Some Notes on The Tree of Life

I watched The Tree of Life over two evenings - the first hour on the first night, the rest of the 139-minute movie on the second night. I watched it on DVD on a medium-sized screen, not on Blu-Ray on a bigger screen, and therefore not under the optimal conditions that cineaste friends recommended (not within my current ability to create). I posted an interim report after watching the first hour:

- I am not sold on the history of the universe sequence. I'm not speaking to its place in the overall structure of the film, which I don't fully know yet, but to its qualities in itself. Both the visuals and the voiceover feel trite to me. I suspect that Robert Bresson would be appalled by the tackiness.

- Half-way in, I sort of feel that the movie hasn't started yet. Although, the history of the universe sequence aside, it looks great.

- At its best, the spirituality of the first half of The Tree of Life represents a kind of country church naivete, touching but strikingly devoid of theological, philosophical, or intellectual content. At its worst, with its rote phraseology and celestial choirs, it suggests greeting-card Christianity.

- I say all that in the full knowledge that Malick was a summa cum laude graduate of Harvard, majoring in philosophy, and is a published translator of Heidegger. Hmm.

- Reviewing the film in The New Yorker, Anthony Lane shrewdly points out something I would not have noticed on my own: the Sean Penn scenes are the very first in any Malick movie that are set in the present. Lane says, " It is no sin to veer away from your own time—indeed, to stick doggedly to it can smack of historical vanity—but the suspicion lingers that Malick finds something distasteful in our current mores." In the first half of the movie, these contemporary scenes, although striking-looking, give me very little in the way of information to work with.

- Malick's writing of the voice-overs he is so fond of seems to have gotten vague and windy compared to the frequently marvelous lines that Linda Manz delivers so memorably in Days of Heaven. None of the language in the first half of The Tree of Life comes remotely close to such simple, powerful writing as the last lines of Days of Heaven: "I was hopin' things would work out for her. She was a good friend of mine."

- Malick seems to want his movies to be all transcendence without connecting tissue, and he comes reasonably close to achieving that in Days of Heaven, but this time I'm not feeling it. Soaring flights are more impressive when a movie spends some time on the ground. Telling a story is a good way of accomplishing that grounding, but in The Tree of Life, Malick seems less interested in story-telling than ever.

- Like some other grandiose directors, Malick is notably weak in a sense of comedy. I can easily imagine the crew of Mystery Science Theater 3000 - or the Woody Allen of the period circa Love and Death - taking down The Tree of Life with some devastating one-liners. It wouldn't be fair, but in his super-solemnity, Malick kind of invites it. If you want to make do entirely without humor in your work, you had better be so impressive that no one thinks of the lack - you had better be a Bresson. Spiritually ambitious novelists like Dostoevsky don't do without humor - in fact, their comedy can be particularly cutting and intense.

- This is not an especially feminist film, is it? Jessica Chastain's mother is unrealistically perfect, in keeping with her symbolic function of representing "the way of grace" (a theme which Malick plops quite nakedly into the film instead of letting us figure it out on our own). She exists solely for the sake of her three boys and her husband, and has no separate status in her own right. I'm well aware that Malick had two younger brothers (one of whom committed suicide) and no sister, but in creating the movie, he might have challenged himself by putting a sister into the mix. With one, I suspect it could have been a richer and more universal movie, and Chastain's character might not have seemed as if she was being sacrificed on the altar of patriarchal continuity.

After viewing the rest, I wrote further:

The second hour of The Tree of Life is a lot better than the first hour – unfortunately, the last 15 minutes is bad. If I had been Malick’s executive producer, I know exactly what I would have done. I would have fought him tooth-and-nail on the following points:

- Excise the history of the universe segment, in its entirety. In my opinion, if you have to include the history of the universe to prove your story is universal, you’re in deep trouble as an artist.

- Excise all the Sean Penn footage, including the ghastly ending on the beach. It all adds nothing. This probably means the brother’s suicide goes, too – everything that lies in the future as related to the body of the movie. End on the car pulling away from the house in Waco.

- Change the title to something less grandiloquent. Lose some of the over-explicit spiritual voiceovers - Jessica Chastain’s “way of nature, way of grace” monologue, and some of Hunter McCracken’s less natural locutions (“Mother, father, you are always wrestling within me,” etc.).

