Shining Glory

Theological Reflections on Terrence Malick's Tree of Life

Leithart

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781621897859
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Religión

Terrence Malick's stunning film The Tree of Life is a modern Job story, an exploration of suffering and glory, an honest look at strife within a Texas family in the 1950s. In Shining Glory, Peter J. Leithart examines the biblical and theological motifs of the film and illuminates how Malick exploited the visual poetry of film to produce one of the most spiritually challenging and theologically sophisticated films ever made.

Chapter 1

Visual Lyricism

“Love smiles through everything.”

--Mrs. O’Brien

The first time I watched The Tree of Life in an Atlanta theater, one of the people with me was so confused by the film that she didn’t realize until the credits rolled that Sean Penn and Hunter McCracken were playing the same character at different ages (Jack O’Brien). After the film opened, the story spread that an Italian projectionist got the reels confused and showed the second before the first. Nobody noticed the mistake until it was all over.

Anecdotes such as these tell us something about our expectations of film, and how Terrence Malick’s 2010 film violates them. Film is often thought to be a narrative art. That’s an understandable perspective. Many films are based on novels, graphic or otherwise, and films share many of the features of a literary narrative—character, setting, episode, a plot with beginning, middle, and end. It’s possible to use the categories and concepts of literary criticism to describe film. Films play with temporal sequences, but filmmakers learned that from storytellers, beginning with the Homer of the Odyssey.

Whatever we might say about the general run of films, Malick is not essentially a narrative filmmaker and The Tree of Life is not essentially a narrative film. Anyone who comes to the film with the expectation that its main business is to tell a story is going to lose his way, and is likely to be disappointed.

The Tree of Life is hard to follow. Characters are not always easy to identify,1 and most are never named. The film makes quick cuts, sometimes to scenes that seem completely unrelated to the previous action. Scenes overlap with and spill into each other, so that at some moments in the film there are three or more time-frames at work simultaneously, one visual, one in voiceover, one indicated by the music. Terms like “elusive,” “elliptical,” “impressionistic” slip regularly from the critics.2

Yet the film does tell a story and, for all its complexities and sophistications, and for all the large questions that it raises, the film’s narrative is quite simple. Though not shown in chronological sequence, three main time periods are identifiable by the age of the characters, especially Jack, and by the style of cars and houses. The earliest period, which we glimpse early in the movie but settle into halfway through the film, is the infancy, childhood, and boyhood of the O’Brien boys. Jack’s earliest years are given in fragmentary flashbacks that eventually settle into longer episodes. During the longest narrative sequence, Jack is twelve years old. The second period, which we see early in the film, takes place about a decade later. The O’Brien parents are no longer living in their earlier home. We never see Jack or his brother R. L. in this second time period, only Mr. and Mrs. O’Brien. The most recent period is Jack’s middle age, when Jack is played by a brooding Sean Penn. Though the first time frame in the film receives the most airtime, the crucial time frame is the last—Jack’s adult “present.”

The opening of the film introduces us to the categories that we need for making sense of the film. In a voiceover accompanying the opening scenes, Mrs. O’Brien (Jessica Chastain) recalls a lesson that she learned from the nuns concerning the “way of nature” and the “way of grace.” We see scenes from her childhood and she is shown as an adult swinging from the tree swing, playing with her boys, sitting at the dinner table with her husband and family. Only a few minutes into the film, Mrs. O’Brien declares her loyalty to God and the way of grace with the words, “I will be true to you, whatever comes.” As we hear “whatever comes,” a delivery boy carries a telegram to her front door. It is devastating news, and she collapses with an aborted cry of “O God.” Later we learn that her second son, R. L., died at the age of nineteen. R. L.’s death is the heart of the film, the tragic center around which everything else circulates.

We never learn how R. L. died, but that episode fills the entire film with Malick’s own anguish. In his 1998 Vanity Fair profile of Malick, Peter Biskind wrote of Malick’s brothers:

Larry, the youngest, went to Spain to study with the guitar virtuoso Segovia. Terry discovered in the summer of 1968 that Larry had broken his own hands, seemingly despondent over his lack of progress. Emil [Malick’s father], concerned, went to Spain and returned with Larry’s body; it appeared the young man had committed suicide. Like most relatives of those who take their own lives, Terry must have borne a heavy burden of irrational guilt. According to Michèle, the subject of Larry was never mentioned.3

The Tree of Life is a cinematic homage to Larry Malick, a celluloid requiem.

After the opening sequence, the film focuses on a single day in the life of the adult Jack, which is the anniversary of R. L.’s death. Jack is an architect at a large and prosperous firm, but he is spiritually withered, haunted and guilt-ridden by the memory of his brother. Jack has wandered away from the God he knew as a boy, and now stumbles through a dry and weary land where there is no water. In his mind’s eye, he sees R. L. standing at a beach beckoning: “Find me,” he says. The rest of the film is Jack’s attempt, on this one day, to be restored to his brother, to be reconciled to his brother’s fate, and thereby to be reconciled to the universe.

