The Tree of Life, The Tree of Death

“Summing it up, one might say that the screen rectangle must be charged with emotion.” — Alfred Hitchcock

“The feel of the experience is the important thing, not the ability to verbalize or analyze it." — Stanley Kubrick

“I can’t quite tell you what the film was about, I can’t analyze it. I’m not a film critic, I can’t tell you where Fassbinder was going with that film… But I had a certain emotional reaction to it, and that’s what I admire. The spirit of that picture permeates the attitude of a lot of the scenes in Taxi Driver. And that means everything.” – Martin Scorsese on Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Merchant of Four Seasons.

I generally hate articles that begin, and for that matter films too, with a quote. It’s a cut-and-dried cliché that has been juiced to the brink of meaninglessness. But I take an exception here, both because those three quotes quoted above condense the point of this post eloquently and also because the film in question opens with one, a quote from God Himself from the Old Testament:

“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?" – God

The filmmaking guidebook conventionally dictates that a film should set the tone in the opening 10 minutes of the film, but Terrence Malick sets a big part of the tone with that quotation itself, establishing the spirituality of the film and the spiritual themes of the origin of the universe and life, channeling our emotions in the direction of that undeniable poetic sensation central to the God concept even an atheist like me cannot deny. The spiritual tone set here together with the first words softy uttered by Mrs. O'Brien (Jessica “Goddess-Like-Beautiful” Chastain) becomes the heart and soul of the film and suffuses smoothly into the rest, carrying with it and tying together all the elements that go into making it.

There is much to be said about all the elements that go into making it, technically and artistically, from sound mixing to editing, cinematography to narrative structure to the hypnotic background score. It would be farcical even to try to dissect every single one of those to ascertain how the experience is brought to life, but in a Portuguese interview one of the editors of this film, Daniel Rezende, quoted the very first advice Malick gave him before beginning the editing, an advice which Rezende says in this interview changed his approach to editing forever, and this attitude in essence reflects Malick’s creative process for this film and the attitude he has tried to spill over to the rest of the cast and crew he has worked with while making it (Keep in mind that there were five editors for this film, one after another over a period of two years of editing, and different cinematographers in different countries of shooting):

“I know you can edit this scene. But please show me what you'd never do with this scene. Let's try to find the opposite of what you plan to do. What you know is not interesting to me. I don't care if the movie does not please all audiences. But I want to give them a new cinematic experience.” - Malick

And a new cinematic experience he gave us alright!

I want to comment a little on the central themes of this movie. The most common interpretation of the film I’ve heard is that it’s Nature VERSUS Grace. And given the opening monologue by Mrs. O’Brien about the contrast between Way of Nature and Way of Grace, it’s almost tempting to believe it to be a versus-themed film, but I couldn’t distance myself from that opinion any further even if I tried. It wasn’t a Nature-versus-Grace story at all, but rather how Grace originates out of Nature. The long, mesmerizing visual scenes of the origins of the universe, and their cold and heartless feel, are not immediately contrasted with the birth of the O’Briens’ children and their joyous upbringing by their angelic, playful, loving mother and an equally loving yet domineering, authoritative father. There exists a transformation between the two sequences – that of the evolution of life from lifeless primeval soup to oceans bursting with life, from abiogenesis to biogenesis – where you can literally feel your emotional response transform from unsympathetic to sympathetic, as you watch the first images of a beating heart in a developing fetus, the first images of a predator dinosaur walking away from its wounded prey out of compassion for its suffering. In other words, Way of Grace is shown as being born out of Way of Nature; they are not two independent entities that are being contrasted but one entity taking birth from another and then vanishing back into the same (the scene towards the end where Earth is shown being blown to dust as the Sun expands into a supernova). Our place in the universe reduced to oblivion by one tiny puff of the Sun.

Search for our place in the universe is another recurring theme in the film, along with loss, bereavement, and deeply bonded sibling relationships. Mr. O’Brien is always on a quest to make a mark on the world, to become significant, to make his existence meaningful, while Mrs. O’Brien has already found that meaning in sharing love with her children in the brief time she gets to be with them on earth. The expressions of merrily joy on the faces of the three children when only their mother is around turn to fearful, blank expressions of forced respect when Mr. O’Brien enters the vicinity. This actually is one of the several ways in which Malick creates the mood pattern by fluctuating the emotions – by using alternating scenes of Mr. and Mrs. O’Brien’s spending time with their children. As a result, each scene feels like a distinct bubble of emotions and the entire film becomes a bubble bath – it’s all one big interconnected cluster of conjoined bubbles, but they are still not a continuum. This I personally feel is what distinguishes The Tree of Life from most other mainstream/conventional films.

Another thing worth noting is the apt title for the film. The evolutionary tale I talked about above is referenced in a very ingenious way in the film title: Tree of Life being the name biologists give to the evolutionary tree of life, referencing Nature, and Tree of Life also being the Biblical Tree of Life, referencing Grace.

When all is said and done, I thank the reclusive Mr. Terrence Malick for giving me this once-in-a-lifetime experience of watching something that is quite possibly the greatest film made when I was alive: A class never before achieved, and perhaps never will be. An ode to the potential and limitlessness of cinema, as eloquently expressed by David Lynch:

“Every medium is infinitely deep.” - DL

___________________________

Trivia 1: Zbigniew Preisner's Lacrimosa is a rendition of Mozart's Lacrimosa.
Trivia 2: Heath Ledger was supposed to play the role of Mr. O'Brien, but I have absolutely no complaints because Brad Pitt plays the character as honestly as and more powerfully than Ledger could have. This to me is by far Brad Pitt's best acting performance of his career.

Trivia 3: The intended irony that a film titled The Tree of Life actually begins with the death of a character. Hence, the title of this post.

Tweet