[Editor's Note: The Conversations is a monthly feature in which Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard discuss a wide range of cinematic subjects: critical analyses of films, filmmaker overviews, and more. Readers should expect to encounter spoilers.]
Jason Bellamy: Terrence Malick's fifth film hadn't crawled beyond Cannes, New York or Los Angeles before speculation intensified about the director's future projects. It's a natural reaction, I suppose, given that Malick once went 20 years between pictures; as important as it is to have Malick in our present, his fans also want reassurance that he'll be back again—eventually if not immediately, later if not soon enough. According to reports, Malick's fans can rest easy: leftover footage from this film is planned for a documentary, and principal photography has wrapped on what is now being referred to as a Ben Affleck-Rachel McAdams project, even though Malick's tendencies in the editing room could reduce those headliners to bit players by the time the film premieres. Malick will turn 68 this November, but barring any health problems it seems safe to assume we haven't seen the last of him. And yet The Tree of Life feels like a swansong.
It's epic, daring and almost painfully heartfelt. It's ambiguous and overt. It deals in spirituality and science. It either alludes to Malick's previous films or liberally borrows from them: tokens buried underground as in Badlands; a snake illustration straight out of Days of Heaven; a woman on a swing as in The Thin Red Line; a (street) lamp shining against the midnight blue sky as in The New World; and so on. It's the summation of all that Malick seemed to be and a doorway to something beyond that. It's an unmistakably personal film—a conclusion I reached long before I learned that it's quasi-autobiographical, too. It's the kind of film you might expect from a director who worries that he might never make another one—a pull-out-all-the-stops, bounce-the-check-to-the-undertaker, this-time-for-sure purging of the soul. It's as if to die in peace Malick needed to get The Tree of Life off his chest.
It's his most challenging film, and perhaps his messiest, too. And for those reasons in particular it took a second viewing for me to fully appreciate its scope, its intimacy and its intricacies—which isn't to say I've figured it all out or come to peace with a sequence that might be the most disappointing in Malick's career. But when I watch The Tree of Life I'm overwhelmed by the sense that I'm witnessing the work of a filmmaker who feels he has run out of time for holding back.
Ed Howard: It's such a daring film, totally. The comments on our conversation about Malick's first four films helped me to clarify some of my ambivalence about The Thin Red Line and The New World, giving shape to a complaint that I hadn't articulated very well in the conversation itself: that those films are marred by half measures, stuck halfway between narrative cinema and the avant-garde, resting somewhat uneasily in both worlds. That is not a complaint that could be applied to most of The Tree of Life, but strangely enough, not because Malick has gone fully in one direction or another. Instead, I think he's just reached a more assured balance between those two impulses—at least for part of the movie.
This is especially true of the long sequence that encompasses the bulk of the film's second half, a gorgeous, emotionally and thematically rich memory of the childhood of three brothers living in Waco, Texas in the 1950s. This is, I think, quite simply the best thing Malick has ever made, and it perfectly addresses my earlier criticisms about the unsatisfying narrative currents in his most recent films. This whole sequence—which starts with the birth of the oldest brother and ends with a melancholy backward-looking shot as the family leaves their home to relocate for the father's new job—is utterly stunning in every way, and is grounded in character and relationships to an extent that I don't think Malick has ever before achieved.
That childhood sequence is a total masterpiece. The Tree of Life as a whole is not, I don't think, but it's certainly a very interesting film and, yes, a messy one, and also a very personal one. Parts of it are amazing. Parts of it are overblown and silly. Parts of it are overblown and silly and amazing. The cinematography is, of course, uniformly beautiful, if sometimes in the way a National Geographic nature special is beautiful. And then there's the ending, which very nearly extinguished the good feelings I had about the hour leading up to this nauseatingly new agey coda. In that sense, The Tree of Life is typical of my conflicted responses to Malick's previous two films, but neither of those films had anything that got to me quite like the troubled relationship between Jack (Hunter McCracken as a child, Sean Penn as an adult) and his father (Brad Pitt) does in this film. That this film contains some of Malick's most remarkable work and, as we've both already hinted, some of his worst, suggests that The Tree of Life is indeed an ambitious film, a film that takes bold risks that don't always pay off. As always, I admire Malick for that willingness to take risks, even as I wince at the moments where his results fall short of his ambitions. Because when, as in the childhood chapter of this film, everything comes together for him, the result is emotionally overwhelming, and says more about the human experience and the nature of life and death than Malick's more overt philosophical statements ever do.
JB: Absolutely. And we might as well dive into that ending now, because we seem to agree that in addition to being disappointing in and of itself, it also undercuts the awesomeness of what comes before it, threatening to obliterate the impact of some of Malick's finest work. The "coda," by which I mean everything that happens after the O'Briens drive away from their Waco home, has to be the most awkward sequence in Malick's filmography—cheesy, clichéd and feeble. It is not entirely void of richness, possessing as it does the mother's (Jessica Chastain) acceptance of her child's death and a bridge shot that neatly symbolizes man's desire for connection (more on that later, I'm sure), but as a whole it's a buzzkill. I can argue in favor of what it tries to do but not what it is. For 10 or 15 minutes, and it feels like longer, Malick follows the older Jack (Penn) as he wanders through a barren wasteland meant to evoke his adult loneliness, goes through a mysterious doorway and ends up on a beach—at sunset, naturally—where he is surrounded by his family and other anonymous souls wandering along the water's edge in heavenly peace. The sequence succeeds in demonstrating Jack's emotional catharsis, in a mathematical or architectural way, but it fails to actually conjure that emotion, to resonate.
Critic at large Steven Boone, who shares our disappointment with this sequence, argued that its inelegance is a direct result of its heavy-handed fabrication. Malick, Boone pointed out, makes films out of "found" moments—shooting liberally and often without structure in the first place, and then finding his film within that "found" footage in his extensive editing process. (Malick's films are twice found, really.) In this coda, however, Malick seems to be directing the action, creating a scenario to meet a specific vision rather than letting the action come to him. It's an astute observation, one that, to be fair, probably does a better job of explaining the effect of the scene (or lack thereof) than explaining how it went wrong conceptually, because while Malick certainly delights in "found" moments, he can premeditate with the best of 'em, whether that means giving us yet another house with curtains that blow in the wind or actually relocating from another yard the mighty tree that sits outside the O'Brien home. In any case, when Penn's Jack, wearing a business suit, falls to his knees in the wet sand, his arms outstretched in exultation, it doesn't come off as the act of a man in the midst of catharsis but rather like the gesture of an actor hitting his mark and sending an "exultation" signal flag up the pole for all to see.
EH: Yeah, the problems with the ending are legion, but the biggest one is how schematic it feels. In terms of style and approach, it's the complete opposite of the material that preceds it. The childhood scenes are so rich in character nuance and observational detail. It's all so specific; this story is apparently autobiographical for Malick, and it shows. If some of Malick's previous characters and stories could be overly generic, that's not even remotely a problem here, as the characters and settings are totally fleshed out. This story is thematically resonant, but the ideas being expressed through these characters—typically Malickian musings on elemental human attributes like love, control, ambition, loss, guilt, maturation—don't feel forced or preachy. Instead, these ideas arise naturally from the characters' interactions, and from the evocative, elliptical style that Malick uses to tell the story.
