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The Tree of Life
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Great Events and
Ordinary People
Cinema cannot escape its essence. It
can achieve the eternal only by unreservedly searching for it in the exactitude
of the instant.
– André Bazin, 15 April
1944
Why
should we be so scared of a cosmic or cosmological ambition in cinema? It has
always been part of the potential – and destiny – of film to mix the smallest
with the largest, the immediate everyday with the longue durée of grand history, the microscopic with the
macroscopic. This drive has most often expressed itself – as in F.W. Murnau or Alexander
Dovzhenko – in terms of an interplay between human affairs and the natural
world: a meteorology of the emotions, a vast swirl of events grand and
miniscule happening simultaneously but in different time-zones (temporalities,
as we say today), at different speeds, projecting different worlds.
Charles
Laughton’s sublime The Night of the Hunter (1955) – a film much admired by Terrence Malick, I gather – gives us an
immortal image-thought about this, in its juxtaposition (within a single,
magically tricked-up frame) of the two children floating down a river, escaping
a malign destiny, and the frogs, owls and rabbits inhabiting the bank. Robert
Bresson gave the image another, grimier kind of resolution in The Devil, Probably (1976), in which
found footage of the planets (taken from experimental cinema) mixed with the
barren lives of lost, beautiful teenagers. Jean-Luc Godard, especially in his
work of the 1980s and ‘90s like Hail Mary (1985) and Puissance de la parole (1988) enthusiastically articulated and explored the micro/macro relation. Stan
Brakhage (an enormous admirer of Malick) tackled it all in Dog Star Man (1961-1964) and many other works; the avant-garde has
frequently gravitated to it.
Today,
this ambition to mix the great events of the cosmos (or often large-scale
History) with the everyday lives or ordinary people is everywhere in cinema.
Sometimes the result has an avowed religious aura, and sometimes it does not –
and the slippery zone of ambiguity between these two options on screen is what makes
some of these films so captivating and intriguing, as it did decades ago in the
work of Dreyer and what has been called his cinema of doubt (in which there
were, nonetheless, miracles). We find the trace of all this, in various ways
and at various levels, in Bruno Dumont’s Outside
Satan (2011), in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011), in Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia
for the Light (2010), even in Raúl Ruiz’s Mysteries of Lisbon (2010).
The Tree of Life is a
veritable meteor in the sky of contemporary filmmaking. Many of the negative
comments made about in the already thousands of pages devoted to it in print
and on-line – alongside the often equally inarticulate reams of praise – are
deadeningly normative. You just can’t do that in a film, they cry! Do what? Mix the grand frame with the miniature
vignette, the birth of the world with the birth of a child, the eons of time
that attach to a scale of material becoming with the human time that attaches
to the generations of a family. Mix the impersonal emanations of light and
atoms with the painfully personal (indeed, nakedly autobiographical)
fluctuations of feeling between three brothers and their parents in a house. Mix
the historic dinosaurs with the toys and the lamps and the storybooks.
Those
dinosaurs. If you can’t go with the dinosaurs, The Tree of Life is lost to you as an experience. Let’s get this
straight, right here and now. The scene is fantastic, and presents the entire
movie (or at least the strata of it relating to interpersonal, intersubjective
experience) in a microcosmic nutshell – here, more than even in Days of Heaven (1978), Malick manages to make each fragment
of the work a total encapsulation, a reflection or refraction or recreation of
the whole. What do we see? A dinosaur, seeming pretty sure of itself, plods
along until it sees a smaller, obviously weaker creature lying down. What does
it do, what is its reflex? It stomps on the neighbour, his foot to its head! Then takes the foot away, but keeps it
hovering. Some movement from the poor creature below. More gently – but still
definitely – the foot gets put back on the head. Then, even more gently
removed. It’s established, finally: no real threat in this ‘first contact’
(we’re back to The New World [2005]…), this encounter. The
bigger dinosaur goes on its way.
All
interactions in the film rather like that: apprehension, doubt, fear, the
ever-present hint or threat of violence; as well as some tenderness,
consideration, maybe even compassion. Has this got anything much to do with a
God, a deity of any kind watching over and planning out the moves? Not really.
As has been observed, Malick has made a timely film that appears to bring both
the wondrous First Moment of Creationism together with the wayward, hands-off,
unregulated path of Evolution. Logic and Chaos combined. Because in Malick’s
universe, as in the philosophy of Simone Weil, a God may be in the deep
background somewhere but He is a long, long way off, and not intervening at
all. Not answering our prayers. And all we have in the Here and Now – which
stretches to Infinity – is a cycle of suffering, inexplicable suffering.
