The Tree of Life opens in limited release today, and it’s well worth the attention of anyone who likes films that a) are visually stunning, b) explore mankind’s fundamental issues of meaning, religion, and spirituality, and c) eschew conventional narrative structure. If you find at least two of these three elements unappealing, you would be wise to skip this film. For those who are left, I strongly recommend the movie: Director Terrence Malick (Badlands, Days of Heaven) loves compellingly beautiful images, and presents over two hours’ worth of them in this eschato-theological family drama starring Brad Pitt (who is one of our best actors, and terrific in this part) and Sean Penn (also one of our best, but underused here).
The film begins with a quote from the Book of Job, in which God gives his famous — and non-responsive — response to Job’s challenge about the purpose and meaning of suffering. “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?” God asks, “[when] the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy?” The film briskly establishes what there is of a plot — a Waco, Texas, family in the 1950s experiences the death of a teenage son — and then turns into a series, about 20 to 30 minutes long, of amazing images drawn from both the microscopic and the cosmic levels. It then returns to the 1950s family dealing with its grief, intercut with the present-day life of the surviving son.
The film itself is essentially an illustration of the quote from Job 38 — asserting that the world is a beautiful and mysterious place, and that death and loss are to be accepted as part of this beauty and mystery. There are a handful of scenes in which the Catholicism of the central characters plays a rather understated part, but the film’s imagery is otherwise almost completely non-sectarian: This is an attempt at a universal vision of man’s fate, and a call for faith in the face of life’s cruelties.
Of course, the notion that we should have hope and courage in the face of pain and grief because the universe is beautiful is a intellectually difficult one. Consider the tornadoes that are wreaking such mayhem in the U.S. these days: If you look at videos of tornadoes, they are remarkably beautiful; should this really console the families of those who have lost loved ones in the wreckage? Remember when, shortly after 9/11, composer Karlheinz Stockhausen discussed the terror attacks as a “work of art”? There was widespread outrage, and I agreed with his critics’ basic point: To view an image of destruction, no matter how visually compelling, chiefly from an aesthetic perspective, is to suggest that one harbors a rather heartless indifference to the suffering of the victims, and a lack of desire to blame the perpetrators of it. In the case of 9/11, the destruction was caused by murderers, whom we do not exculpate simply because there happen to be remarkable photos of their crime. So, in principle, might it be with tornadoes; though in their case we might legitimately suspect that the tornadoes themselves are not conscious and morally culpable, so we will look up the chain of causality to see whether they might have been crafted by (to borrow a phrase from the Discovery Institute) an “Intelligent Designer,” who can then bear the blame.
So the experience of beauty is not, taken in the abstract, an adequate response to Job’s — indeed, man’s — question. But what Malick has tried to create in this film is a concrete image of the universe that believers see, and ask audiences to join in contemplating it. In one of the first lines in the movie, the narrator contrasts the “way of nature,” which is self-seeking, and the “way of grace,” which is full of love and acceptance and can transcend pain and humiliation. The film’s imagery is bold and stunning, but it is actually modest in what it asks us to do: It does not browbeat the audience into accepting a theist point of view (as too much of conventional religious apologetic would do) but merely asks us to look at material realities, and consider whether the way of grace — of the spirit — might be the best way to respond to them.
In short, then, this is a serious and beautiful film; strongly recommended.