That's why it's such a letdown when Malick the heavy-handed symbolist returns for the final 15 minutes, not so much to wrap things up as to deliver a crushingly obvious vision of heaven that reminds me, of all things, of the similarly disappointing—and similarly saccharine and spiritually pat—conclusion of the TV series Lost. Why does Malick feel this need to literalize, at the last moment, the spiritual, abstract concepts that are expressed so movingly through the more grounded narrative sections? I don't know, but it doesn't work at all because while the young Jack is a fully functioning character, Jack as played by Penn is a total cipher who's divorced from the depiction of his younger self. Whatever catharsis he finds on that beach, surrounded for some reason by people from his childhood, their appearances frozen in time as they looked in the 1950s while only he has aged, it's an empty catharsis that squanders the real depth found elsewhere in the film.
I feel similarly about the mother's acceptance of her child's death, which is a fine idea but an awful scene. She's bathed in white light, flanked by a pair of anonymous young women (angels I guess?) and repeatedly making the gesture of lifting her hands towards the sky and opening them, as though releasing something to fly up into the clouds. Not only is the idea hammered home with a complete lack of subtlety, but the visual sensibility of it is so lame and clichéd, an unthinking regurgitation of the most turgid form of religious imagery. It makes me wonder how such a visually accomplished filmmaker can make something so clunky—especially when the scenes like this are surrounded by the visual riches that make the best parts of this film so stunning.
JB: I think you've cut to the heart of it: Although there are fundamental challenges to conjuring catharsis through Penn's scowling cipher, the scene's biggest failure is its ordinariness. Malick, love him or loath him, has never been ordinary. He's the guy who gives us extreme closeups of insects, who gives us stories that unfold during the magic hour and who gazes at forest canopies with the awe of someone taking in the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. He's the guy who makes curtains blowing in the wind seem profound (mileage may vary). He's the guy who gives us stream-of-consciousness narration that vacillates between poetic grandeur and plainspoken sophistication. Most significant of all, he's the guy who for five films now has found religion, spirituality and seemingly even God himself in the natural world that most of us take for granted. Put all of that together and it's utterly shocking that when Malick finally gets around to depicting heaven off earth—after spending his career stunning us with his depictions of heaven on earth—it would seem so uninspiring, so bland, so hackneyed. Malick aspires, as he always does, for heartfelt magnificence, but while the earnestness of the emotions and the lushness of the images are stamped with his trademark, the unimaginativeness of it all makes the profound prosaic. The beach sequence reminded you of the finale of Lost, reminded me of Clint Eastwood's clumsy Hereafter and reminded Tom Shone of commercials for "sanitary napkins, or life insurance, depending on which channel you chance upon."
Of course, maybe this is what The Beyond looks like to Malick. Or perhaps this is what Malick figured The Beyond looked like to Penn's Jack. To which I say, fair enough. But the problem isn't that the beach scene can't be defended. The problem is that it fails to live up not only to the gracefulness of the Waco scenes before it but also to Malick's entire oeuvre. Emotionally speaking, that scene needed to tower above almost any other scene in his career. And it doesn't. Not even close. It feels small. I never watched Lost, but based on the chatter I've heard about the show's disappointing finale, that might be the most apt comparison. Indeed, the beach scene is enough to make one think, "Wait a minute, you led us all this way for this?"
If I seem particularly critical of the coda, I suppose it's because I feel the final moments of his previous two films are absolutely magnificent. This is the third Malick film that I've been lucky enough to discover in the theater upon its initial release, and I vividly remember, as The Thin Red Line and The New World were winding down, nearly clasping my hands together in prayer as I begged them to fade to black precisely where they do. Both The Thin Red Line and The New World end on emotional high points created from climaxing scores that quickly give way to the tranquil ambient noise of secluded nature. They end swiftly, even suddenly. But the coda of The Tree of Life drags on, and all the while the incredible power of the previous chapter escapes like air out of leaky balloon.
EH: Malick's entire career has been oriented towards heaven, but I never expected him to literally depict the afterlife or the spiritual realm—and, as you point out in discussing how Malick has always found the religious in nature, I never felt like he needed to depict heaven itself in order to communicate his spiritual awe. And now that he has... yeah, you led us all this way for this? A heavenly beach and angels dressed in white robes and self-conscious gestures of acceptance and hugs all around? Maybe Jack hasn't gone to heaven, maybe he just took an especially strong dose of Ambien. The aesthetic of the finale makes me think that it would have been a parody in the hands of a more satirically-minded filmmaker—the kind of saccharine mass-marketed heaven that Tyler Durden would have savagely mocked—but Malick apparently intends it earnestly. As you know from our discussion of Malick's first four films, the director has always tipped too much in this overblown, self-serious direction for my tastes, but even a number of his longtime fans seem to have decided that the conclusion of his latest opus is a bit much.
That's a shame, because if I'm especially disappointed by the final destination of The Tree of Life, much of the journey that leads there is exhilarating. The film begins in typical Malick fashion, an elliptical collage of fragmentary scenes of the O'Brien family in happy times (which will be expanded upon in the film's second half), accompanied of course by whispery philosophical voiceovers. Then Malick leaps ahead in time to the parents learning of the death of one of their sons. Soon after, there's a shot that absolutely slays me: the shadows of the children, projected upside-down on the concrete, running back and forth as they play. This shot will be echoed later in the film when young Jack runs down the front steps of the O'Brien house and then back up in reverse, his shadow stretched out behind him on the steps. But it's the earlier shot that I find really haunting and unforgettable, a ghostly image that somehow crystallizes all the loss and grief of this family. Then, after a little break to show how dissatisfied and soulless adult Jack is (we know this because he works in a skyscraper!), Malick returns to the dawn of time, dramatizes the creation of the universe through near-abstract images of space and chemical reactions, spends some time with the dinosaurs before observing the meteor that wipes them out, and generally gives the impression that the entire history of the universe is leading towards the birth of the oldest O'Brien child.
As you said earlier, this is the work of a filmmaker who's not holding back in the least. I'm not sure how I feel about some of it (the dinosaurs continue to puzzle and intrigue me) and some of it seems downright silly in that typically Malickian way (I couldn't suppress an eye roll at the child swimming up through the underwater house right before being born), but it's definitely quite a ride. And all of that is in many ways only setting the stage for the jaw-dropping childhood section of the film.
JB: If the beach coda is the most maligned portion of The Tree of Life—I've yet to find someone who goes so far as to praise it—the creation sequence is the most controversial. There are those who are all-in, those who are all-out, and then quite a few who seem to find the sequence awesome as a set piece but disjointed or even foolish in its application. After my first viewing of the film, I was probably in the latter camp (minus the "foolish" part). I was awestruck—and I don't use that word lightly—by the utter beauty of the visual effects that depict gaseous clouds drifting, expanding and coalescing; that show planets and galaxies; that show the Big Bang and the meteor that did in the dinosaurs. I was swept up by the scope of it all, both in terms of what it represents and what it must have entailed to create. I was moved by Malick's musical choices—the ethereal Funeral Canticle giving way to the rapturous Lacrimosa—which so perfectly convey the otherworldliness and incredibleness of the creation of life at a beyond-planetary level. And most of all I was touched by Malick's courage: his willingness to abandon his human characters so completely and for so long, while exploring his amazement with the natural world at such an epic scale. In every way, the creation sequence is thrillingly limitless.
