BEFORE: Jessica Chastain carries over from "The Debt". You might very well ask, "Why not watch this one with the other two Brad Pitt films?" It's a very good question, and the simple answer is that I work holisticly here, I look at two or three months of the schedule at a time, so I don't feel the need to get to every one of each actor's film at one time, I might need one of the films for a crucial link, like I do today. I needed an outro for the Helen Mirren chain, and this one gets me to a big film (I'm hoping...) for round number 3,500 tomorrow. You just never know, or correction, I just never know, which films are the shining moments and which ones are going to turn out to be duds.
Besides, if I'd watched this one right after "Ad Astra" and "Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood" then I wouldn't have been able to squeeze in those two Al Pacino films, and then connected to the Helen Mirren films, one of which was perfectly timed for April 1. So while it seems like madness, I assure you there's some method in my madness. Not a huge amount, but some.
THE PLOT: The story of a family in Waco, Texas in 1956. The eldest son witnesses the loss of innocence and struggles with his parents' conflicting teachings.
AFTER: Terrence Malick, of course, has a high reputation as a director, from what I hear and read about, anyway. Before today, I'd only seen one of his films, "The Thin Red Line", which was a long World War II film with a cast of hundreds. Checking my notes, I gave that one a "4", I must have thought it was too long. But it was also based on a novel by James Jones, so perhaps I didn't really give Malick his due, and I shouldn't judge anyone based on just one film. How does a film both written and directed by Malick compare?
Well, that's not an easy question to answer - because this is either Malick's visionary masterpiece, or a confusing, rambling montage of life events. Can it possibly be both? I feel like maybe somehow it's both. I'm going to try to write something here while the film is still fresh in my mind, then at some point I'll go check out the plot summary on Wikipedia and the trivia section on IMDB to try to gain some insight. Yesterday I was (almost) complaining about the use of flashback in "The Debt", this one takes it to the extreme. After a short intro sequence where we see the O'Brien parents being notified about the death of their son in the past, we're shown a segment from the present where the adult Jack O'Brien is working in an office, and is seen apologizing to his father on the phone for something he said, reflecting, finding it difficult to concentrate, and then he's seen wandering in a desert. Does he suddenly leave the city and go on vacation, or is the desert a metaphorical one, a symbol for how he feels about his life?
Then the film flashes WAY back, like maybe to the dawn of time, and Malick shows us footage of various nebulas, galaxies spinning in the cosmic ether, suns forming and planets cooling, and it's clear at this point that somebody's aiming for "arty", but who's to say it didn't look like that as the universe was forming? We've got no frame of reference for it, after all. Eventually we're on what looks like Earth in prehistoric times, and cells merge in the primordial ooze and form simple lifeforms that look like jellyfish, and as the montage continues we see sea dinosaurs, sharks, then land dinosaurs and finally some mammalian hearts beating. A wave seen moving across the Earth's surface could be one of several extinction-level events, perhaps the meteorite that led to the end of the dinos. Back then there were a lot of extinction-level events, they're part of the reason that mammals and then humans were able to evolve and thrive. Some of the events shown, like one dinosaur showing compassion to another by not killing it, would seem to be a throwback to the opening sequences of "2001: A Space Odyssey", only with the opposite result.
But this also relates to the O'Brien family, because the film then skips over most of human history to get us back to Waco, Texas in 1956. But the voice-overs tell us that there are two ways to live, the way of nature and the way of grace. (This, I believe, is connected to that compassionate dinosaur, somehow.). One parent will come to represent the harshness of nature, man's inhumanity to man, and the other the compassion of grace. Yep, Dad is nature and Mom is grace. Only don't call him "Dad", because he demands that his three sons refer to him as "Father", followed by a "Yes, sir" or a "No, sir". You know what, better make sure that's a "Yes, sir." because any back-talk from his kids tends to set him off. He claims to love his sons, but also believes that he needs to instill discipline so they will be tough enough to survive life's challenges.
