Witnessing “The Tree of Life”
I saw Malick’s “The Tree of Life” Friday night and as one might expect of seeing a Malick film, I’ve been thinking about it since. Lots of friends have asked me what I thought about it. I continue to struggle with this question, but I wanted to capture a few thoughts while they’re fresh on my mind.
“The Tree of Life” is a meditation on life in a cosmic sense. There’s your obligatory one sentence summary that describes what it is without revealing what it means. I’ve been saying it’s a “poetic meditation” until today, but to ascribe the terms poem, poetry, or poetic to any of Malick’s work is to state the obvious and become superfluous. His is not a cinema of story or plot or even character, but of feeling, of thinking, of musing. Many other filmmakers have used the first three to comprise something like poetry (John Ford is foremost on my mind), but Malick unlike any other American filmmaker has attempted to circumvent and even resist them in “The Tree of Life” to instill a pure sense of awe and wonder in the viewer. It is indeed an ambitious film.
Visually the film provokes this sense of awe by keeping the camera in constant motion. The scenes in small town suburbia are never static, always fluid, and nearly always moving from afar to near. The camera constantly draws near to things, as if a physical proximity to its subject will somehow bring us understanding. I will undoubtedly see the film again, and I will watch more carefully the second (and probably third) time around, but I don’t recall there being a single zoom in the entire film. Instead the camera investigates, but not mechanically as on a dolly, but fluidly using a Steadicam. I recall Malick being the first filmmaker to employ extensive use of the Steadicam for “Days of Heaven,” and I think it’s a tool he has used artistically unlike any other filmmaker. It has a mesmerizing effect—the camera itself is yearning to know something.
I think that’s at least one of the main things the film is essentially trying to show. When you ask the question that all must ask sometime in our lives, “What does it mean?,” instead of there being an answer, there is simply another question that must be asked. That the answer is “love” is so plain as to be unsatisfactory to us, and we are compelled to ask again in hopes of finding some grand explanation for every-thing. We are by our nature beings of hope, yet as mortal creatures we hope for things which are finite, definable, and understandable. Yet when we find the definition, when we gain an understanding, we still yearn for more.
“The Tree of Life” is arguably the first film which has had the courage to explore this yearning, to investigate its history and posit its origin. It is a mighty and glorious film.
I can’t help but end with this verse from Paul’s first letter to Corinth, a verse which I am certain must be engrained in the fabric of Malick’s being, and which compelled him at least in part to make “The Tree of Life”: “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” It is this quality of seeing in full which “The Tree of Life” strives to show. Instead of a film you watch, it is something majestic which you merely witness.
And now, a postscript.
After the final image faded and the words “Written and Directed by Terrence Malick” appeared on screen, a man in the theater shouted, “Thank God! Let’s all get our money back!” Another man retorted with equal volume, “You can shut the fuck up!” My girlfriend and I talked about this reaction, and the similar reaction from various critics (however less frank and more nuanced), and I think she summed it up well: “I think it also has something to do with why people don’t like poetry. They don’t like to think, or they don’t like to have the patience to let something beautiful wash over them without needing to ‘understand’ it.” That this is arguably a film about our need to understand makes the scene that unfolded as the movie ended ironically poignant, and also, sad.