And yet I wondered if it fit and what it meant. I mentioned before that The Tree of Life feels like a swansong, and the creation sequence is one of the reasons why; as much as anything, it seemed as if Malick just needed to get it out of his system and thrust it into this film, in this place, for fear that otherwise his vision might never be realized. But then I saw the film again, and discovered that no matter the sequence's origins—apparently, the creation sequence was originally conceived for another film called Q—it's more than justified. In fact, it's kind of the point.
Not long after the scene you mentioned with the shadows of playful boys dancing across the street (shadows of the mother's boys in a memory? shadows of someone else's boys in the present reminding Chastain's character of her own children in the past? either works), there's a scene in which the boys' grandmother attempts to comfort the devastated mother with churchly wisdom: "Life goes on. People pass along. Nothing stays the same," the grandmother says. "Lord gives and takes away—that's the way he is." But Mother isn't buying it. She isn't comforted by the thought that her dead son is now in God's hands, because the way she figures it her son was in God's hands all along. So eventually she asks the questions any grieving mother would ask: "Lord, why? Where were you?" And the creation sequence is the answer to that question.
But what does it say? There's room for multiple interpretations. One reading is that the creation sequence refutes the idea of God, seeing as how it isn't rooted in creationism. Another reading is that it confirms the presence of God, seeing as how the film starts and ends with a mystical gaseous presence that appears to be the egg from which the world hatched. I don't think it really matters which of those is true. The crucial point is that the creation sequence suggests the lengths to which we the living often go to cope with death, questioning where we came from and why. Where was God, or Life, if you prefer? The creation sequence shows that He/It was everywhere, always.
EH: That's a beautiful interpretation of those scenes. The creation sequence is the culmination of a thread that's been running through all of Malick's films, the idea that in the big picture, we're all in this together. In The Thin Red Line, it was phrased as all of mankind sharing a single soul behind different faces. The Tree of Life isn't so explicit about it, but the creation sequence positions humanity as another piece in the puzzle of nature. An important piece, perhaps—after all, the creation sequence does lead inexorably towards the creation of human life—but still just a piece, an aspect of a tremendously complex universe that encompasses processes occurring on a microscopic scale as well as dinosaurs towering above the ground. This is an idea that we've discussed in relation to all of Malick's previous films as well. His positioning of humanity in the context of the natural world in his other films is here expanded into a grand statement on humanity's place in the universe, in time, in a natural order that stretches back to the Big Bang.
One thing I find curious about all this is how strangely bloodless Malick's idea of nature is. Earlier I compared some of the images from this stretch of the film to a National Geographic documentary, but I realize now that that's not quite right. What's missing is predation. If this sequence is meant to demonstrate the eternal cycle of life and death (and I think it is), then why does Malick seem unable to find a place for the violence of nature, for predators and their prey? His vision of nature has always been idealized—shots of foliage swaying in the breeze accompanied by beautiful music—but the incompleteness of it really struck home for me in the scenes with the dinosaurs. At one point, one dinosaur walks up to a dying dinosaur that is lying on the ground by a streambed. It seems clear that the dying dinosaur is going to be killed and eaten, but instead the other dinosaur simply plays with it a bit, putting a foot on its head and tapping it hesitantly in a manner that seems more feline than reptilian. When I was a kid, I doubtless would have known what these dinosaurs were on sight, but now I can only guess that this playful dinosaur isn't a predator or a scavenger, or else the scene wouldn't make much sense at all. Regardless, the dinosaur's behavior seems kind of cutesy, like it's an anthropomorphized cartoon rather than a real animal. It's an odd note to be hitting in the midst of this epic journey from the Big Bang to 1950s America.
Malick at times tries to suggest that nature is cruel, that death is a part of life, but, presaging the new agey hokum of the finale, his images present a relaxed, beautiful natural world where a dinosaur dies a quiet death much like an old man lying in bed, gasping his last reptilian breaths while lying amidst the splendor of nature. Death has an uneasy place in this film. The two most important deaths in the film, the extinction of the dinosaurs and the death of the O'Briens' son, occur from a distance, the former shown from space and the latter signaled by an impersonal telegram. Perhaps this is appropriate: the film is uncomfortable with death because the characters are uncomfortable with it. Death is uncomfortable, and as you suggest, Malick seems more interested in the human response to death than he is in death itself. The bloodiest cruelties of nature would seem out of place in Malick's idyllic vision of nature as a church—accompanied, oft as not, by appropriately churchy music—but in this film the impact of death, at least, is viscerally felt. What's interesting is that Malick communicates this loss most powerfully not by lingering in the aftermath of the tragedy (though the brief scenes of Pitt and Chastain expressing their grief are very powerful) but by returning to the time that preceded the loss, with the knowledge of that eventual loss haunting every moment of childhood happiness and familial strife.
JB: That's a terrific observation. Malick's films have of course been full of predatory behavior by humans: from Kit in Badlands, through the hunting down of Bill in Days of Heaven, the Battle of Guadalcanal in The Thin Red Line and the clashes of Europeans and "naturals" in The New World to this film, where '50s boyhood is marked with mild skirmishes of violence that suggest within them the potential for something uglier. But true predation has been missing. The closest things we can point to are the storm of locusts preying upon the wheat fields in Days of Heaven and the first dinosaur we see in this film, which lies on the beach with a large bloody gash down its side. It's as if Malick doesn't have it in his heart to observe the cruelty in nature that he sees in humankind. The scene you mention, when one dinosaur pins down the head of another dinosaur that's slowly dying along a riverbed—they're velociraptors, I think—indeed seems to be saying something quite deliberate. After all, this isn't "found" footage; it's choreographed CGI, which suggests that Malick conceived the scene with a specific intent in mind. But what is that scene saying?
I'm not sure. The most obvious reading, I guess, is to assume that the scene mirrors the behavior that we'll see in Father and Jack in the '50s scenes to come, because the healthy raptor seems intent on demonstrating its dominance, much in the same way that Pitt's Father asserts his power over his sons and Jack asserts his power over his younger brother. In each case, dinosaur, father and oldest son need others to respect their strength, much the same way Kit needs everyone around him to respect his. Put more simply, it's as if Malick is suggesting that power struggles are as old as time. The Tree of Life begins with the mother narrating about her religious upbringing in which she was taught that life has two paths: "the way of nature and the way of grace." As she explains: while grace forgives slights and injury, nature "places itself against others" and "looks for reasons to be unhappy when all the world is shining." Chastain's Mother, of course, is this film's representation of grace, and Pitt's Father is the depiction of nature. And as we watch Jack and his younger brother, we quickly realize that Jack is nature and his brother is grace. What I find interesting is that a filmmaker known for romanticizing nature would equate it with violence. It seems to me that Malick is implying that violence is our default setting, and that those who can rise above nature, rather than succumb to it, are extraordinary.
EH: The nature/grace dichotomy is definitely one of the major threads in the film, but I actually find it to be one of the less interesting ideas that Malick is exploring here. There's something a little simplistic, and typically idealized, about his depiction of the mother as this figure of purity and bliss, so focused on happiness and play that she hardly seems of this world. Indeed, at one point Malick depicts her, in the memory of one of her children, as floating above the ground, dancing lithely in the air as though she's already in the process of drifting upwards to heaven. In comparison, the rest of her family is very much grounded in this lovingly detailed 1950s suburbia.
