Tree of Life: Worth Watching

¶ … Tree of Life": Worth Watching Twice

Terrence Malick spent more than three years editing the six hour reel of footage he and his crew captured outside Waco, TX in 2008, and fans of the director wondered if they would ever see Malick's latest. But The Tree of Life finally debuted at Cannes this summer, marking it as only the fifth feature in the director's four-decades-long career. While not your typical film, Malick's Tree is a superb work of art that cannot be viewed only once: it must be seen again and again. This paper will provide an in-depth analysis of the film to show how the three years of work that went into piecing The Tree of Life together were not for naught -- but were, rather, part of a process of masterful filmmaking.

Malick's directing-style is unlike any other's in or outside of Hollywood: his is a technique of capturing the accident, as Fiona Shaw put it (Labrecque). He will write pages and pages of new script for an actor and then tell them to pick out a line or two or say what they like best. He will ask his cinematographer to capture things on the wing, take long looks at the ways in which nature moves, focus on ordinary details in a way that makes them appear fresh and extraordinary. Malick brings to life trees, clouds, sunshine, the whole of the natural world -- and then inspires a great sense of mystery and awe and wonder that human beings exist in it at all. His use of natural lighting enhances the beauty, elegance, and grace of every scene, already masterfully designed by long-time Malick collaborator Jack Fisk. Nothing seems phony in a Terrence Malick film -- even the highly impressionistic scenes in which Mrs. O'Brien pirouettes in mid-air or the meeting of the dead on the shores of the after-life. After looking through the lens of Malick's camera, everything seems possible, true, and real.

Of course, The Tree of Life is aided by a stupendous soundtrack. Malick makes use of everything from Mozart to modern-day Tavener. From the beginning, Malick uses music to express the over-arching theme of Tree of Life: that though we walk in the shadow of death, our souls are not doomed to die. Preisner's "Lacrimosa" accompanies the segment representing the creation of the world, literally reminding one that tears water the seeds of life. An excerpt from Smetana's "The Moldau River" adds a dimension of joy to the innocent days of youth that could not have been effected, one feels, in a better way. And Berlioz's "Agnus Dei" at the end of the film when the dead are brought back to life places a poignant and subtle emphasis on the theology at work in the depths of Tree of Life: how is this possible? The Lamb of God takes away the sins of the world.

It extends the scope of the modern summer movie (whose purpose is merely to entertain with mindless spectacle) by, like Dante's Divine Comedy, moving one to the ultimate catharsis -- a remembrance of eternal things. Tree of Life is, in fact, a mini-journey -- not through Heaven and Hell -- but through time and space: we witness the creation of the world, a segment of life in 1956 Texas, and the Resurrection at the end of the world. Watching Tree of Life is less like watching a film than it is like contemplating and meditating upon the meaning of life itself. As Roger Ebert said, the film is a prayer -- and for that reason, one's engagement with it depends upon one's desire to communicate with the Divinity, whose presence is at the heart of the narrative.