Many parents thought along these lines in the 1950's, and times may be different now, but for the most part, we've got a couple generations' worth of really soft kids, with their gluten allergies and their participation trophies and their desires to grow up and be social media influencers. Being in my early 50's now, I'm kind of on the fence about which method of child-rearing is better, the old-school discipline one or the modern, gentle approach. When I was a kid, my father also had a bit of a temper (he's since mellowed considerably) but he never hit me, just yelled, mostly at my mother. I'm tempted to say I had things pretty easy, as long as I did well in school and mowed the lawn once in a while, I pretty much got a pass from them, but I find myself now struggling with my own self-discipline issues, so I almost wish they'd been a little stricter on me. Almost, because when I think back on my childhood it was pretty darn good, so maybe I shouldn't wish it was any different.
For the next hour, I thought that was what this film was going to be about - those great moments of childhood, shown rapid-fire style in a very long montage, things like summer picnics and holding sparklers outside at night, trick-or-treating and activities like jigsaw puzzles or shadow-puppets. Then, of course, since you have to take the bad with the good, there are times when Dad made you do a lot of yardwork, or punished you for slamming the door by making you close it quietly fifty times in a row. Dragging you to church on Sunday, ugh, I wish I could get all that time I spent in church for 17 years back, all in a big chunk, now. Who the hell reaches middle age, looks back and says, "Darn, I wish I'd spent more time in church!"?
Then pre-teen Jack experiences some real lows - a friend drowns in the lake, and another is burned in a house-fire (again, this is part of the montage/tableau, so the film really doesn't slow down much to explain each individual thing.). He becomes angry at his father for being abusive and angry at his mother for her tolerating that. Then when Mr. O'Brien goes away on a long business trip, the three boys have a number of fun experiences with just their mother, only Jack also starts rebelling, committing acts of vandalism and breaking into houses. Shortly after Mr. O'Brien returns, he loses his job at the plant, but is given an option to take another job in another location, so the family has to pack up and move away.
That's the end of the flashback, but when we're back to adult Jack in the present, he's having strange visions, I guess? Actually, what happens after this point seems to be a matter of interpretation, because it's impossible from a narrative viewpoint, Jack is (or imagines himself to be) walking along a sandbar with his family members, and honestly, I couldn't tell if he was supposed to be dead at this point, or just experiencing a dream or some wishful thinking. How is adult Jack walking on this imaginary (?) plane next to his young brothers. He's with his parents, who seem to be the same age as him, how is that possible? And if this is the afterlife, do you just stay the same age in heaven that you were when you died? What if you lost an eye or an arm or something, do you get it back in heaven or do you just spend eternity without it?
There also seems to be a lot of detail missing - like, which son died at the start of the film? Obviously not Jack, but there were two other brothers, so which one? And apparently the third brother died at a different time, was this not worth mentioning? Come to think of it, we know very little about the adult Jack - I had to learn from the IMDB credits that he had an ex-wife, what happened there? When Jack is an adult, is his mother still alive? All of this is unclear, and the lack of a clear linear narrative here isn't really helping. For that matter, adult Jack is an extremely underdeveloped character, what's his deal, what's he all about? Reportedly there was a lot of footage of Sean Penn as adult Jack that didn't get used in the film, some say enough to make an entire other movie. That seems like a bit of a curious choice, unless the footage is terrible, or Sean Penn had trouble delivering his lines or something.
What makes this film particularly timely for this month, this week, is the fact that the Book of Job quoted at the beginning of the film. It's a completely unintentaionl reference to our troubling times, perhaps. Job was tested by God, after being prompted by Satan, who suggested that Job was pious only because he had been blessed with wealth, health and a family. After God gives Satan permission to take away those things, Job still praises God. (I realize, this is the short version, I'm leaving out a lot...). Eventually Job becomes an outcast, sick with boils and demands God explain why he is made to suffer, when he lived by principles and did nothing wrong. Basically, God pulls rank and acts all righteous, claiming that it's not something that Job would ever understand.
Over some of the more artistic scenes in "The Tree of Life", we hear some of the characters saying lines, and one stood out for me: "Why does our father want to hurt us?" This was probably one of the O'Brien sons wondering why their father was abusive, but it has a double meaning if you think of God as the father. Why does God plague people with troubles? Again, religion falls back on the old "it's not for us to understand" and "God works in mysterious ways", which are awfully convenient things for theologians without answers to say. Or, there's another possibility, that the troubles don't come from God, because he doesn't exist. It's just as likely, that's all I'm saying.