The relationship between Jack and his father—both of them infused with the qualities of "nature" according to Malick's formulation—is the real heart of the film, and provides much of the most interesting tension and emotion. Father is, implicitly, linked to God by Malick. At one point one of the kids asks in voiceover, with mingled exasperation and curiosity, "Why does he hurt us, our father?" It's a key question of the film, since one of Malick's themes is the idea that bad things can and do happen to good people. This is an important question that, sooner or later, every religion has to answer for its adherents, since living a good life according to what God wants is never a guarantee of safety, longevity or happiness. It's the question at the core of the book of Job, which is quoted at the beginning of the film and brought up in a homily delivered by a priest when the O'Briens go to church one morning. Why does he hurt us? The voiceover might be referring to God—why do bad things happen in the world?—but more concretely the line could also be about the O'Brien patriarch, who like God dispenses justice, punishment and love unpredictably. He is unknowable, like God. His family can't be sure when his disciplinarian rigidity will burst into anger or when his cool demeanor will momentarily be overwhelmed by the displays of affection and warmth that he occasionally shows for the sons who he obviously does love. These children see their father as devout worshippers often see God: loving but unfathomable, strict, remote, as liable to dispense punishments as hugs.
Father aims for gruff wisdom but really just terrifies his kids, making them hate and fear him, to the point that they rejoice when he leaves. The parents might represent nature and grace, but they more convincingly embody discipline and freedom: where Father is bound by strict rules of behavior, codes of manliness, Mother is free, a childlike spirit of play and improvisation. One of the film's funniest and most joyful scenes is the exuberant romp that breaks out when the three brothers wake up one morning (awoken by the ice cubes their mother smilingly places on their feet and necks) and realize that their father has left on a long business trip. With the disciplinarian absent, they can run around the house without fear, laughing and yelling and playing, mocking their father's anger, chasing their mother with a lizard, while she alternates between scolding and laughing.
However, in the absence of the father's moderating influence, a real darkness begins to creep in around the character of Jack, as he slides from harmlessly petty childhood infractions to fledgling acts of violence and destruction. A dark drone dominates the soundtrack, as Jack revels in the guilty thrill of breaking windows. He's discomfited by the idea of launching a frog to its death with a firework but does it anyway, just to see how it feels. Most horribly, he betrays the guileless trust of his adoring brother, who he shoots in the finger with a BB gun, a moment of visceral pain that plays out on screen like a quick spasm of horror and pain and almost immediate guilt. The grace/nature dichotomy falls apart a little at moments like this, because Jack seems to need his father's moral certitude and chilly discipline; the "grace" of his mother proves useless to deal with a world of pointless cruelty and sexual confusion. The freedom represented by the mother is also the freedom to do wrong, to hurt others, to succumb to negative emotions.
JB: I suppose that last part is true, but if so I think that creates problems for your discipline/freedom interpretation. Yes, the father is a strict disciplinarian. Yes, around the mother the boys are not just free from punishment but free in spirit, too. But Malick's nature/grace dichotomy would suggest that to do wrong, to hurt others, to succumb to negative emotions, would be to turn one's back on grace. That doesn't mean grace is "useless," because it's not meant to be a disciplinary action so much as an ideal, the carrot to nature's stick, a state of being that one achieves inwardly, not through external force.
When Jack acts out in this film, we're seeing two things. First, we're seeing the ramifications of jealousy: Jack envies his younger brother. He's certain that his mother must love his younger sibling(s) more, and he feels removed from the bond that his guitar-playing brother has with their organ-playing father. Beyond that, one senses that, in the parlance of the film, Jack sees his brother as naturally graceful, and he resents him for it. It's worth noting that in the scene in which the boys are trying to decide whether to break the windows of a neighbor's shed, Jack's younger brother silently shakes his head at the proposal just before Jack picks up his first rock to fire it into the glass. The window incident isn't a random act of mischief so much as it's an act of sibling rivalry; Jack breaks the windows precisely because his younger brother wouldn't. Like so many children (or adults, really), he tries hard to stand out because he doesn't fit in. And that brings us to the second thing we see when Jack acts out, breaking windows or shooting his brother with the BB gun: nature begetting nature. Jack wants to be his mother's son, but he becomes his father's son. He even says so at one point, telling his father that for all their differences he has more in common with him than with her—an admission that seems to surprise the father, who we presume feels he's always struggled to connect with his oldest son.
For all the heavy-handedness with which the nature/grace dichotomy is first introduced, one of the film's strengths is the artfulness with which these threads are woven together. For example, the mother's playful way of waking up her tired boys with ice is offset by a scene in which the father walks into their bedroom and rips the sheets off of them—no time for gentleness or affection—with stern organ music playing in the background. Amidst shots of play there's Jack's punishment for slamming the screen door and a lecture on weeding. Chastain's Mother is a nurturing, loving presence, talking softly to her children in bed at night and giving them gentle kisses. Pitt's Father, on the other hand, typically fluctuates between threatening and peculiar—when he tries to teach his sons how to fight, they seem terrified by the strangeness of the exercise as much as anything. To Malick's credit, he doesn't portray Father as wholly monstrous. One of the film's most touching images is the shot of soaking wet boys with huge smiles on their faces clinging to their father, who has been playfully spraying them with the garden hose. We can feel the father's desire to connect with his sons, as he does so beautifully in the scene in which he plays the piano to accompany the middle son playing guitar. But, well, grace is not his nature. The father's relationship with his sons, particularly Jack, can be summed up in one terrific shot, when Father leads Jack back toward their front lawn: his arm is outstretched as if to wrap around his son, but instead his hand grips his son around the back of his neck, like a police officer taking a suspect to his jail cell, as the setting sun shines through the two-foot-wide but almost endlessly deep emotional abyss between them.
EH: Your description of Mother as "a nurturing, loving presence" in contrast to Father's stern and terrifying countenance suggests one of the other ways in which Malick sets up these two parents on opposite ends of a scale. These characters represent stereotyped and old-fashioned ideals for their respective genders, fulfilling societally expected roles so completely that they nearly become caricatures. Mother is nurturing and loving, sweet and kind, sensitive and graceful. Father is domineering, strong, unsentimental, reluctant to show any emotion other than anger. Part of the reason he's so strict with his sons is that he wants to raise them to be what he thinks a man should be: that's the rationale behind the boxing lesson, as well as the constant emphasis on discipline. It's as though he's preparing them to be in the military, which is why it's so easy to assume that when one of his sons dies, years later, it happened at war in Vietnam. Father also tries to instill in his sons a distrust of other people and a cutthroat attitude towards business that Jack obviously internalizes, as evidenced by Penn's portrayal of the older Jack as a stereotypical soulless businessman. One senses that Jack has grown up to be what his father wanted him to be, a hyper-successful masculine provider; his mother's exaggerated femininity had comparatively little lasting impact on his personality.
If gender is important to the film's depiction of family life, sexuality also enters into it in certain scenes. Malick's films have always been circumspect about sex. There are sensual and romantic images in his films, especially The New World, but no real sex; indeed, it's hard to imagine Pocahontas and John Smith in that film going beyond the playful, almost childlike romantic relationship they share, which seems to consist mostly of laying in the grass together. So it's probably telling that the most sexual sequence in all of Malick's work is the scene where Jack breaks into the home of a woman who he has been voyeuristically spying on. Jack walks around the house, fascinated by everything he sees as though all of it is an extension of the woman he'd been watching, and finally he takes one of the woman's undergarments out of her dresser and spreads it out on the bed, admiring the sheer fabric, perhaps imagining the way its thin surfaces might lay against the woman's body. The fetish-like way he engages with this garment, stealing it and then desperately getting rid of it by letting it drift off on the current of a river, suggests the intensity of the confused feelings overtaking him.
