An American Movie that Aspires to be an Epic

Heard a lot about a movie called "The Tree of Life", the enigmatic and reclusive Terrence Malick's fifth film in nearly 4 decades  ("Badlands" [1973], "Days of Heaven" [1978], "The Thin Red Line" [1998], and "The New World" [2005]), . Saw it yesterday. It was a happy but mixed experience.

A "Tree of Life" is concept in various mythologies and religions the chief idea of which is that all forms of knowledge and of life are somehow connected: male and female, life and death, love and hate, success and failure, strength and weakness, good and evil, man and Nature (trees, grass, animals, birds and fishes, the sun, the moon and the stars, earth and sky, the universe, fire and water, mountains, deserts, beaches etc.). Everything unfolds according to their own rhythm, causing joys and sorrows, magnificently,  mercilessly, relentlessly and mysteriously, indifferent to man's will and desires. It's also connected  to concepts of fertility and immortality.

As the film opens, we see O'Brien, (Brad Pitt) trying to talk to his wife Mrs O'Brien (Jessica Chastain) amidst the loud roaring of an airplane engine at an airport. Jessica says she doesn't want to live. We are shown a guitar leaning disconsolately against a foldable chair on the wooden floor of the porch facing the green grass of the backyard, through a glass door. The guitar belongs to Steve, their 19-year-old second son. We hear a Biblical quotation from the Book of Job: God asks, "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?"  We see O'Brien talking to Jack (Sean Penn), his middle-aged eldest son suffering from a mid-life crisis, having divorced and remarried and having some unresolved issues: we hear in one of his voice-over monologues "Father, Mother. Always you wrestle inside me. Always you will."(probably conflicts between reason and feeling, between clarity and ambiguity, between limit and the dissolution of limit, between the head and the heart, between self-love and selfless-love). Jack told his father that there was never a day he did not remember Steve. Then we are shown Jack's eyes landing on the planting of a tree in a new architectural project. This triggers his memories of his childhood (the young Jack being played superbly by Hunter McCrackern). Then the scene cuts to the origin of the universe, with its endless volcanic eruptions, formation of the sea and first cells and finally, the emergence of dinosaurs, one of which was shown giving a "light" dinosaur tap on an injured cub with a gash at its side lying helplessly upon a beach and then moving away..

Steve is probably O'Brien's favourite son, perhaps, as we learn later, like him, he had a passion for music and dared follow his dream, unlike O'Brien himself, who wanted to become a professional organic player but ended up being an engineer with 26 patents under his name which he attempted to sell and doing marketing job for his company in the 1950s' mid-America. He advised young Jack in one of their father(not dad)-to-son ( he objects to being called "dad) talks never to follow in his footsteps and never to make the same mistake of getting "sidetracked".

The story is about how O'Brien brought three lives into the world, all boys, how he taught them to know what is theirs and not theirs, how to draw boundaries between self and others and how to fight and be strong, how to hone their skill so that they may survive in a tough world and how his teaching had a permanent effect on Jack's life. . The story is told through magnificently filmed sequences portraying planets, fire, huge sea waves, desert caverns, water and wind eroded mesa and natural sandstone sculptures in the grand canyons country, microscopic images of tissues and cells, lush green grass on land and giant  underwater fresh water weeds, huge salt desert and clear blue skies. As voice overs while we watch the stunning photographic work, we hear the questions the three protagonists ( the father, the mother and the first born, now head of a huge architectural design company in some towering steel and glass structure), ask of God: why he should do what he did.

We are shown in rough chronological order each stage of the development of the three children up to about time of death of O'Brien's second son Steve: how O'Brien taught them, largely in the form of lectures or commands on the dinner table or out in their family yard, how to water and weed grass, how to plant trees, how to fight and defend themselves in the typical 1950's mid-American paternalistic, stern, authoritarian and disciplinarian style where a man is king within his own castle and how although he would work hard, give security, protection to his family and when he got a moment to spare, some education on the "facts of life" to his children but will turn to violence if he status as head of family is challenged in the slightest way.  But we are also shown how the relationship between sons and father is one of fear and respect, more like the top-down power relationship between a teacher and master to his pupil and apprentice and in which he somehow felt compelled to demonstrate his "love" only through action, never in tender or comforting words because probably he thought it "unmanly" to project any any image of himself to his children except one of "strength" and "toughness" as befitting a "master of the family".  We are shown how once he is gone on a business trip, the children could finally breathed a sigh of relief and literally jump for joy in their beds, holding their pillows for comfort because only then would they finally be able to do what pleased them most, viz. to relax and to have childish fun in all sorts of silly ways, with the mother joining in the chase for undiluted and non-didactic joy. Jack recalls that that when he felt the need to be rebellious and wished that his father was dead and proceeded to experience his urge towards violence by throwing the first stone at the glass panes of a deserted house whereupon the other teenage boys around him followed suit and when he began to watch the underwear of a female neighbor. He was always a leader. He was taught that way.

