A 21st Century Review of "The Tree of Life"
As childrenour parent's voices, their heartbeat - the warmth of their touch - combine with simple statements, and their love for us - to create a basis for memory, feeling and perception. Our earliest memories are almost always a little bit hard to describe. The first step you've ever taken. Your first nightmare. The first time you ever ate birthday cake. The first time you ever kissed a girl.
The Tree of Life, named in the film after a tree that was planted, parent and child together - takes us to a place of childlike awe - a universe that continues to unfold before us. And it helps us to see that our full understanding of the universe, and its process of birth, growth, and decay - is still, even with all technological advancement, not unlike that of a child's. We whisper stories to others in symbols and scientific journals, of the origin of vast galaxies... but also, and perhaps with equal importants to each other, laying side by side in a field of grass, looking up to the midnight sky.
The tree of life whispers its story to you. This is an important thing to understand - an important difference between this film and any other.
It doesn't tell you it's story outright. Why? Is it because you have become jaded. Do you understand how to be sat down, and told what to think? Have you turned on Liberty Prime Ultra News? The ticker crawl across your TV set... and two talking heads argue that a scientific fact is true, or not true - maudlin, comic, and propagadistically weaving its corporate message of advertisement into your made-for-tv-movie understanding.
Your ability to sit there in front of a computer, or a TV - has been highly developed by the machines that seek to feed upon your presence there. Silicon life seeks supremacy.
The Story of "The Tree of Life" isn't told to you in the linear download so common to silicon life. It is told to you - as perhaps you remember your own childhood - through the fog of 10,000 downloaded web pages, and television shows, and banner ads... A half memory. There is no timeline. You can move forward, or back. People can live and be dead at the same time. And be alive as child, and adult. Your first girlfriend. Your first wave.
And at the same time, there is a feeling in watching this film, that you are present in spirit with those who sat in the candlelit room at the first reading of John Keats - you are in the film, watching it - and at the same time, you are years past , there in a literary den - listening a young medical student's verse - a half whisper within that you are at the creation of something beautiful. Something timeless. That is what great works of literature accomplish. They are so vivid that they reach out and touch our lives and change them. And it is a great blessing to be counted amongst those who first heard the works.
Keats was ill received. People walked out. They booed. They ignored him. His books sat on shelves , unsold. And his health failed... he went to Italy - a doctor sought to cure him by starving him and cutting him to drain his blood. He died poor, longing for the woman he loved.
And at the cinema, where I saw the film - someone stood up at the end of the film and shouted "Thank God".
But he, like the main character of "The Tree of Life", lived his life with love. And Keats also wrote with love. So, too, did Terrence Mallick. The Tree of Life is, to this author, almost a dawning of a new form of literature. It is a film that centers itself first in unutterable beauty, and the strange and timeless rhythm of our lives - the questions that seem to thread through us every day. And second, the answers to those questions - that we perhaps see each day as well. In the reflection of light upon water, shining on the wall. The pattern of lines in a baby's foot. A sort of puzzle that we can take away and hold within our hands, immune to a simple googled parse of answer. Something we can cherish.
Terrence Mallick, in his previous work "The Thin Red Line"... asks ... "Why does nature vy against itself". In this film, he seemingly finds his answer. Nature does not vy against itself. Natural History is a paegant, not a philosophy. And it is also something much more. The film was based heavily on a Christian novel, and from the passages of Job , book 38, which reads like a map to the entire film. And in fact, is quoted at the beginning, and in the middle (it is the text of a sermon, being told in the background at the middle of the film).
But it does not descend to christian mores. Beauty, in this film, is the beauty of the natural world.
The curve and trace of a woman's breast is to me, something so beautiful that I have always wondered if there is a timelessness about it. And this film seems to say - even through the standard map of desire, and a warning of the wages of sin - that this is because, yes, it is timeless. You are right to wonder if ever a woman would dance beneath a tree - suspended in midair, back arched, hair floating. You are right, at times such as this - to wonder about grace. But you are also right to enjoy the beauty of her dance. And to love.
A criterion of collecting film, for me, is that I might watch it twice and enjoy it. I can still enjoy film - watching a film only once. The Inside Man is a good example of this. Spike Lee did a wonderful job making a puzzle film that, if you saw the ending, you would not watch again.
The tree of life is special. It's a film that I would see far more than once.
I would see it one hundred times. Collect it and keep it forever. But the film does not give itself over to leaving your mind. So vivid is this film. So sharp. And if they say life and art are woven together. This film weaves itself into the fabric of life. This film is a new classic.
And being there, on its opening night - as one of the first to have ever seen it - gave me a sense that somewhere, somehow - I have been in just such a place before. That there was a candlelit room in early America, and that I had read the prophecy and beauty of the newly published words of Carl Sandburg. That I had seen the disdain on the face of a man who picked up a volume, newly printed , from John Keats. That I too followed, and touched the page at first printing. In some human form.
So my review of this film is complete. And you have worked your way to it through a web of electronics. If the power goes out, these words will disappear. Do you print them? Do you fell a tree.... grind it ... roll out its remains and bleach dry it until cut into paper. Fed into a printer. And held in your hand?
This has made it to you through the endless series of switches and a fabric of cabling, and routing. It glows upon your screen. And can just as easily become ink upon a page.
A bridge is a structure built to span physical obstacles, such as a body of water, a valley, a road, for the purpose of providing passage over the obstacle.
The first bridges were made by nature itself. A tree falling over a river, forming a way across.
And this film, like the first bridge - seems almost to have been formed naturally - piece by piece, crafted with loving care. And at the same time, it is a masterwork of modern literature - forged from actual sequences from the hubble space telescope, cgi, and digital editing tools that seemingly alter reality itself. Perhaps that is the film's message. That we are, even as we attain ever higher technological capability - still enfolded in nature. Still human.
Like this film. This a quiet miracle that needs to be explored, and can be explored - every day. Connecting one day to another. And me to you.
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