Jack's fascination is sexual, but also related to class. The home obviously belongs to a much wealthier family than the O'Briens; it is nicely decorated and full of valuable knick-knacks. Jack's voyeurism is motivated by more than a youthful, burgeoning libido. It's also about a desire for a different sort of life, for an escape from the strife that so often fractures his own home life. Perhaps he even understands, on some intuitive level, that so much of his father's bitterness is rooted in the O'Brien patriarch's feeling that life has passed him by, that he's failed to accomplish as much as he could or should have. (This, too, ties back to gender roles, since the father feels that he hasn't been successful as a man and as a breadwinner.) When Jack walks through this home, his pseudo-sexual excitement is an echo of the similar scene in Days of Heaven when Abby walks around the farmer's house, relishing the nice things that are now hers. Malick understands, and doesn't judge these characters for their materialism: for those who had so little, a taste of something fine and fancy can be exhilarating.
Those feelings of avarice and jealousy are all tangled up with Jack's developing sexuality, and also with guilt, shame, and the Freudian transference of his adoration for his mother to another woman. The sequence ends with Jack returning home, having disposed of the stolen slip, and confronting his mother, who seems to somehow know, if not precisely what he did, then at least that he did something. He can't even look her in the eye, instead shuffling by, looking back with such a miserable expression, unsure of what he's even feeling at this point. Moments like that are why the childhood section of The Tree of Life is so brilliant: seldom have the complicated, half-formed emotions of childhood, both positive and negative, been so intensely felt and so precisely conveyed.
JB: I agree with that last sentence wholeheartedly. I can't remember where I read it, but at least one review of The Tree of Life suggested that it was yet another Malick picture without sexuality. But I don't get that. As you've pointed out, it's just a film without sex. Prior to the scene in which Jack enters the woman's home, there are others in which he ogles the woman's bare legs or comes up with an excuse to drink from her garden hose so that he might spy on her as she hangs her delicates on a clothesline. There is incredible eroticism to those scenes, and incredible youth, too. What we're seeing there is true immaturity: adult sexuality that's coming into form.
For all the movies that have been made about childhood, whether in the present tense or through a nostalgic filter for a bygone age, few do as wonderful a job of capturing what childhood feels like. The emotional highpoint of the film for me is the one that kicks off with the mother holding her child, looking up to the sky with a smile on her face and saying, "That's where God lives." Then, with Ma Vlast flowing in the background, Malick gives us a current of childhood images: boys running and chasing one another around the house; throwing a ball onto the roof; playing with 4th of July sparklers; climbing trees; and eventually crashing hard at night with dirty fingernails. The sequence ends with the boys hearing the sound of the screen door opening, signaling that their mother is about to call them in for the night, prompting them to scurry behind a tree across the street, hiding single file and then breaking into animal noises (perhaps my favorite image in the entire film). Later on we'll see the episodes of mischief and more moments of pure innocence, and some that are a combination of the two, such as when Jack dares his brother to stick a wire hanger into a lamp. In each case, the boys seem to be wearing blue jeans, and sometimes nothing but blue jeans, as if they never take them off. (In a bit of irony, there are some shots in Malick's film that remind of the John Hillcoat directed Levi's ad that so clearly ripped off Malick; indeed, Levi's even gets a thank you in the closing credits.) When a truck comes through town spraying DDT, even that is a moment for childhood play. What Malick captures here is the endlessness of a childhood summer, and the spaciousness of 1950s childhood, where the boys seem entirely unteathered, free to explore, free to be boys.
These scenes stand in contrast to the shots of the older Jack, who looks back on his life from atop a Houston skyscraper. He's an architect, apparently, at one point looking at blueprints that seem to show lots of tiny little offices or cubicles. "I feel like I'm bumping into walls," Penn's Jack says in the voiceover. "When did I lose you?" he asks. But does he mean his brother or his childhood spirit, his grace? His house is spare, like something out of a Kohler ad. It's unlived-in. He's boxed-in now, and he apparently longs for both the freedom of youth and the feeling of dirt underneath his fingernails.
EH: The scenes with Penn as Jack are the film's weak point, but yeah, for the most part they do work in terms of the film's symbolic system, the opposition between innocence and cynicism, between grace and nature. Interestingly, one thing I don't think works is Penn's comment about "bumping into walls." Malick's mise en scène goes out of its way to establish that this character is miserable and alienated: as you say, his house is bare and seems like a pristine model home rather than an actual lived-in residence, and at work he's surrounded by steel and glass and concrete. At least one review I've read has pointed out that these are the first scenes in any of Malick's films to be set in the present, and it's consistent with his generally nostalgic, backward-looking sensibility that he seems to find the present lacking. But the images of skyscrapers towering up to the sky, high glass ceilings stretching up to views of the sky framed by steel beams, don't seem as claustrophobic as Penn's comment would suggest. Maybe I just don't respond to Malick's obvious suspicion of cities. Maybe Malick's aesthetic is so naturally inclined to find beauty and awe everywhere that he makes these urban images too aesthetically appealing to support the idea advanced by the dialogue.
Or maybe—and I like this idea best of all—part of the point is that Jack himself is missing the beauty all around him. He says he's bumping into walls, but to me Malick's images seem to undermine this statement, showing Jack in large open spaces with ceilings that vault up to heaven like the roofs of cathedrals. So many of Malick's films include characters who are oblivious to the splendor of the natural world, but maybe the adult Jack is a character who's oblivious to the splendor of the man-made world. He looks all around him and sees only ugliness and conformity and constriction, especially in comparison to the free-wheeling sense of adventure and play seen in many of the childhood scenes, set in a sunlit suburbia that's surrounded by the wilds of nature. The viewer can't help but make the same comparison, and Malick even seems to want us to find Jack's adult surroundings oppressive in comparison to his childhood environs. Instead, I come away with the conclusion that Jack's sense of claustrophobia is self-imposed, that if only he'd let go of the past he could find some happiness in the present and the future rather than constantly looking backward to his childhood as the source of all his problems and the repository for all his joy.
Granted, this is a direction in which the film sometimes seems reluctant to head, and the final scenes—in which none of the characters besides Jack have aged past the 1950s—suggest that Malick himself remains mired in the past, as does Jack. The film never quite considers the idea that real fulfillment and happiness are to be found in opening one's eyes to the beauty of one's present situation rather than trying to return to a tumultuous but (in memory) idyllic past. Those images of surprisingly soulful skyscrapers are like a whispery countercurrent to this dominant thread in the film, a faint suggestion that pleasure, joy, grace and freedom are confined to 1950s suburbia only if we allow them to be.
JB: I like that reading. Personally, and maybe because I was swayed by Penn's narration, I saw the skyscrapers as more imprisoning than inspirational, but you're not the only one who thinks that those shots provide their own kind of awe, whether or not that was Malick's intent. In his review at Not Just Movies, Jake Cole observes that the adult Jack's "revulsion of his surroundings does not match the tone of the shots, which remind the audience that the steel and glass monoliths do not cover up nature but reflect it on their surfaces. Malick's films previously argued that the destruction of mankind was a part of nature and not against it, but he goes further here. That the last physical shot of the film is of a bridge shows how Malick has progressed to the point of accepting the man-made world as a part of nature, cementing the idea that everything is connected (and there's no better man-made object to demonstrate connection than a bridge)."
