(Host) Commentator Bill Mares believes that if there were an Academy
Award for emotional impact, Terrance Malik’s TREE OF LIFE would win
hands down.
When my friend and film critic, Barry Snyder,
recommended that I see the film, THE TREE OF LIFE, by Terrance Malick,
he called it " an overwhelmingly ambitious cinematic gesture that
recalls all the hope and belief in the possibilities of the medium…" And
ambitious it certainly is. This film embraces life from the Big Bang to
an indeterminate future. There are lush visual riffs on creation and
even dinosaurs make a cameo appearance. Sean Penn appears as a troubled
architect wandering through a soulless forest of anonymous skyscrapers,
perhaps some of his own creations.
It reminded me of Stanley
Kubrick’s 20001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. But while Kubrick looked forward for
the central story, Malick looks backward to his home town near Waco,
Texas in the ‘50’s. I grew up in a similar town about 200 miles south of
Waco at about the same time, and seeing The Tree Of Life was like
watching a professionally-made home movie.
Through what Barry
calls the " camera’s floating presence" there were we three brothers
again, wearing striped shirts, chasing each other around backyards,
jumping on beds, and waging watery war with garden hoses. Like
movie-father Brad Pitt, our father was an engineer-inventor. Like Pitt,
he hid his love behind a stern and distant front. Both our home and the
one in the movie rang with classical music. Pitt played Bach, our father
listened to Beethoven. Malick’s camera found tactile details in the
house that so resembled our own, like the movement of lace curtains
before air-conditioning, aluminum glasses for soda, and an early
phonograph. There was the familiar sibling rivalry, and family meals
where kids were supposed to be seen and not heard.
Other
flash-backs came quick and fast. We too, chased into the woods to hunt
with pellet guns. We too, danced in the oily-sweet spray of the DDT
truck. There too, were our first stirrings of interest in girls, and our
casual amorality of petty vandalism and mocking the handicapped.
According
to Barry, Malick was fascinated by the central question in the Book of
Job, that is, why do bad things happen to good people? In the film, one
brother dies off-camera. The oldest son watches a friend drown and his
father is helpless to revive the boy.
That split my heart. My
own middle brother Tom died in a swimming accident. I had arrived home
from work just an hour after his body was pulled from the water. Through
blurred eyes I seemed to be watching not Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain
react, but my own mother weep and my father clench his jaw in stoic
silence. The rest of the film veered away from my own family’s
experience. As I left the theater, I couldn’t help wondering if I had
simply been moved by a brilliant visual coincidence or if a stranger’s
art had actually managed to touch something deep within my own life?
Surely, I concluded, it had been a bit of both.