There
are pockets of ambiguity in the telling of The
Tree of Life that catch up its viewers and reviewers in intriguing ways
(the same thing happens with Claire Denis’ films). Like with the put-upon
soldiers in The Thin Red Line (1998),
it’s not always easy to tell who is who, whose voice we are hearing on the
soundtrack, or be able to tell near look-alikes apart. That kid who dies
swimming, is he one of the central three brothers? He turns out not to be, but I
immediately found myself straining to catch a glimpse of all three of them
alive again, as the shots and the bodies flew past me. A terror or dread in
this, which unfolds from one end of the film to the other. And likewise,
ambiguities in the shuffling of chronology, and in the quite frequent recourse
to imaginary, dream-like images – visions of the purely possible (mother [Jessica
Chastain] floating, boy in an open grave, a chair moving, the house full of
water … ).
Near
the start, tragic news is delivered: the death of a beloved son. Then we go
back and, for a long time, on my first viewing, I figured it was the
particularly sullen kid, so prone to bad moods and inchoate rages, who was the
one marked for death. Wrong. (It’s R.L. [Laramie Eppler] who dies at 19, and
Jack [Sean Penn] as a teenager [Hunter McCarcken] who’s the sullen one.) But
the fact remains that the mark of death, in the universe of this Distant God,
hovers over all of us and picks its victims with a randomness that will never
make any good sense. And most of the religious talk we hear snatches of in the
film (church scenes, sermons, platitudes of faith and belief) is just the sum
of what distracts us from this senselessness. Forget “the way of grace and the
way of nature” as some sort of explanatory signpost over the film; Malick has
always erected such binary categories only to demolish them, confound them,
reveal their subterranean connections and complex interrelationships.
The Tree of Life is
about what the great filmmaker Ken Jacobs once called the mystery of personality: why does one person pull through the
endless hard times that a lousy world bequeaths us, while his/her brother or
neighbour or best friend does not? Anyone – and not the one you necessarily
expect – can take a wrong turn in this film, a swirl or an eddy amidst all
those cosmic waves, be transformed by a mood, by a “bad thought”. A Spinozist
film in this sense, like those of Philippe Grandrieux. Incredible scene of the
father and son finding their way to playing music together, a simple but lovely
piano and guitar duet – but then the brooding brother, off to the side in the
yard, excluded from the rapture.
A
lot of normative nonsense is declared about how the characters here lack
detailed, three-dimensional psychology, how their rapport is as facile,
stereotypical and predictable as in a familial melodrama like The Great Santini (1979) or somesuch.
But films don’t need those kinds of characters: not Malick films, anyhow. All
that’s required – it has been enough for Godard, Béla Tarr, Leos Carax, Šarūnas Bartas,
Abel Ferrara, Miklós Jancsó and so many others – is that a character be a figure and that the actor have some presence.
Meaning:
their role is, from the outset, known – a repetition, a type, an icon (“father,
brother, mother”: we hear this litany of names and roles frequently in Malick).
Meaning: what the living performer brings to it, in contact with all the
material properties of film on the move, is a constant transformation, constant
metamorphosis. Who needs psychological backstory when you’re so close to the
raw affects of solitude, of pain, of desire? In this first Malick movie to
offer any kind of conscious, anthological recapitulation of his past work,
there is the scene – the scene of first love, first desire, between boy and
girl in the classroom – that takes us right back to Kit and Holly in the leafy,
wide, suburban street in Badlands (1973):
always, Malick starts from what is larger than real life, eternal in Bazin’s
sense, in order to immediately plunge right down into the tiniest world of
sensations, of moment-to-moment identity-change. And The Tree of Life comes further into this realm of the microcosmic
self than he has ever dared go before.
The
more I watch The Tree of Life, the more
I am astounded by its tightly woven, poetic structure. It’s an utterly free but
also extremely controlled film. Poesis in cinema is not a matter of tasteful
music selections or pretty cinematography (to which some have regularly tried
to reduce Malick’s work – too pretty by half, and what a mix-tape of modern
classics!). Beyond the metaphors and symbols that act, here and there, as
familiar anchors – birds in the sky, open doorways in a landscape, water, air –
there is all the more elusive stuff. This is an astonishingly rapid fwork,
never lingering, flying on and past so many years, so many feelings, so much
experience. It takes on an entire developmental gamut from birth to adulthood,
with every pothole in-between delicately mined. The enigma of the Other and the
motif of Encounter, for example – as announced in the dinosaur scene – takes on
many shapes and variations, from bewilderment to brotherly trust, from
murderous or just plain callous cruelty (put your finger in this electric
socket, or against the tip of my air gun) through to the disconcerting, social
experience of the crippled or the dispossessed or the marginal out along the
town’s main strip.