Jake's reading and yours remind that even though this is the first time Malick has grappled with the current world it's not the first time he's observed human progress. In Part I of this discussion we noted that in his previous film Malick regards 17th Century England with almost the same awe that he has for the forests and rivers of the New World. And we shouldn't forget that two of the most romantic images in Days of Heaven are President Wilson's train rumbling through the vastness of the panhandle and those biplanes swooping down to the farmland below. Malick might be nostalgic for the way things were, he might see his ideal in the rearview mirror, but he's never portrayed progress as some looming absolute evil. For me, The Tree of Life proves that Malick views human progress as just another irrepressible phase of natural evolution.
As for the shot of that bridge, it's the one thing that almost saves the beach coda for me—or at least saves it from being a complete waste of time. Don't get me wrong, it's a jarring shot, because after spending film after film in amongst the trees, anything made of steel seems out of place in Malick's universe. But the moment I saw that bridge I flashed back to that excerpt from The Thin Red Line that I quoted in Part I: "How do we get to those distant shores? To those blue hills? Love." The bridge is love. I realize that sounds very Kumbaya, and I don't mean to suggest that Malick is directly alluding to that scene from The Thin Red Line, but spiritually those moments are united, and I suspect you'd agree with me that this is one of those times when a shot of a bridge is anything but "just a bridge." Put together with Jack's oceanfront rapture, the bridge suggests that we can connect to our past, if only we go looking for it.
EH: Yes, it's a bridge to the past, not a bridge to the future. Malick is conceptually able to leap back to the very beginning of the universe and show the irresistible progress of time, but the film ends in a loop between the present day and the idea of heaven as embodied by a return to the past, to memories of one's childhood. Malick has a very ambivalent attitude about progress, of course, as evidenced especially in The New World, where progress can evoke awe at mankind's remarkable feats, but also horror at the destructiveness and waste produced by any great leap forward. That's why The Tree of Life hurtles through the entire history of the world—quite literally starting with nothing, then single cells tentatively fusing, then the dinosaurs and their extinction—only to come to an abrupt halt with one family's failure to move forward.
The rush of history can't be stopped, Malick suggests, but on the individual level his characters fiercely resist that relentless momentum, desperately wishing to return to simpler times rather than move forward. There's such tension between the conservative and the radical in Malick's work. On the one hand, The Tree of Life is his most formally adventurous film yet, fully embracing the avant-garde in terms of editing and imagery. Parts of the creation sequence recall the abstract work of Stan Brakhage and Jordan Belson, and Malick apparently samples a brief snippet from an abstract short by the experimental filmmaker Scott Nyerges. In the celebration of color and light forms, parts of the sequence particularly evoke Brakhage's The Text of Light, and not just because of the resonances in the titles: Brakhage's adoring tribute to light filtering through ashtrays finds a spiritual successor not only during the most abstract moments here, but also in Malick's obvious love for the natural world, his appreciation of light beams cutting through dense treetops or streaming in through filmy curtains. The sensuality of avant-garde work like Brakhage's, often achieved through rapid cutting and abstraction, is echoed in Malick's much more studied, less abstract approach to the world.
For all the radicalism of Malick's vision, though, the underlying dynamics are, if not quite regressive, then at least overly focused on the past. Implicit in Malick's vision is the impossibility of truly halting the flow of progress, and the 1950s childhood section of the film also suggests that the past is much more complicated than the idyllic, sanitized images of it that proliferate in popular culture. But for all the darkness and conflict that weave through the O'Brien family's domestic situation, that section of the film is nevertheless inscribed with a very potent desire to escape the alienation of the present and immerse oneself in that lively, sensually stimulating milieu. This desire is carried over into the problematic coda, in which Malick seems to visualize David Byrne's vision of heaven as "a place where nothing ever happens," except that Malick finds that prospect not numbing but sublime.
JB: The only danger with that reading is that it places an awful lot of emphasis on the 1950s and on the 'nothingness' of the beach footage. It could be that the coda is simply a depiction of a man rediscovering his grace, which just happens to reunite him with his childhood, which just happens to have occurred in the 1950s; meanwhile, Malick might not be intent on portraying heaven so much as creating a space where the living Jack can be reunited with his deceased brother. Point being, for all the vastness of The Tree of Life, in the end it's an incredibly small and personal story—one man's journey into his past in search of, what? Happiness? Peace? Grace? His dead brother? The meaning of life? All of the above? What Malick seems to find sublime is a contented spirit. He found a slice of heaven in Kit and Holly's forest hideaway in Badlands, in the farmland of Days of Heaven, near the war zone of Guadalcanal in The Thin Red Line, in untamed Virginia and manicured England of the 17th Century in The New World and now in Waco, Texas, circa 1950-something in The Tree of Life. Yes, this is all in our past, but if Malick were to set a film in 2011 or 3047, I suspect he would find heaven there, too, elusive and fleeting though it always is in his films.
The more I think about Malick's filmography, the less I see his films as fixated on or reverential about the past. Instead I see a filmmaker who is determined to consume and preserve those fleeting bits of heaven or grace. Malick is Kit or Jack's younger brother burying mementos in the ground. He's Holly gazing into the stereopticon. He's Witt finding a "spark" amidst war. One of the most crushing moments in The Tree of Life, and the place where I wish Malick had ended the picture, is that shot of the O'Briens driving away from their home, each of them looking back longingly at a structure that for them is overflowing with memories. Does Malick romanticize the past? Sure. But he gets there by romanticizing it as it happens, by seeing the beauty that so many of us miss.
EH: I should emphasize, as we wrap this up, that one of the things I like best about The Tree of Life is how many contradictions it embodies. As I've said, it can be seen as both conservative and radical, simultaneously obsessed with progress and with the past, and it is open to multiple readings that overlap even as they contradict one another. Its ultimate meaning is up-in-the-air, though my visceral dislike for the closing scenes unfortunately does color my perceptions of some of Malick's ideas, making me more suspicious of the new agey currents that drift through the film, mostly peripheral until those final scenes on the beach. The ending can be read in multiple ways, I think you're right about that, but more because it's vague and hackneyed than because there's any productive ambiguity in it.
Thankfully, this disappointing conclusion notwithstanding, The Tree of Life is a rich and complex film with densely interwoven thematic layers and countless visual delights. Like you, I love that point-of-view shot from the back of the O'Briens' car as it pulls away from their home for the last time, and like you I wish the film had ended there. That shot encompasses so much that is great about Malick's sensibility: bittersweet nostalgia coupled with a wise outlook on the inevitability of loss and change, the sensually drifting quality of the imagery, the romanticism that's built on a strong foundation of concrete detail. That moment is earned. The entire childhood sequence of the film builds to that moment, so its romanticism and nostalgic yearning are grounded in a very tangible reality. Most importantly, it captures a child's helplessness and lack of agency, the sense that one is skating through life, borne along by the decisions of others. Jack, looking back to his own past, is unable to make it play out any differently; he can only observe, carried along with the flow of life towards that unavoidable moment when everything finally collapses.
Not every moment in The Tree of Life is so dense or so perfectly realized, but there's no doubt that this often thrilling, sometimes frustrating film is one of Malick's finest achievements yet. As you said at the beginning of this conversation, it is the daring work of an artist who is not holding back a thing, and that accounts for both its dazzling moments of emotional catharsis and its baffling moments of indulgence.
Jason Bellamy ruminates on cinema at The Cooler. Follow his updates on Twitter.