I was reminded of a documentary from the 1980's, called "Koyaanisqatsi" - the title is a Hopi indian term for "Life out of balance". It contrasted a bunch of beautiful nature photography with images of big-city life, sped up to the point where cars on city streets appeared to be like blood cells pulsing in veins. Everything was set to Philip Glass music, and I think I watched it on PBS back in 1983, and it really had an impact on me. I think it might be time for a re-watch of this film, which also had gritty footage of random street people, I remember a lot of clouds moving in time-lapse footage, and then it ends with a rocket exploding at the end. Perhaps this was my first encounter with non-narrative composition, a film that has no plot but still manages to convey an idea, which is that man is living out of harmony with nature, and that city life, outside of the influence of Earth's environment, is a crazy, disintegrating thing. This is a point that was driven home again lately, think about how quickly the Covid-19 virus spread through New York, with its high population density, crowded subways and often unsanitary conditions.
Anyway, back to "The Tree of Life". That IMDB trivia page confirmed what I suspected, that many of the narrative points here in the story of the O'Brien family came from Malick's own life - he grew up in rural Texas with two brothers, his father was an aspiring musician who played the organ in church, and worked as a geologist for an oil company. One of Malick's brothers committed suicide at age 19 while studying music in Europe, the other died at age 60, years after being burned in a car crash. Both of Malick's parents were alive when "The Tree of Life" came out, so I guess we sort of have to fill in the details not seen in the film with those from Malick's life, and we can sort of read between the lines. So therefore Jack O'Brien is a stand-in for Terrence Malick, and also the biblical Job in a way (initials J.O.B.).
I did recognize some Austin, TX landmarks, like the Texas State Capitol building, which my wife and I visited in October 2018. There's a very prominent rotunda, and I recall taking photos of it from below, which gave me a very dizzying feeling. Then as you walk around the floors surrounding the open central space, there are portraits of all of the past Texas governors, like Ann Richards, George W. Bush and Rick Perry. Also there's footage of bats flying around in formation, and I recall that as one of the tourist attractions in Austin, the bats live under the Congress Avenue bridge, and fly around in the evenings in spring and fall, eating mosquitos. They didn't the day we were there, though, because it was raining.
This film used to be on the list of "1,001 Movies You Must See Before You Die" - at least it was on the list when I started tracking my progress in 2014, but by 2017 it had dropped off the list, in favor of newer movies. So I can kind of see, from a critical POV, why it made the list originally, but also why it kind of scrolled off of it. Whatever committee decides on this list seems very hesitant to remove some of the older classics and foreign films, but if you ask me, some of those old films really need to be jettisoned to make room on the list for newer films. Removing the not-quite-as-new films from the last decade seems a bit counter-productive, because modern movies are just better, in all senses of the word. Am I likely to go and watch "Broken Blossoms" from 1916, or "Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler" from 1922? No way, they should be removed from the list so they can keep slots open for "Spotlight" from 2015 and "Arrival" from 2016.
I swear, I didn't even realize that today is Palm Sunday, and I just watched a film that's tangentially about religion, and has a tree in the title. I must have known on some subconscious level, but really, this was a total accident, one of many. Once again, my chain managed to be coincidentally relevant.
Also starring Brad Pitt (last seen in "Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood"), Sean Penn (last seen in "Fair Game"), Hunter McCracken, Laramie Eppler, Tye Sheridan (last seen in "X-Men: Dark Phoenix"), Kari Matchett, Joanna Going (last seen in "Love & Mercy"), Michael Showers (last seen in "I Love You Phillip Morris"), Kimberly Whalen, Jackson Hurst, Fiona Shaw (last seen in "Pixels"), Crystal Mantecon, Tamara Jolaine (last seen in "Boyhood"), Savannah Welch (ditto), Dustin Allen, Michael Dixon, Finnegan Williams, Michael Koeth, John Howell.
RATING: 5 out of 10 patent claims
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