Tree of Life puts suffering in context of the Earth’s origins
At least twice in its two-and-a-half-hour run The Tree of Life directly references the story of Job; once in an epigraph and again in a church sermon that directly addresses the problem of suffering. It’s a natural question in a film whose emotional instigation is the death of a son testing the faith of the O’Brien family in 1950s Waco: Why do bad things happen to good people? What good is a loving God if He distributes tragedy and triumph with inscrutable capriciousness?
The sheer scale of those questions has proved too great for entire civilizations let alone a single film but director Terrence Malick has never been lacking in ambition. His previous films have explored such topics as war poverty and imperialism without shying from the breadth of any of those discussions — leading to a sprawling and beautiful but not particularly accessible catalogue. The Tree of Life is a natural extension of those themes using the nuclear family of America’s most idealized era as a locus for its meditations. But while family life may seem a narrower focus than his earlier films Malick is unafraid to let his gaze wander from the smallest of details to the largest.
Much has been said about The Tree of Life’s middle third which moves from the origins of the universe through to the dawn of earthly life in a staggeringly beautiful set of special effects sequences. Narratively these sequences are inconsequential at least on the level of human comprehension and that is exactly the point: Next to the scale of life the universe and everything questions of human suffering seem impossibly insignificant.
In spite of the sobering context though Malick’s film isn’t about minimizing humanity. The remaining portions those following the young Jack O’Brien (played by Hunter McCracken as a child and Sean Penn as an adult) and his unnamed parents (Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain in wonderfully understated performances) seem to argue that scale isn’t everything. Aided by cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki Malick’s camera drifts aimlessly through the endless Texan summer chronicling Jack’s childhood without forcing it into an artificial narrative. Instead Malick presents beautifully observed moments. Jack and his father fight. His friends encourage him to engage in boyish destructiveness; he does the same to his younger brother. His parents exist as archetypes of the disciplinarian father and the softhearted mother as all parents do to their children; Pitt and Chastain’s performances are enough to hint at the greater depths.
Given the scope of its subject matter there are undoubtedly many who will find The Tree of Life bloated — there’s a reason it drew equal doses of cheers and jeers when it played Cannes. It doesn’t offer answers and occasionally can’t even articulate its own questions. Even at its most ponderous though The Tree of Life is a beautiful film. If the thought of understanding family life via the Big Bang sounds unbearably pretentious steer clear — Malick is making no concessions for those who question the value of capital-A Art. The questions he is dealing with are already big enough.