Hey, guys…I really enjoyed this conversation, but I had one question: What makes you think the ending sequence is necessarily supposed to be set in Heaven, or that it's some vision of the afterlife?
I mean, it MIGHT be that, but given how obliquely Malick has come at spiritual matters in every other movie, I tend to doubt it. I've read review after review, positive and negative, singling out this sequence as problematic or simplistic, but I wonder if (a) Malick's intent is being misperceived, either because he didn't execute the concept fully or because people are reading it through the lens of organized religion? If the latter, why? Malick's vision is pantheistic, maybe beyond or apart from organized religion, very primitive or advanced depending on how you want to read it, and his notion of the soul is so intertwined with psychology and psychological development that the two concepts — religion and psychology — are practically indistinguishable.
I read it more as the main character reconciling all the parts of himself, and his experience, that he thought were irreconcilable. There is no reason to think all of those people, the hero included, are dead in that sequence. And there are a lot of characters in there who had a tiny presence in the movie, or not presence (cutting room floor casualties?) and whom the hero could not possibly classify as dead or alive, because how would he know?
I saw it more as a symbolic representation of the hero coming to terms with his experience and realizing there is no father/mother, nature/grace, alive/dead, past/present, only the continual unfolding continuum of inside the mind/outside in the world. Or something.
In other words, yes, you can imprint your own reading on it, and Malick invites it, but at the same time, the structure of the movie intentionally frustrates attempts to impose such a reading. It is, as you gentleman have said, Proustian…we are watching what is in one man's mind (Jack's or Malick's). So it's all figurative, in a way. I think even the parts of the film that Jack could not have been present to see are Jack's hypothetical imagining of those events, not a "documentary" record….
I need to see it again to sort all this out, but can you see what I'm trying to get at, at least?
Thanks again–
I know you both say the ending is open to many readings, as is the movie itself, but it seems like you are gravitating toward the afterlife idea, right?
I agree Matt, that the ending represents the reconciling the irreconcilable. It's all in Jack's mind so it's rather self-serving to what he wishes for, not necessarily the culmination of where the film is leading to. The last moment of that sequence is Jack's mother finally coming to terms with giving her son over to God–something illustrated in the beginning of the film as something she couldn't conceive of. She wished for death just so she could see R.L. again. The death of R.L. was essentially her fall from grace. In Jack's mind he was envisioning that sometime, somewhere his mother finds the grace she once had. And because the moment of his mother finding grace again is what ends Jack's internal thoughts, sending us back into his present world and seeing Jack looking like he just overcame something, I believe it's key to what the film is about. Jack isn't just grieving for the loss of his brother that day but grieving what the death did to his mother.
Many argue that the Sean Penn sequences are the weakest aspect of the film, and some argue that Malick could have simply cut these parts out. But without the sequences you don't have any context for what surrounds it. The present sequences key us in. I wondered why Malick would have Jack going to work on a day when it's the anniversary of his brother's death, and he is still preoccupied with grief. Many pointed to the idea that Jack was cut off from the world–or nature–that surrounded him but I didn't buy that. There's that shot of Jack's wife bringing in branches from outside for their centerpiece at home–obviously nature is something that's important to Jack. The mystery stuck with me until the end when Jack's father gets moved to a job he doesn't care for, uprooting his family from their home. Jack's father says that he never missed a day of work. Coupled with the bonding scene between Jack and his father shortly before and we realize that Jack becomes his father, never letting what's eating at him get in the way of not showing up for a day's work.
I've been reading y'all for months (years?), but registered to comment now.
First, thank you both for this astute, illuminating conversation. It's already enlarged my enjoyment of Malick's latest masterpiece, as your past conversations have done with Malick's earlier work.
I, too, found the "heaven" sequence a tad puerile and cliched, both in its visual tropes and how it appeared to be resolving everything for so many characters: God! Forgiveness! Letting go! Grace!
But I think I really love Matt's interpretation that, instead, the sequence is the hero's coming to terms with his fraught past. Strong evidence for this reading would be, as Matt also suggests, that the "heaven" occupants are all from Jack's childhood, frozen at the age he remembers them–except for himself, who is represented at his current age where he is trying to resolve all this.
If ultimately convincing, this reading of the coda, for me, moves the film from "messy, qualified masterpiece" to "masterpiece."
I agree totally with Matt.
The beach scene for me is most likely an epiphany Sean Penn has after or while overthinking his life (the Waco scenes are on one or two occasions intercut with Sean Penn remniscing; touching grass, staring into his memory). After this epiphany, the elevator finally goes back down to earth and Jack is able to smile again. That smile is the punchline of the movie and it indeed shows that Jack is able to, from now on, enjoy the present by coming to terms with his past.
The bridge shot at the end naturally evokes the bridge metaphor which I think is valid, also human (emotional) bridge-building elevated from the natural river beneath it, but aside from that I thought Malick showed an extremely modern and man-made object in the same frame as the river which is still flowing after thousands of millions of years. The penultimate shot, looking upwards, is one of the skyscrapers. The present may look like this, but if you just look to the ground, the same river is still there, flowing.
What makes you think the ending sequence is necessarily supposed to be set in Heaven, or that it's some vision of the afterlife?
Good question, Matt. It was one that sent me back into the conversation to see what we said, because I think we see that sequence as you describe it: "a symbolic representation of the hero coming to terms with his experience and realizing there is no father/mother, nature/grace, alive/dead, past/present, only the continual unfolding continuum of inside the mind/outside in the world. Or something."
I think it's a vocabulary problem in that there really isn't a great name for this otherwordly place/space where the beach sequence occurs. Going back through the conversation, I first said the characters were walking around in "heavenly peace," and that it was "heaven off earth," and that they were in "The Beyond." And I think that's all correct, and I was actually trying to avoid calling it "Heaven" itself, because that would imply that Jack is dead (right?) and I don't think that. Of course, eventually all of that led to Ed's calling it a depiction of "the afterlife or the spiritual realm," and maybe "afterlife" is the wrong word (although at least one dead person is there) but "spiritual realm" is right. (I may have missed some other references, so it's possible that in there I came right out and called it Heaven.)
Point is, part of the problem is that the beach sequence looks and plays like so many depictions of Heaven, so it's hard to feel like Malick isn't suggesting that Jack is mentally/emotionally going to that place/space to reconcile all the parts of himself (to use your words) — because, after all, this is a film that gives us the entire creation of the universe, and several references to God, and so something would almost seem to be missing if Malick didn't try to engage with Heaven in some respect. But, that said, (Ed, correct me if I'm wrong), I think we both agree with you that it isn't Heaven itself … which doesn't mean it isn't some heavenly Beyond.
Or, to put it another way, it all takes place in "Or Something."
Matt, that's a good point, and though Jason and I did discuss the finale frequently in terms of Heaven and the afterlife, I do agree that it's not necessarily a *literal* heaven in the sense that everyone there is dead and etc. It could just as easily be a symbolic and metaphorical heaven, which fulfills the functions that you describe in providing some closure to Jack. He goes to this place, either mentally/figuratively or literally, that looks and feels like traditional depictions of heaven often do, and he encounters people from his past and reconciles with his family and is finally reunited with his long dead brother. I like what you say about psychology and religion being intertwined for Malick, and in that respect I think this is "heaven" in the sense that everyone has a personal heaven or idea of heaven. Jack's seems to be the 1950s, or at least the people who he was surrounded with during the 1950s and the memories he has of the time. That's heaven for him, and his brother is heaven for him.