What I like about this long awaited film is that it shows, not tell what Malick intends to say: in lush imagery, often to the sound of awe-inspiring religious or other uplifting classical music. He supplies little connectives. We got to piece the narrative together. He just leaves clues in the conversations between the characters, their physical appearance and clothes to enable us to locate the time, place and context of the various episodes in the "epic" reminiscence of their growing up and "maturity"(?). I like the tiny but telling details that Malick chose to illustrate the relationship between the characters. Thus we rarely see Pitt smile, except with great constraint, to his wife and children and we would always see him grabbing the scruff of the neck of his elder son whenever he talked to him and taught him the ways of the world. At the dinner table, he would merely stare straight into the eyes of the children in silence, like a head lion surveying his pubs, and the children would have to scan his face for the slightest sign of disapproval before daring to gingerly remove a coveted piece of meat or cake from the common plate on the dinner table to their own dish. Likewise, he shows us how Steve trusted his eldest brother Jack, despite their father's warning against trusting any one too much, by putting his hand right in front of the tip of the barrel of an air gun they were then playing upon Jack's suggestion and then running away in pain when Jack actually pulled the trigger and how later, Jack handed Steve a thick rectangular wooden pole and asked Steve to hit him back if he like so as to even out  the score for having betrayed him earlier and how Steve took the pole, made as if he would do so and then smiled and threw it away without getting even. I also like the scene which O'Brien got up from the dinner table when Steve looked up to his father and said "silence", the word he must have heard hundreds of time at the dinner table, when O'Brien was making a noise when he was eating, as he was taught, and O'Brien got angry, pushed everything aside to thrash him and then returned to the table to continue eating his dinner in anger as if nothing had happened  but how her wife expressed her disapproval at his boorish way by deliberately throwing the dish washing towel with more force than was really necessary and noisily washing the dishes and how all O'Brien knew was to resort to his sheer muscular power to hug her close to his own chest against her wishes and not allow her writhing hand to escape from his hold!

What impressed me most in this film is Malick' s use visual symbolism. The creative force of life is always associated with light and with fire, whether it be the flickering flame of a candle or the superhot flow of glowing volcanic lava in gold and red and with the male principle. The capacity for spontaneous enjoyment of sensory pleasure and the empathetic nurturing influence of the female principle is however, always associated with water, whether it be the clear water of a pond, a river full of weeds, the gush of water rushing out from the jet of the garden hose which Jessica appear to thoroughly enjoy when she allowed sole of her feet to be tickled by it, or the swimming pool where all the children were having fun but where however a fatal drowning of another child occurred, despite all efforts to revive him by O'Brien. The film ends, with O'Brien's plant being closed and he and his family had to relocate and he finally reconciles with his family: we are shown, surrealistically, images of various people walking slowly, serenely, relaxedly along a beach where the water has receded, revealing the wet sand beneath and offering each other gentle hugs bathed in the soft fading light of a sunset. The beach is where the sea meets the sky on the far horizon and the soft sand on the beach. Whilst the sea an whip up huge billows whose combined weight and power is not to be underestimated and whilst it can lash, swallow and kill, it can also comfort, surround and soothe. The beach at low tide is visual embodiment of the latter. That is cinema! It is cinema as poetry, epic and lyrical by turns. But that is not the only surrealistic episode, we also see Jack walking through a make shift wooden gate erected in the middle of nowhere in the arid mesa land of strange sand and wind-carved sculpture ( the desert of his emotional life?) and Mrs. O"Brien walking over a white lake of dessicated salt towards the light. As all symbols, they are ultimately ambiguous, enigmatic and open ended. I also like the imagery of a field full of sun-flowers. Perhaps we all need the sun to continue to flower. The film closes as it began with the flickering yellow-red flame.

It is debatable whether the trivialities of mid-American domestic life in the mid-1950s are capable of supporting the kind of cosmic or epic story that Malick seems to working towards with the stunningly spectacular photography of Emmanuel Lubezski and the voice-overs quotations from the Bible and interrogation of God by his three main protagonists: O'Brien, his wife and their eldest son Jack. The ambition is commendable but in the final analysis, I don't think it works because it lacks sufficient emphasis upon the sense of history and a certain "heroic" proportions to the acts of the protagonists, which is what an epic requires. It seems a free-floating story without adequate comparisons and contrasts with other characters of the same historical era who share a common fate or by contrast, a different fate. The "larger than life" heroism and the sense of history is simply not there. Malick may want to tackle such big questions as the origin and the meaning of life,  the meaning of death and the nature of God's grace but I don't think that he is there. It was a good try though. There are some very moving scenes, great music and first class photography, very lyrical and even"epic" but only visually and perhaps musically. However,  as a totality, the film simply does not have a successful "epic" structure. Whatever the truth may be, it won the 2011 Palm d'Or at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival.