Malick's "The Tree of Life'

When Terrence Malick is on, his camera is a thing of magic like no one else's— more precisely, a wand of knowledge that reveals things one has never seen before and cannot see in any other way.

It's not merely the artfulness of composition or the fluidity of motion, but the uncanny way he frames his characters in the world so that one registers both as a simultaneous temporal occurrence in different and autonomous dimensions. The world, he wants us to know, precedes, contains and exceeds its human passengers, whose fitful drama is enacted on a stage that quietly but completely dwarfs them. How he shows us this, in frame after frame and image after image, is the secret of his art.

I think of a very simple scene to illustrate this from Malick's first film, Badlands (1973), in which Kit, the principal character, kicks a can down an empty street. Kit is a drifter who will soon go very wrong (his character was based on the 1950s mass murderer Charles Starkweather), and one is meant to see his premonitory restlessness here.

But Malick also makes us notice the can, not merely as the focus of Kit's anger but as an object in its own right. We see the can's own life, as it were, quickened by Kit's action but not simply a response to it. We see the world itself, that is, as alive.

Later in the film, when Kit is on the run with his girlfriend in the Dakota badlands, Malick shows us the vast sunset, or the quick animation of a jackrabbit, and we understand the continuum in which the characters' action is enfolded, the larger, deeper drama which their own barely disturbs.

Temptation of the grandiose

Some people still regard Badlands as Malick's best film. Personally, I think his second feature, Days of Heaven (1978), extends his range and takes in a wider scope of experience. I take, however, David Thomson's point about the temptation of the grandiose in Malick, which is apparent even here.

It takes extraordinary discipline to sustain a vision in which a film's action proceeds continually on two or more levels, and in which narrative isn't necessarily the privileged part. Badlands binds its levels together with extraordinary precision and control, which is why it seemed to me the most important American film debut since Citizen Kane when it first appeared.

As in the case of Orson Welles, however, the magic fully extended only to Malick's first two features. Then trouble developed. Malick's film conceptions became grander in scale, but less focused in execution. Twenty years were to pass before his third film, The Thin Red Line, was finally complete, a war epic in which the depiction of violence— so sharp and sure in Badlands— became aestheticized.

In Orson Welles's footsteps

Worse was to come in The New World, which depicted the first colonization of Virginia and, with it (always an implicit subplot in Malick), the ravaging of Eden. Malick seemed to have lost interest in genuine characterization here, with the result that his protagonists were less and less felt individuals, and uncomfortably close to cliché.

Having thus proceeded down a long road of disillusion with Malick, much as an earlier generation of critics did with Welles, I awaited The Tree of Life with a certain degree of trepidation. The film's origins may go back 30 years, to an unfinished project entitled Q that Malick conceived shortly after finishing Days of Heaven. The saga of its eventual filming (originally to have involved Colin O'Farrell and Mel Gibson) and distribution was an epic in itself. At last, however, it is here in commercial release, having borne off the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival (and elicited some reported booing at the same time).

What I can say about The Tree of Life is that there isn't a single dull shot in it— at least those of Malick himself— and that the poet in him is fully alive. Aspects of this film that will be talked about for decades, and will enter any sophisticated discussion of cinematography.

Self-indulgence

This is true even of Malick's penchant for repeating his images, for example his symbolic tree (one uprooted and transported for the film itself), or the scenes of a quiet river. But there is also a stretch, not far from the beginning and lasting a good quarter hour or more, that will stand for some of the most self-indulgent filmmaking ever offered in commercial release.

In this patch, the story of a Texas family in the 1950s whose life is sundered by the death of a child, is interrupted by a parade of images representing the gestation and development of the universe, the violence of solar and volcanic processes and, most oddly, an episode of the prehistoric encounter between two dinosaurs.

The precursor, of course, is Stanley Kubrick's 2001, with its various cosmic and historic throwbacks and allusions, and Malick and his collaborators, unsatisfied by computer simulations, went back to some of the earlier technology that had served Kubrick.

