The Tree of Life

“If I can prevent just one person from watching this, it’ll have been worth suffering through it.” Thus begins a review of The Tree of Life by Kevin A Ranson, alias Grim D Reaper; unfortunately one which I didn’t read in time. I can’t blame Paula, from whose House of Toast I heard about the film. She describes it “as impressively beautiful as many have said, but ultimately annoying”. You need more from a film than impressive beauty. You need it to deliver the catharsis adequate to the emotional anguish it’s put you through for more than two hours. The more pretentious the work of art, the progressively less willing is one’s suspension of unbelief. The portentous music and images constantly create expectation of a poignant tragedy of universal significance. By the time it suddenly finished, I think in a field of sunflowers, or perhaps Sean Penn in a suit and tie, wandering an Arizona desert, I was merely being polite to the film and all who sailed in it, praying for no more than merciful release.

As a kind of irrelevant leitmotif, we get bucketfuls of nature-fractal imagery—raging seas, hot lava, writhing clouds—which I take to represent the seven days of Creation, with highly-strung choirs to match. Any moment now, I thought, we’ll reach Satan’s rebellion from God. That’s possibly because I’ve been trying unsuccessfully to read Paradise Lost, after a visit on March 1st to Milton’s Cottage, when I allowed myself to be seduced into the idea by Eddie the Curator, a man of superlative charm, erudition and marketing skills. The Americans love Milton far more than we (English) do, he said. They come over in droves. I think the English are right. Let us honour Milton, but stay short of reading Paradise Lost, just as we may acknowledge the critical acclaim given to director Terrence Malick, short of actually spending time watching his film.

“Ultimately annoying,” says Paula. Let me clarify and say it was annoying all the way through, but most of all it was retrospectively annoying. What was all that pain for? I had planned to write a post entitled “Why Paradise Lost?” but ended up saying to myself “Why write a post about it?” So I bury those plans in this one, and cover the two overblown visions in one review.

As other critics have noted there isn’t a narrative, exactly. It’s more of a tableau in its creator’s head, made into celluloid. There is a father, a mother and three boys. The eldest is Jack, the most beloved of the three angels in heaven, and the one who will rebel against the boss of a suffocatingly-close nuclear family in the nineteen-fifties: Brad Pitt as the All-Father. In his emphasis on high achievement, I couldn’t help but think of the Kennedys. To me, his character had a look of the late President and like him had been in the Navy during the war, not to mention the good old Irish name—O’Brien. (Well, begorrah! It’s St Patrick’s Day as I write.) But never mind that. As soon as I saw the way he treated his sons, especially the eldest, I said to myself “A righteous man—they’re the worst.” He had a wonderful look of smug religiosity, which as the film went on made me wish that Jack would shoot him in the head. I wasn’t far off there. In one scene, Father’s lying under his car doing some repairs, while it’s precariously supported by a jack attached to the rear bumper. The boy Jack saw the possibilities two seconds after I did, saw how easily the support could be kicked away. Both of us, sadly, had been too high-mindedly brought up to give it more serious consideration.

What interested me in the first place was probably the same thing which interested Paula: an alleged dichotomy between Nature and Grace, as in the following voice-overs from the mother:

“The nuns taught us there were two ways through life - the way of nature and the way of grace. You have to choose which one you’ll follow.”

“The nuns taught us that no one who loves the way of grace ever comes to a bad end.”

“Grace doesn’t try to please itself. Accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. Accepts insults and injuries.”

“Nature only wants to please itself. Get others to please it too. Likes to lord it over them. To have its own way. It finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world is shining around it. And love is smiling through all things.”

Like all the other voice-overs, like most of the scenes, they are inconsequential pieces of confetti tossed in the air as generalised religious sentiment: a tossed grenade of indiscriminate guilt-laying. I shall resist the temptation to discuss Nature and Grace here & merely endorse Paula’s own words on the topic. The film doesn’t cover it anyway, being engrossed in an all-embracing emotional blackmail which only violence could stem. Jack wants to kill his father—psychoanalytically one supposes—but can’t. So the boy grows up and turns into Sean Penn, a bewildered neurotic given to wandering in metaphorical deserts—or perhaps real ones, who knows.

Here I return to the reviewer Kevin A Ranson, whose advice (“don’t watch it”) I had not received in time. He concludes that it is not the worst film of all time but his least recommended, a view which he explains thus: “. . .this film was made by one person specifically for one person and can only be the product of much soul-searching and intense introspection. It should be viewed by that one person and only by that person, sitting alone in the middle of an empty theater like a widower watching old home movies and reminiscing of days gone by.” I conclude that it’s a cinematic autobiography of which the author/director should be justly proud, so long as he doesn’t foist it on us. For the emotional blackmail foisted on Jack by his father (and more subtly by the mother) is now foisted on the viewer, suggesting that the father’s dream has come true: he has sowed a seed of righteousness in his son the film director, who has brought forth an hundredfold, to preach to us from an Hollywood mountaintop.

“Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour!” said Wordsworth. Indeed. The author of Paradise Lost and the author of The Tree of Life could meet, like Joseph when he went up to meet Israel his father: “and he fell on his neck, and wept on his neck a good while”; for they have a lot in common.