childhood. Here my own
dream experience is capture by Malick. It's not so uncanny though,
this Elysian image. We know it from Homer and Virgil, and in the
preparation for the journey across the sea to the west. In images
such as this, or in the story of Job, or in the received idea of
grace, or in the immense history and the immense unconcern of nature
— in all these we recognise obscurely the cast and setting our own
peculiar brief precious experience.