 - Re-edit the Texas sequences slightly to reinforce the sense of a story – or two stories, actually, McCracken’s coming-of-age and Pitt’s career disappointment.

What would be left would be an exquisite, 80-minute poetic feature, not flawless by any means, but awfully good and maybe even worthy of that Palme d’Or (which the current version, in my opinion, is not).

Some commentators have written that any such suggestions as I have made are equivalent to telling Herman Melville to cut all the extraneous stuff from Moby Dick, but that presumes that Malick is Melville’s equal as an artist, and I hate to disappoint everyone, but he’s not that. As I suggested earlier, he’s not Bresson either, nor Tarkovsky, nor Bergman, nor Kubrick. He’s not of that caliber; he’s not as robust as those directors. He’s a rather fragile talent who needs to be saved from his own gas attacks.

I stand by all of my earlier comments, pretty much. Jessica Chastain’s mother does show a little more mettle and individuality in the second half. I like the way the movie moves into Oedipal territory. Chastain is young, gorgeous, and very physically free with her boys, and given the lack of a sister for balance, that sets up a real tension; I’m glad this was explored. Brad Pitt is tremendous in his role, and the father’s sense of his placement in the economic scheme of things, which doesn’t come up in the first half, adds true depth to the second. I guess that part of my complaint with The Tree of Life is that it takes so long to get to its good stuff, which is often very good, indeed. The dinosaurs are just a delay, as too much of that first hour is.

Having flayed Malick for his lack of humor, I will admit that the scene with the DDT truck is in the nature of a sick joke, and a pretty funny one, too!

The scenes with Laramie Eppler (a ringer for a boy Brad Pitt) playing the guitar are affecting in a way that, strictly speaking, is extrinsic to the movie:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrence_Malick

Malick had two younger brothers: Chris and Larry. Larry Malick was a guitarist who went to study in Spain with Segovia in the late 1960s. In 1968, Larry intentionally broke his own hands due to pressure over his musical studies. Emil went to Spain to help Larry, but Larry died shortly after, apparently committing suicide.

Malick is famously private and refuses to give interviews or answer questions about his family, but it would be disingenuous of him to take offense at viewers interpreting his movie in the light of information that is publicly available, and that the film seems to be in dialogue with.

Finally, it should go without saying that anyone interested in film needs to see The Tree of Life for themselves and make up their own mind about it.

POSTSCRIPT: Within my group, the question came up as to why I watched the film over two nights - my usual procedure these days. Not too difficult to explain. 

First, I put in really long days at my teaching job . Officially, my day goes from 7:00 AM to 6:00 PM, but usually in actuality from 6:30 AM to 7:00 PM, and I get home at 8:00. I am wiped out at that point, and have to hit the hay by 10:00 at the latest in order to start all over again the next morning. I don't have a lot of time to play with - an hour of a film, or one TV episode, or a few chapters of a novel, is usually all that I am able to manage. It's better than nothing. Weekends offer more time, but I'm doubly wiped out by the weekend, and nap a lot on Saturdays and Sundays.

Second, I'm on - and will be on for the rest of my life - a prescription medication for which some of the side effects are diminished energy and fatigue. My doctors and I worked out that the optimal timing for my daily dose is late afternoon. If I take it at bedtime, I can't wake up in the morning; if I take it when I wake up, I fall asleep at work. So most of the time when I settle in to watch a film, the medicine is starting to creep up on me, and when I begin to feel that it is interfering with my focus, I call it a night. The DVD will still be there tomorrow, and I appreciate that.

My circumstances are just my circumstances, but who doesn't have circumstances nowadays? It's the New Global Economy. In Korea my hours were worse - 6:30 AM to 10:00 PM, every weekday. It's the price one pays for being employed at all - and at least now in Mexico, I have a good job, one that I like.

For every one person who is so fortunate as to be able to arrange their life in keeping with the demands of the Church of Art - usually someone comfortably well off as a result of the family they were born into (I know some such) - there are a thousand who would like to, but cannot. Given that I choose not to be in a relationship, not to have a family, and that part of the reason I opt against those is that they would cut into my intellectual time - well, I consider that I do my best.