Jack remembers swimming in the Brazos River near Waco and at the local swimming pool. He remembers playing dodge ball in the yard. Above all, he recalls an earlier period of his life when he had wandered away. When a boy drowns in the swimming pool, he questions God’s goodness and the order of the universe. Already estranged from his domineering father, Jack withdraws even further, and becomes alienated from his mother and brother as well. When he hurts R. L., his brother refuses to take vengeance. He forgives Jack and the two are reconciled. R. L.’s compassion touches off reconciliations between Jack and his father and mother, as well as with others in the neighborhood. As Jack recalls those events of his boyhood, he relearns the lesson R. L. taught him. At the end, he finds R. L. on the beach in a vision of reunion that includes not only his brothers but his parents, neighbor children, everyone who has appeared in the film and more. At the end of the day, Jack emerges from his high-rise office building with a relaxed look on his face. He has been reconciled to the cosmos, and his dead brother was the mediator of that reconciliation. The death that drove him away paradoxically brings him back.

To say that the film is not primarily narrative is not to say it lacks incident. As in the novels of Marilynne Robinson (Gilead, Home), The Tree of Life is stuffed with events, but many are told so obliquely, so briefly, that we barely register that they have happened. When Jack is a toddler, there is a brief scene of Mrs. O’Brien hurriedly carrying Jack across the lawn, her face twisted with terror. Behind her a man lies on the lawn shaking with an epileptic fit as another man bends over him to help. An overturned bicycle is on the lawn nearby. What happened? Who are these men? Did the man recover? We never find out. As Mrs. O’Brien walks through town with her boys, they encounter several criminals being packed away into police cruisers. Mrs. O’Brien gives one of the criminals water from her thermos. The criminals never appear in the film again either. What did they do? Where are they going? These minimalist vignettes are the fragments of a life remembered, a collection of “Remember the time whens?” And they are affecting and effective in the same way that memories are.

Malick is not a dialogue-centered filmmaker either. Minutes pass in The Tree of Life without words exchanged between characters, and the voice-over doesn’t fill that gap, since most of the voice-over, if it is dialogue at all, is dialogue with God. Set against the background of the film’s visuals and music, the voice-overs can be quite moving, but they are portentious and occasionally flirt close to the border of pretention. What dialogue there is tends to be stilted and formal, more symbolic and thematic than dramatic. Characters play thematic and archetypal roles. We learn a good deal about Mr. O’Brien’s past, but nothing at all about Mrs. O’Brien’s. Mr. O’Brien works in a factory, and invents things. What he invents, we’re never quite sure. What realism there is to the characterization is the work of the superb cast as much as the screenplay.4

If The Tree of Life were nothing more than this oft-told family story, it would hardly merit so much attention as I am giving it. What makes The Tree of Life a masterpiece is Malick’s decision to widen the scope of this small family story and his exploitation of the visual poetry of film.

Some viewers are confused by Malick’s insertion of a lengthy sequence depicting the evolution of the universe, of earth, and of life. Though it might appear out of place, the sequence fits perfectly with the small family story that Malick tells. The O’Briens suffer a devastating loss, and Malick knows from his own experience that every loss raises global questions about the justice of the world. Everyone who suffers or witnesses inexplicable pain asks, as the O’Briens’ pastor does, “Is there some fraud in the universe?” Malick signals that his interest in the problem of suffering is a theological one in the first frame of the film, which contains a quotation from the book of Job. He paints the small family story on a canvas as big as the cosmos. And he paints it in brilliant colors and with a fascinating composition. One critic noted that while most movies have “moments of poetic montage,” in this case “the entire film is a poetic montage.”5 The film is gorgeous.

Mrs. O’Brien invites us to see the love shining through everything, and Malick’s film not only tells us to see it but makes us see it. Malick gives the gorgeous surface depth and emotional power by the way he overlaps visuals, music, sounds, voices, characters, and episodes. The film delivers what it has to deliver through the dense metaphoricity and visual allusion, juxtaposition of images, and the inversion or twisting of normal clock time. The film is itself a tree, “with seeds, roots, trunk, branches, sticks . . . and leaves, all undergoing duress and change under the weight/wait of Time.”6

Visual allusion first. The allusiveness is so dense and compact that nearly everything in the film is announced in the first moments of the film. The sound of waves and gulls in the first frames takes us forward to the beach scene at the end. A quotation from the book of Job gives the story an epic biblical thrust, and the flame that is the first visual reappears just before the credits. Windows, breezes, grass, nature, grace, beauty, glory, hands, sunflowers, trees, sky—we see or hear about all of these in the first few minutes, and over the course of the film these images recur, spiral out, flower and bloom. Sounds, words, and concepts are linked with visual images, so that when the visual images recur later they carry the concepts along with them. Images get packed with multiple significances. The “tree” of the title is the biblical tree of life, the tree that Mr. O’Brien plans, the backyard tree that the boys climb, the evolutionary tree of Darwinian biology.

Juxtaposition of scenes, and the layered overlap of scenes and dialogue, are crucial techniques for Malick. Early in the film, as Mrs. O’Brien completes her opening meditation on nature and grace, she says “The nuns taught us that no one who lives in the way of grace comes to a bad end.” At that moment, the camera closes in on R. L., whose early death appears to be a standing contradiction to the nuns’ simple message. In a charming moment earl...