Yet The Tree of Life strains toward something beyond Darwinian ruthlessness. The sequence highlights the “tree of life” in the Darwinian sense, a tree whose branches eventually bring together the O’Briens (an earthy Brad Pitt and an ethereal Jessica Chastain) and produce their three boys. This withering cross-examination, taken from the beginning of God’s response to Job’s complaint, anticipates the film’s most remarkable movement: a lengthy sequence, accompanied by soaring choral work (including Zbigniew Preisner’s Lacrimosa or Requiem), contemplating the formation of galaxies, stars and planets, as well as the origins of life on earth, from microbes to jellyfish to dinosaurs.
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When the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” (Job 38:4,7). An opening epigraph asks, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?. The first question, though, comes from God himself. What sort of God presides over such a world? In a flashback we see the O’Brien brothers as children dealing with the accidental death of a playmate. The questions in The Tree of Life are posed in Malick’s trademark inner monologue voice-overs, with characters carrying on a running cross-examination of God: “Where were you?” “Who are we to you?” “Why should I be good if you aren’t?” Early on, a telegram arrives bringing word that one of the O’Brien boys, now 19 and perhaps in the military, has been killed. We are the riddle, and the very fact that we ask the questions we do is one of the best clues we have to the answers we seek. The riddle of existence is not a riddle the universe poses to us, but one we pose to ourselves, as Malick does in The Tree of Life. For instance, what does the phenomenal success of a film like Titanic tell us about the society that embraces it? With The Tree of Life, I find myself stepping further back, contemplating it through an anthropological lens, as much as an artifact as a work of art. Occasionally, with certain films, I find it helpful to step back and look through a sociological lens rather than a critical one. Many Christian viewers and critics have embraced it for its overtly religious content, but some have argued for pantheistic or New Age readings. It has been, for the most part, rapturously received by critics, but walk-outs have been common.
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The Tree of Life premiered at Cannes to sustained boos as well as applause and went on to win the festival’s top prize, the Palme d’Or. The Tree of Life is probably the most polarizing film from a director whose slow, contemplative style - developed in five feature films over nearly four decades, from Badlands (1973) to his most recent, The New World (2005) - has won him ardent fans and firm detractors. Some critics have felt that Malick would have done better to omit the IMAX eye candy and focus on the human story others have argued that it’s the cosmic grandeur that works and the banal human story that bogs it down. There are also surreal images and flashes of magical realism. The Tree of Life blends an impressionistic portrait of a Catholic family living in a suburb of Waco, Texas, in the 1950s (and glimpsed in later decades) with a majestic procession of images from distant galaxies to microscopic organisms, exploding volcanoes to wounded dinosaurs. Here is a film that not only asks, with unusual insistence, why God allows suffering, but contemplates God’s own answer to that question in the Book of Job, amplified by the sweeping vistas of the natural world available to modern science, the Hubble telescope and Hollywood special effects: God did all this who are we to think we can judge or question him? It also asks why a stern, bullying father hurts his children. Is Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life a pretentious mess or a profound masterpiece?Ī deeply religious meditation on grace, nature and the mystery of suffering, or a philosophically confused, contradictory muddle of themes and images?
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The Tree of Life: God and Man Cross-examined SDG Original source: National Catholic Register