The Tree of Life 2011

[9.6/10] “Theodicy” is the fancy term for the problem of evil -- why would an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving deity create a world where evil is allowed to exist? It’s one of the fundamental questions that Western theology grapples with, and it raises subsidiary questions that can be just as significant and thorny. Why choose to be good when it seems as though evil is not always punished and good is not always rewarded? What does the goodness or badness of our actions matter in the mind-boggling vastness of the universe and in the incomprehensible length of eons between its beginning and its end?

The Tree of Life addresses these questions head on, but does so through the filter of a young boy trying different moral stances on for size. Terrence Mallick delivers a sumptuous, naturalistic picture, that grounds some of the most pressing and intractable issues in moral philosophy in the day-to-day struggles and growth of a young man coming of age in Waco, Texas. As gorgeous at the cinematography of the film is, what stands out about the film is how it takes such a provincial, prosaic struggle to figure out how to be in the confines of your family and small town, and turns into a universal meditation on the struggle and questioning of what it means to be good.

The film centers on Jack, a prepubescent boy who’s part of a nuclear family and figuring out the way of the world. He has an angel and a devil on his shoulders, each in their own way pushing him to take a particular path. His mother (Jessica Chastain) is a devout woman, full of grace and forgiveness who tells Jack and his two brothers to love everyone. She is a bastion of empathy, one who’s constantly shown taking delight in the joys of her children, in playing with them, teaching them, bringing them through the world. She is the image of radiance, and the beacon that calls her sons to the path of kindness and caring.

On the other side sits Jack’s father (Brad Pitt), a harder man who teaches his sons that the good are taken advantage of. He teaches them strength, discipline, the notion that corners have to be cut, rules broken, spines stiffened in order to get ahead in this world and have a decent life. It would be so easy for Jack’s father to be a pure villain, and he certainly casts a shadow over his children in this film, but The Tree of Life makes things more complicated than that.

It makes Mr. O’Brien someone who feels stepped on by life. He had aspirations to be a great musician that were crushed and never to be realized. He struggles to write patents and secure a financial future for his wife and children and feels the fruits of his labor are stolen by men who shake hands and smile with the judge. He is harsh with his family, taking his frustrations out on them in unfair and unfortunate ways, but the film takes time to make him comprehensible, even as it paints him as a cross to be borne. He loves his children as much as Mrs. O’Brien does, demanding their affection but earnestly wanting it, wanting them to have a better life than he has, trying in so human a fashion to make them better at this race than he is.

In the valley between those two major figures, Jack questions how he should act, what he should be. His father does what he judges to be terrible things, hypocritical things, ungodly things, and yet he seems to exist unscathed and unchallenged. His mother, so kind and so decent and so loving, loses one of her sons when he’s only nineteen, asking her own questions about why an equally loving God would allow such a terrible thing to happen. It’s in this environment that Jack tests his boundaries, that he begins to wonder where the divine is, where justice could lie, in such a world, in such a life.

Mallick and legendary director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki trace the contours of both that world and that life, tying the two together. Unusually for a film so small in scope, The Tree of Life depicts the creation of the universe, the expanse of stars and galaxies stretching across millennia and light years of space. The film puts on a beautiful cosmic ballet, with swirling colors and swooshes of light and form that blur the line between breathtaking spacescapes and Renaissance art.

Lubezki’s camera follows the formation of the universe with the emergence of life on this lonely planet, from primordial ooze to undulating fish to dinosaurs capable of showing mercy and indifference. It’s then that the film follows Jack’s own growth, shown as momentous and lovingly as the creation of the whole world. The image of his little foot in his father’s hands graces the film’s poster, and Mallick uses a light touch as the curious little boy begins to experience the vastness and wonder of the world around him.

By connecting the cosmologically large with the tiniest and most ordinary of human lives, Mallick brings the two in sync, communicating the depth and breadth of the questions Jack is answering in an immense thunderous universe that makes any life, any choices, seem so small and insignificant, and yet metonym for what for those miniscule lives to be a part of so great a whole.

Confronted with the seeming injustice of the world, Jack forswears grace. He stops struggling to be good, to not give into his baser desires. He rebukes his mother; he breaks windows; he’s even cruel to a small amphibian with the misfortune to cross paths with young boys playing. He crosses each line and waits for divine retribution, to find the biblical bulwark for his bad behavior that never seems to come.

But then he pushes further, trying to goad his brother into fights, taunts him into jamming his finger into lamp sockets, and test the limits of his baser impulses. Finally he has his brother put his finger over a B.B. gun, pulls the trigger, and hurts his sibling. It’s then that Jack feels remorse for his actions and reaches a turning point. He seeks forgiveness. He seeks offers himself up as repentance. He understands the existence of other lives and others’ pain and the personal cost of extracting it from innocent people.

The film is opaque about whether Jack finds his connection to the divine again, but he feels the pull of goodness from his simply acts of empathy. From loving his mom, from understanding his dad, from placing a hand on the shoulder of a burned fellow boy whom he recoiled from previously. That is his answer to the problem of evil, to the indifference of the world. There is goodness for goodness sake, whether or not he can feel the imprimatur of God, and Jack embraces it.

He grows up to be a man in a great glass tower (Sean Penn), seemingly the success his father wanted him to be, but again feels the pull of that. The film contrasts the constructed beauty of downtown Dallas with the gorgeous naturalism of the countryside. Trees grow, outside the O’Brien home to mark the time from the children’s youth to their adulthood, in the spaces between the concrete in the city, serving as a reminder of where Jack came from. Even in this tamed world, there is life that pokes through, that cannot be repressed or forgotten.

The film’s end is impressionistic, but it suggests Heaven, it suggests reward, that for all Jack’s uncertainty and the doubt his parents express over the course of the film, they and all whom they love are to be reunited. Whether it’s meant to be real or just in Jack’s head or some combination of the two, there is catharsis in all this wondering, all this doubting, all this struggle leading to a place of reunion and love. Whatever they flaws and falters, Jack feels that, receives that, the chance to renew his affections with the people he cares about. It’s a powerful finish to a powerful film.

There is next-to-no exposition in The Tree of Life. There is barely a plot, more a series of moments built around a theme, piece of this life sewn together to make a greater whole. It is not a movie in the way we think of movies, depicting the beginning of time before delving into the mundane but meaningful lives of its subjects and drifting back again into the majesty of the great unknown and beyond. But that is also its source of power, creating something affecting and visceral from the truth of it, whether that truth emerges from the sweep of the cosmos or the embrace between mother and child. It is an everything movie, one that reaches from the beginning to the end, that speaks about one thing and yet speaks to all things. It is beauty. It is grace. Captured on celluloid, but transcending the mores of form and convention and the grammar of film, it is life.