Tree of Life

If you kind of liked Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line but thought, “Gee, this would really be better if they got rid of all the boring war stuff and expanded the flashbacks into a movie of their own,” then, boy, have I got a movie for you.

In Tree of Life, one of our best directors gives free rein to many of his worst impulses. It’s not devoid of merit—the individual scenes are, in fact, quite lyrical and beautiful—yet collectively it feels like yet another falling off from the tightness and precision of his first, best feature. (Badlands. If you’re too lazy to IMDB it, please, for the love of God, at least Netflix it. Here, I’ll even give you a link, you lazy bastard.) Malick grew up in Texas at about the same time as the boys whose story forms the dramatic arc—if one could call it that—of the film. He also had a brother who played guitar and committed suicide overseas, which is presumably what happens here, although he gives us few enough details that virtually any explanation of the brother’s death is plausible—Vietnam, car accident, whatever. Perhaps that’s by design—it’s certainly understandable to be reticent on such an intense personal tragedy, even decades after the fact, and leaving it open makes it feel more like everyone's movie. But it also feels more like a movie that can’t make up its mind, one that starts with personal roots but branches off in myriad impersonal directions, for Malick mashes in literally just about everything, with sequences depicting the Big Bang, the formation of galaxies, the evolution of life. There’s even a shot of a wounded sea dinosaur (an Elasmosaursus, according to Wikipedia) flopping about on a beach. Why is he wounded? What will happen to him? And, most importantly, what the hell does he have to do with the coming-of-age of three Texas boys with an overbearing father and a gracious mother? It feels churlish to ask such questions of a movie that’s so beautiful and mesmerizing, for the imagery in the movie is so compelling that one almost doesn’t care about the normal niceties of moviemaking, like “plot” and “storyline.” Almost.

There are plenty of precedents, and not just in the auteur’s own work. (A common commentary on his films is that they’re more like visual poems than movies, and this seems designed to cement that perception.) Indeed, Tree of Life feels like 2001 in 2011, as if Malick’s channeling Kubrick. Both movies have a relatively small amount of dialogue compared to their long running time, with lots of effects-laden eye candy in there as a sort of padding, taking up all the empty space, keeping all the narrative from rattling about in all that running time like a BB in a tin can. Both even have the same special effects wizard—Douglas Trumbull, who was apparently lured away from thirty-odd years of exile from Hollywood to supervise the work on this film, because Malick (and here I really can’t fault the guy) reportedly hates the look of modern-day CGI. So there’s some stunning imagery; if this had been made and screened in the 60s, I’m sure it would have been a magnet for hippies on hallucinogens looking to heighten their highs, as was reportedly the case with 2001. (While we’re on the topic of drugs, this movie is trippy even in its depictions of the personal. I heard a comedian—I’m not sure who it was, and a cursory Google search gave me lots of fun-looking links, but nothing that seems like it has an answer to my question—talk about how babies and toddlers basically act like they’re on ecstasy all the time. There’s a druggy sense of amazement and wonder to early life, as we figure out how the world works, all those fun little real-world brain lessons on topics like gravity and object permanence, and Malick captures that wonder perhaps better than any filmmaker I’ve ever seen.) But is it necessary? Does a coming-of-age movie have to include birth, and the birth of the universe, just to make sure we don’t miss anything?

Granted, there is a theme of sorts tying it all together. (Pardon me while I think out loud to try and figure out this glorious mess of a film.) As was the case in The Thin Red Line, there’s early narration discussing the countervailing forces one sees in the world at large. But rather than seeing everything as a simple struggle between good and evil, or as creation vs. destruction, Malick’s talking about a subtler conflict, between nature and grace. (I say Malick because he’s unfortunately become indistinguishable from many of his narrators; nearly gone are the arm’s-length characters of his earlier films, replaced by navel-gazing notebook dumps into a variety of vessels.) Nature here is the father-force, the harsh glory of Old Testament capital-G God, the one who created the heavens and the earth but remained insecure enough to smite people for sacrificing to other Gods, the one who got all pissy with Job when he dared to ask for an explanation for all his tribulations. And grace is a mother’s unearned love, soft and gentle yet no less powerful, the supple cement that fills in the cracks and hides the sharp edges of rough nature.

These dueling themes tie everything together, more or less, and provide vastly more nourishing intellectual fodder than is normally found in the Hollywood trough. And even if Malick is unwilling or unable to show us a clearer picture of the tragedy that sets up these themes, he's probably given us a perfect movie somewhere in Tree of Life's miles of footage. Unfortunately, the difference between the length of that movie and the length of the movie Malick actually did deliver has been growing at an exponential pace throughout his career. In other words, it may not have been healthy for him to dig up the roots, but I wish he’d at least pruned this tree.