Kubrick's peak, or decline?

2001 is a touchstone film for many. There are those who regard it as Kubrick's masterpiece, an unsurpassed extension of cinematic form and language, and those who regard it as the beginning of his decline. I am of the latter persuasion, and I see uncomfortable parallels between Kubrick's career and Malick's, as well as those with Welles.

If Malick's early genius was his ability to compose images that connected characterological narrative with natural process, what occurs here is rather an all but complete divorce— unless the dinosaur scene, in which a larger creature forbears to crush a smaller one, represents some suggestion about the dawning of moral consciousness. I hope not.

The images in this long sequence are frequently striking, but they pall with repetition and the lack of any plausible connection with the story line, which resumes as if this interpolated National Geographic special had never been.

Father and son

The story itself, which focuses on the relationship between a hard-driving Texan named O'Brien (Brad Pitt) and his elder son, Jack (Hunter McCracken, in an extraordinary debut), proceeds slowly but with mounting tension as the latter gradually reacts against his father's erratic but punishing abuse. The violence in the household is reflected in the ambivalent relationship between Jack and his two siblings, in which the brothers partly re-enact the abuse pattern inflicted on them and partly seek comfort from it in each other.

All grow to maturity, but the most sensitive of them, R. L. (Laramie Epper, also remarkable), dies at 19 in unexplained circumstances. Jack is deeply traumatized by this, and perhaps blames his own aggressive impulses for the tragedy. Meeting him as a middle-aged man (Sean Penn), we know only that he is deeply troubled, and that in the film's dreamlike conclusion, he meets all the figures of his life on an ocean shore, where he finds consolation at last.

Malick doesn't want us to know critical pieces of the narrative, although he recreates the feel of mid-century Texas very meticulously, and offers us many vivid glimpses into the O'Brien household. It is a tale told largely from a child's point of view, with the disjointed patterns characteristic of a child's sense of time and of events.

Contradictions of childhood

The film must build to Jack's eventual confrontation with his father— a confrontation that constitutes at once a rejection of O'Brien and a fatal recognition on Jack's part that he has nonetheless incorporated him into his own personality. This is a tricky feat, but Malick brings it off. Among other things, The Tree of Life is one of a select number of films that captures the actual flux and contradiction of childhood experience.

This is obviously a very personal film for Malick. It's set in Waco, where he himself grew up in the 1950s. The oblique sense of narrative, which he favors in his other films as well (distancing is achieved, as usual, by extensive use of voice-over), justifies itself in what it ultimately reveals, but the awkward straining for transcendence makes for a muddle, and the film's end feels unearned, since we know far too little of the mature Jack to see how and why his beatific vision can bring him peace.

The famously reclusive Malick is apparently willing to say just so much and no more. From an audience perspective, this is simply not enough. In Malick, the camera can cover a multitude of sins. But it cannot fake redemption.

The missing female

In one way or another, all of Malick's films have involved the Eden that's always by our side yet forever unrecapturable. Yet there is another aspect of this paradise lost beside the world around us whose strangeness and wonder Malick can evoke so remarkably. That is love. In The Tree of Life, it is the call of brother to brother.

What's conspicuously missing in Malick's Eden, however, is an Eve. In Badlands and Days of Heaven, the female consciousness that presides in the voice-over is that of a girl-child. In The Tree of Life, Jack's mother—she is never referred to by a first name, and her last is only borrowed from her husband— is wraithlike and inefficient, a quasi-angelic presence with no real standing in the world.

Jessica Chastain, the actress who portrays her, is very good but ultimately suggests only her character's remoteness from living; and when, near the end of the film, Jack sees her rising from the ground, she seems quite glad to be quit of the earth.

There is in fact no independent, full-blooded woman to be found anywhere in Malick's work; his is a man's world, or sometimes a boy's, but women figure in it only as slyly passive accomplices, or as victims. Without love, Malick observes in a voice-over, life merely "flashes by." So, however lovingly observed, does the world.