I
have heard and rea engaging, inventive attempts to say what The Tree of Life is fundamentally about – not like a secret to be
uncovered, more like a guiding thread to be discovered, somewhere in the weave.
Curious details insist, and differently so on each new viewing, as if a slight
alteration in one’s own angle changes the perception of the whole (how the word
“experiment” comes up twice, in two different time-slices, for instance). It is
(for instance) a film about running, about movement: Murnau with a Steadicam.
It is a film about a house, or rather the metamorphosis of a house (a home)
into many houses: filled, emptied, packed up, left behind, refilled, remade.
Precisely the film of a domestic, familial interior that, so far, Malick has
resisted shooting in his career, perhaps because (as Neil Young sang in
“Helpless”) “all my changes were there”.
Every
individual open to the film finds – often in a delighted shock – some miniscule
detail directly out of their own young lives (for me, it’s when Dad at the
dinner table asks: “And what have you learnt today, my fine-feathered
friend?”). What joy in the scene when the kids – suddenly free of the
crankiness and forbidding ways of the Father (Bard Pitt) – tear loose and run
wildly from room to room, slamming doors, bringing in lizards, roping their
mother (despite her civilised reluctance) into the infectious sense of abandon.
Again,
the whole film is summarised there, just as it everywhere: the superb editing
that whisks us into and out of gestures and movements with hardly a second to
register them, the overlay of Couperin’s “Les Barricades Mistérieuses”, the
physical improvisation (how many superbly unreadable gestures there are in this
film, as if little Edmund from Germany,
Year Zero [1948] had been resurrected, or indeed never died, and remained
an inscrutable, solemn child, playing in the ruins, eternally).
It’s
curious to me that some champions of the film try to tie it down to a
schematic, reductive kind of sense, shape or form: it’s all inside a guy’s
head, cosmic visions and all! Actually, there are clues to that feed such an
interpretation (just as there is some evidence for the film being a kind of Incident at Owl Creek all-life-rushing-past-at-the moment-of-death vision), especially when a boy
asks his mother something like: “Tell us a story of from before we can
remember” – and, of course, The Tree of
Life, in its totality, is something like that very story, a tale of origins
and the effects spiralling out of from every small existence (the Butterfly Effect!).
But
why do we need such a frame to rein the film in and explain it? Movies should
be made to get us out of heads (especially our own), not lock us inside one.
Or, better: films should dwell and dance in what Raymond Bellour called (his
example was Ritwik Ghatak, another micro-macro artist) the “ever-tested limit,
so difficult to touch, between interior and exterior, realist image and mental
image, perception and hallucination”.
Most
articles on Malick (mine included) like to heavy-hit from the outset with a
prefatory nod to a Great and Deep Philosopher: Heidegger, Plato, Weil, Cavell …
Yet, while we know that Malick has swam in these waters, I wonder whether, with
the years, he has also worked (this is pure speculation) to divest himself of
some good deal of this apparatus of learning, this cultural and intellectual
sophistication. In any rare report of public speech, he only wants to talk
innocence, freshness, spontaneity, childhood perception. Like, again, Brakhage,
or Philippe Grandrieux: Eden before the animals were named, before our adult
identities are fixed, badly congealed, inescapably neurotic. It is like reading
Daniel Stern’s The Interpersonal World of
the Infant, with its system of emergent senses of self all co-existing in
the same growing child (a model Raymond Bellour has nimbly adapted to cinema),
and lurking around forever despite our best efforts at erasure and repression: those
superimposed selves take in the most abstract rushes and washes of affect all
the way to the most powerfully symbolised moments of ethical choice and
destiny-formation.
Malick,
it seems, always has a plan (some kind of launch-pad script) but – as one young
punk once protested to me about all intellectual and creative work – the plan
must fly off, get lost. Like Wong Kar-wai, Malick (as David Cronenberg’s
composer Howard Shore once described the process) “starts wide”, explores all
possibilities, then contracts, filters, shapes. It is as noble as any other way
of working, and riskier than most. Industry-norm types like to mock directors
who hack out whole streams of material in this manner or produce multiple cuts:
they just don’t know what they’re after, what a waste of resources! But I like
it that Malick names his film after a Miltonic Tree of Life that we see planted
by Dad when one of his children is young (classic set-up for a Kazanian developmental
narrative: A Tree Grows in Waco), but
(as far as I’ve noticed) we never return to – just as Sean Penn’s character’s
apparently crumbling marriage is no more than a bitter bedroom glance and a
postural lassitude of the body.
But
why linger? The Mother-figure in Anne-Marie Miéville’s twin-film to Hail Mary, Le Livre de Marie (1985) said it well: “When a thing stops moving,
it’s dead”.
MORE Malick: A Hidden Life © Adrian Martin September 2011 |