The Tree Of Life

A film is not the telling of a dream, but a dream in which we all participate together through a kind of hypnosis . . . By dream, I mean a succession of real events that follow on from one another with the magnificent absurdity of dreams, since the spectators would not have linked them together in the same way or have imagined them for themselves, but experience them in their seats as they might experience, in their beds, strange adventures for which they are not responsible... - Jean Cocteau

“Guide us to the end of time” prays Jack’s voiceover in Terrence Malick’s new film The Tree Of Life. Jack’s appeal, undoubtedly meant for God, seemed to echo my unspoken petition of Malick whilst watching his new film. Judging by the varying degrees of bemused disappointment I overheard on my way out of the theatre, it seems that this surrender to, or acceptance of, Malick’s ‘guidance’ is the only way to experience the film without feeling as if you’ve just been forced to endure an unwelcomed two hour slideshow on ‘the meaning of existence’ by a crackpot door to door evangelist. The problems with this much-voiced reading are simple and lie in either misattributing the qualities of a cinematic vanguard to a religious crackpot, or in expecting this film to be Legends of The Fall II.

Personally, I loved the film. Not because I ‘understood it’ (a phenomena that people, standing outside on an increasingly crowded Market street sidewalk, seemed especially concerned in letting each other know they ‘had’ or ‘hadn’t’ done), but because it explored the very ends of things with the very ends of it’s medium. In Malick’s search for meaning in existence he gives cinema an ambition and purpose far beyond its previous realizations. The Tree Of Life asks questions I’ve never seen film ask in ways I’ve never seen film question. With this film Malick has well and truly developed his own cinematic language.

The death of the middle of the three brothers, revealed at the start of the film, casts its shadow across what is to follow, and considering the film’s action spans from before time to after it, this is no small feat. It is this lingering sense of loss that gives weight to images intent on taking off, floating around and jump cutting backwards and forwards in time- sometimes seconds, sometimes longer. To this end the camera seems never content with merely observing the action of the universe (a term that Malick makes sure to include both the young family’s life in the suburbs as well as the far reaches of the galaxy). Instead it thrusts forward and backwards, weaving through the lives of the characters, memories, dinosaurs, dreams and exploding consolations with images of the real and the abstract.

As far as family life in the 1950’s goes, it seems that Malick, his actors, his cinematographer and his production designer created a place where a story could happen and then hoped that it would. The moments between the children appear awoken from lost memories; with their mother they appear lifted from dreams; with their father they seem straight out of a nightmare. The ambiguity surrounding the source of the images (are they recollections, flashbacks, ruminations on what might have happened-what might happen?) is at once disorientating and exhilarating. Are they the visions of the characters’ or the director? I’m not sure. “The way of grace and the way of nature” we are told are the two ways through life. Are they made diametrically clear in the narrative of the film? I don’t think so. Does grace forgive nature? Grace is found in nature too, right? ‘I don’t understand!’ my friend whispers in my ear as the credits appear. ‘Neither,’ I reply, ‘I think it forgives us though.’

Never before has a filmmaker so beautifully, boldly and nakedly explored the existence of God, and the fabric of dreams, in our universe, our families and our cinema. I am still not sure what exactly happened in that theatre last night, but whoever it was that said Terrence Malick is ‘shy’ was wrong.