Way of Grace

I had forgone the critics' screening for "The Tree of Life" for more down-to-earth fare and when I saw the film at the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville, New York, it was with a general audience. It is always instructive for a filmmaker to see his or her film with an audience and the same could be said for a critic. Sensing an organic audience reaction has tempered many pens from dipping into poisonous preconceived notions.
I have to admire a film that asks not just large questions, but the largest ones which are passed along from generation to generation like family albums. They are questions which even a six-year old can articulate, but which most adults dare not ask without a tinge of embarrassment. Why are we here? Why do good people die? How do we go through life without making fools of ourselves?
Terrence Malick, the only filmmaker who can make Stanley Kubrick seem prolific in comparison, filters cosmic musings through a rather ordinary family in 1950s America. Like William Faulkner, Malick knows that by probing and digging into the specific, we are likely to uncover the universal. He shows us a family with familiar longings, but no first names: there is Father, played by Brad Pitt and Mother, played by Jessica Chastain, and their three boys.
From an acting standpoint, everyone pulls their weight, but Brad Pitt is the shining jewel in this dull crown; his portrayal of a man whose every attempt at normalcy betrays the desire to be a man of exceptional destiny is as seamless as it is tragic. He adroitly plays the organ and makes the boys listen to Mozart and if things have been different, he could have been a great musician. Instead he teaches his sons the fine art of boxing, cautioning them that "it takes fierce determination to get ahead in this world". He also tells them that they can achieve whatever they set their minds to. The tragedy is that he doesn't entirely believe this of himself.
Malick touches on a universal dilemma. If we can have whatever we want, why are most lives monuments to Compromise? Are there forces we do not understand which shape our destiny, or is everything (which includes lack) of our own doing? If we please an unknowable God, will everything turn out okay? Organized religion would have us believe so, but Malick is too worldly and smart to give us easy answers.
The film encapsulates breath-taking images of what looks to be nothing less than the creation of the Universe with a loose narrative about a family in a way that suggests a scientist studying a single cell in order to make sense of the fabric of life.
But here is where Malick's approach strides a different path. Unlike another famous reclusive director, Stanley Kubrick, Malick does not distance himself from his subjects. There is a refreshing naivete in the proceedings that is at times exhilarating, other times frustrating or embarrassing.
I was most taken by the middle portion of the film, where the focus remains on the family. There are two ways through life, the Mother tells us. The way of Nature and the way of Grace. Nature is embodied by the father, who is determined to fight his way through life. I suppose it is a self-fulfilling prophecy that if you see the world as an adversarial place in which you have to assert yourself, with your fists if necessary, you will continually find yourself in situations in which exactly that happens. A drunkard looking for a fight will usually find one. Just ask Hemingway.

In contrast to the Father, who exhibits a weariness and defeat by the end of the film, the Mother remains relatively unchanged. It seems she does not engage the negative forces of the world, but goes through and around them. Guilt plays no part in her process. After her sons blow up a frog for fun, she sternly tells them "Never do it again". In other words, look forward and don't make the same mistake twice. The two approaches to life necessarily lead to conflict and marital strife, as neither party will yield to the other and the children pin-ball between them. To a large extent, the conflict the boys experience in choosing between the value of their mother and that of their father mirrors the individual quest embodied by the Serenity Prayer. Accepting that which cannot be changed, changing that which can be changed and having the wisdom to know the difference is a mantra that has applications way beyond A.A. meetings.
I was less taken by the part of the film where Loss is explored along entirely predictable lines. One of the three boys dies early in the film and this segment resembles the work of a film student who has yet to understand the principles of filmmaking. The power of film is unlocked by juxtaposing contrasting images which lead to insight. Wallowing in cliched images of mourning and loss is a sure way to turn the profound into the meaningless. If that is Malick's intention (which I doubt) he achieves it.
There is a sense that the formlessness of the film, maddening at times, is an escape hatch which Malick uses when he runs out of fresh approaches. We return to a close up of yet another leaf being tickled by the breeze or soap bubbles drifting through the air and we temporarily forget that we are supposed to be searching for some kind of meaning. Other critics have made the argument that Malick is less concerned with finding the meaning of life than with the chronicling of the wonder of the Universe. I disagree. One of the boys is haunted by his childhood into his middle aged. As played by Sean Penn in his usual broad morose strokes, the successful son still oscillates between the differing world views of his parents. A successful professional, he inhabits a world of glass and steel, the polar opposites of nature, and open spaces that were the playing ground of his childhood. Is the turning away from Grace a natural byproduct of adulthood?
In the end, The Tree of Life, accomplishes something that most pictures do not. It stays with you long after most films fade from memory (usually in the time it takes to walk from the theater to the parking lot). The good (profound questions into the nature of existence) outweighs the bad (over-reliance on elliptical narrative, literal-minded images) in a way that makes for a satisfying cinematic experience.