Just because I am shying away from the challenge of Pynchon does not require that I shy away from challenges in General.  Terence Mallick’s The Tree of Life seems like as good a place as any to start.

I just finished writing 1,000 words about The Tree of Life (most of which I have ditched) and I am no closer to coming to an acceptable explanation of this film.  It is very abstract and hard to understand and the best I can do for you is to present a guide for how to see the film.  I strongly recommend watching it as there are few films like this made nowadays.

I have ambivalent feelings about this film.  For a while now I’ve been increasingly disappointed in the amount of shitty movies that are made.  It used to be I could find at least one bearable film in the theaters.  Nowadays watchable movies seem to be fading from the theaters, replaced by formulaic romantic comedies, predictable action films that do little more than showcase a studio’s amount of CGI-related toys and “independent” films that all seem to bare a striking resemblance in story and sight to the dry/quirky/visually stunning stories told by Wes Anderson.

So the thought of seeing a film that asks questions without answering them should have been exactly what I wanted.  I will admit when I’d first heard of this movie (it was a story on NPR) and how fans were leaving the theatre 30-minutes into the story because it was so abstract and non-linear (two snobby terms that get my heart racing), I couldn’t wait to see it.  But the film’s abstract inaccessible message clashed with all too familiar scenes of an all too familiar dysfunctional family in an all too familiar town living all too familiar lives

Malick relies on this familiarity to tell his story.  Rarely throughout the film are we treated to an entire conversation, but what we do hear is familiar enough for us to fill in the blanks.  One need only catch the snippets to get the gist of the thing.  It is a handy method that goes well with the general aesthetic of the film.  the idea of a Tree of Life gives one the impression we are to be told a parable, and therefore the details are familiar and trivial to us .  A lifetime spent watching TV and movies has conditioned us to recognize certain flashes of “reality”:  A father bullying his children, struggling with financial security and maintaining an emotional distance from his wife.

But where it does disservice to the story is that we are left without nuance, nothing to relate to these particular people above the throngs of familial familiarity splattered on television screens throughout our lives.  The characters are deduced to mere caricatures of people we know too well.  Is it simply the flip side of a coin, or was Malick clumsy when constructing his subjects?  Do we really need to care about this family when Malick’s message (whatever it may be) transcends their small lives in a small town?  It might be a matter of preference in the end.  I personally felt a little let down.

But this movie does have its shining movies, and it is in that favorable light where this optomist chooses to focus the girth of his argument.  While I still don’t know what Malick wanted to convey in this film it was certainly clear what he was asking: are we children of God, or Monkeys?  This is a pretty simplistic and obvious interpretation.  But he makes very little effort to conceal his intent.  We open the film with a nice little history of the world from a Darwinian point of view.  Just before being led through this lesson, we are asked a question by the voice-over of Big Mama (these characters didn’t have names, so I have christened them myself). The voice-over guides us through the film, being the most accessible element in the film  we are able to discern what Malick wants us to be thinking.  In the beginning, we are told “In man’s palace there are two ways through life: the way of nature and the way of grace.  You have to choose which one you’ll follow.”  It is clear who Big Mama favors: “Nature only wants to please itself (tight shot on Brad Pitt) and others to please it too.”  But are we really to believe the way of grace is the way to go?  When taken out of its favorable light, is grace really so good as Big Mama claims?

“Grace doesn’t try to please itself.  It accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked.  It accepts insults and injuries.”  These are not the signs of a constructive way of life.  These are the signs of a coward, someone ill fit to survive in a world dominated by nature.

Opposite grace’s favor is Da played by Brad Pitt (who if he doesn’t claim at least one slot of the five Best Actor nominations will be a crime against humanity.  And I think we all know beautiful people are never in the line of fire when nature takes its vengeance out on humanity.) who makes nature look like an asshole, with its random cruelty and harsh lessons we never seem to get straight.  Pitt forces his way through this film like an angry hurricane, darkening the dispositions of all in his presence, providing a life for his family but one in which they are always in fear of the random explosions whose impetus they never quite figure out.

It is unclear throughout the film whom Malick favors.  Is grace the virtuous way of life, while we are forced accept nature’s existence as a necessary evil, or are we really all a part of a great natural force that will guide our planet and this universe to its inevitable end?  The 15-minute montage of mankind’s evolution certainly makes an argument for Malick’s respect for natural dominance.  But surely the final sequence at the beach speaks to a supernatural world not seen on this planet.  Is this brightly-lit, seemingly endless ocean front the salvation we pray for at night?  Even in the naturalist sequence, we see a dinosaur show mercy to a lesser species, a contradiction to the Darwinian ethic we Atheists were raised to understand.

One can come up with a hundred theories regarding the message of this film, but the diplomat in me wants this film to be an argument for the reconciliation of the great God/Mutha Naytcha.  Not that both evolution and Christianity are right in the binary sense of the word, but that those championing both sides are capable of living in the same world, regardless of what happens afterward.  It gives me hope in the end to see the man and the man he’s made come together and relate to each other if nothing more than on a strictly human level.  It is an optimistic view indeed, but one worth documenting.

And as for the more technical parts of the film, these are by far the best I’ve seen in a long time.  Camera work, lamented by one reviewer as constantly in movement plays a very effective role in conveying the harsh nature of the characters in the film.  When we see a group of pre-teenage boys terrorizing the neighborhood and causing as much damage as they are capable, the camera circles and bumps up against them in an aggressive way, seemingly pushing the kids into committing the petty acts of boredom and anger on those unsuspecting.  We are given multiple views of characters drifting down the street like leaves off a tree and the camera follows suit, drifting back and forth along a vaguely similar path.

And as I’d mentioned before, Brad Pitt is an absolute force of nature in this film.  He is stubborn, mean, angry and violent by nature.  He makes this film what it is and should be honored as such.  The only problem I’d had was his sudden flip from Dick Da to  regretful, “what have I done with my life” Da in the blink of an eye.  And that can be attributed to weak character development in the writing as much as anything else.

But that brings me to my last point: there is no plot to this film.  It is meant to be a statement, not a story.  The fate of the family is not our concern here.  Their story is all our story and their fate is to mimic that of the fate of mankind.  They don’t go away, they don’t resolve anything and nothing ends.  We go through our lives and we are forced to make choices.  These choices dictate how we are seen and how we see the world.  They are wholly effective, if not a product of our environment.  Our decisions can say more about our environment than they do about us.  In the end, we may be effected by nature or grace, but the only thing that is sure is that we are affected.

Okay, we’re warming up and we’ve got a list.  Next week, Brad Pitt makes the miraculous jump from angry abusive father to angry abusive general manager of a baseball team, and I (totally heterosexually) fawn over his diverse acting ability and “stage presence.”  Selah.

Alouishis