Of course, whether the scenes are taking place in an actual heaven, in Jack's mind, in some other spiritual or metaphysical plane or, as Jason says, in "or something," the visual sensibility of the whole sequence consistently suggests heaven and transcendence. Not necessarily a Christian heaven, of course, because nearly every religion has similar visions of some place beyond, the domain of god or gods or spiritual matters in general. It's a generic image of spiritual *something*, and a lot can be read into it, and fairly or not I think that vagueness is a big reason why that whole sequence gets singled out by so many people (myself and Jason included) as a weak point of the film. I think you pretty much nail what Malick was going for here, but I'm not sure he really brought those ideas to the screen as clearly or powerfully as he could have.
Another excellent conversation, guys. I tend to agree with Matt in terms of the final sequences. I think it's telling that the Sean Penn material before the conclusion of the "heaven" sequences are shot aggressively claustrophobic and give the impression of imprisonment. After Jack's adult "visions," he seems much more relaxed and at ease (I believe he even smiles, finally) in the final images and the final shot of the bridge suggests he's found peace not only with the decisions he's made in life, but how the modern life is eliminating the sentimental idea that the old ways are better. In some ways, this seems like Malick self-criticizing the fetishist way he treats nature in some of his films and coming to terms with the beauty of the modern, man-made world. It's telling, I think, that there aren't any man-made structures in Jack's (an architect's) visions. I do believe as you point out that if his way of coming to terms with his own grief seems uninspiring to viewers, it's because it's his vision, his fantasy, not Malick's. It seems like an extension of the character, not the film maker. And if there seems to be something missing from Jack's vision, and if the film suffers from it, so does Jack, so then this is Malick's way of getting us to share his suffering, wishing in some small way that he (and we) can go back to the visions of growing up in the 50′s. But he/we can't, so what we're left with is a barren wasteland and memories of loved ones. It's right that we're disappointed with the ending…because so is he!
I'm also of the opinion that the reason Penn acts so morosely in the beginning of the film is that he's just gotten word that his mother died which would explain some of the voice over ("Brother, mother…it was they that led me to your door") and the awkward phone call to his father ("I think about him every day.") This suggests that upon reflecting on the death of both loved ones, he was able to come to his own sense of forgiveness and grace, and as you mention, that shot of the bridge is man made but also allows for some kind of spiritual reading. I know there isn't a ton of information backing up his mothers death, but then again we don't know from the film how his younger brother died (likely by suicide, like Malick's younger brother). Then again, with the recent news that Malick's parents are both still alive, the idea that the mother in Tree of Life has died seems unlikely given that the film seems like it's so personal.
Anyway, thanks again for another great read.
"I've yet to find someone who goes so far as to praise it"
Yoo Hoo — Over Here!
Malick's audio-visual mode is the symphonic. He uses Berlioz on the soundtrack but The Tree of Life reminds me most of Mahler — especially the 8th.
The film seems to be taking place in the Sean Penn character's consciousness, but not quite and never always.
Where do the dinosaurs come from?
To chime in with Matt – I didn't read the ending of the film as 'heaven' at all. The thing that immediately came to mind when I was watching it was the end of "8 1/2″ – although i grant in that film it was better integrated into the narrative.—-For what its worth – I think the film CAN be read as somewhat anti-religion. – rejecting the idea of a man in heaven who made us all in favor of a flash of light from which all life on earth was created – and that initial moment of creation being replayed over and over again on several scales – the macro scale: (life on earth in its early phases could be thought of as the infant. and age of dinosaurs as the child, the modern age as 'adolescence' (etc) and the 'micro scale (the birth of Jack and his life experiences).
—–From my perspective, in realizing we are all reliving the original moment of the creation of life, we are part of a continuum – and that even though his brother is dead his legacy is – literally – that as someone who was born and who lived he is part of the tree of life from which life continues to spring.
——So as Christians (say) might find solace of turning outwards to a God in heaven, Jack finds solace turning inward towards his own (and by extension all) creation. I DO think the comfort Jack finds IS spiritual in nature though.
——While I agree with complaints that the ending lacked the visual magic of Malik at his best, I was really very moved by the ending (sort of against my better judgement). My bigger complaint with the film was that 1. Sean Penn, an actor I'm not crazy about was cast in it and 2. That his character was kind of a black hole. Surely Malik could have come up with something a little more interesting for adult Jack to do than run around looking angsty.
——–But I loved, loved loved the film. I am often nostalgic for how much more magical the world seemed when I was a kid, and this film was like Malick waving a magic wand and transporting me back to that way of experiencing life for a couple of hours – it was like the greatest gift a filmmaker could give a person.
A quick and modest rebuttal to David Ehrenstein; since the dinosaurs also come from Terrence Malick's consciousness/artistic vision/thoughts; they might as well come from Jack's. Dinosaurs are often the first fellow animals that come to mind when one acknowledges that our time too is limited on this earth and we will go extinct along with 99,9% of all other animals that have ever evolved here.
Interesting read about the mother, Parker; it makes quite a lot of sense. You could deduce from Jack's epiphany at the end, that he envisions his mother reconciled in death with her dead son — again not in a literal Heaven, the theism surrounding the film's 1950 characters is Christian, the film is not I think (I have yet to encounter a review calling the film "Jewish" just because they see a Job quote at the beginning…).
Well of course it ALL comes from Terence Malick's consicousness. But as barthes says the question of "Who is Speaking?" is a highly complex one. And rarely more so than in Malick's art. Nothing in the film is tied down to any single point of view. In a genral way it's the memories and dreams of the Sean Penn character. But never always and never entirely.
I agree, just wanted to say that it wouldn't be too farfetched to say that it's Jack who's thinking about dinosaurs. Maybe I'm just saying that maybe even for the dinosaurs I favor the "not entirely" reading over the "not in that scene". "Look, I found a dinosaur bone!"
I don't understand the impulse to identify opaque inferences with explicit simplicity. I perceive problems of perceived simplicity in the perceiver, not the artist, most often – as Greenaway says, "It is harder to be a good watcher of films than it is to be a good maker of films." But, then, I find negative criticism to be indicative of a refusal to continue on the whole, so I guess it's inevitable.
The most perplexing element in the film to me was the way in which Malick used architecture in relation to nature – in the 'later years' he shows trees being planted in constricted planters, the sky being reflected off of gargantuan skyscrapers, and ends with a massive bridge spanning two green shores. Initially I had thought this was a reflection of man blocking out nature, but the implications of the final shot certainly create the possibility of the architecture as purely metaphor (the bridge being particularly blatant, but in this context the skyscraper perhaps no less), and then the effort to allow for life within these massive human architectural achievements could be skewed in a positive way beyond metaphor which alters the other elements, or it could all be all be a reflection of something else entirely. Penn's character himself is rather cold and stern, like a piece of architecture himself, but perhaps this represents an improvement rather than an emotional deadness. After all, if the film is in part a reflection of his current state then perhaps he is achieving a full blossoming of understanding which goes above and beyond his childhood mistakes, his inability to appreciate his loved ones and treat them properly. Most importantly, for me, is that none of these things could possibly be more interesting than the underlying contrasts clearly established and clearly not explicated, given the innumerable attempts at implicitly establishing some definitive codex for deciphering the film's various supposed correlatives. Can a film function in the same manner as non-narrative film even if it happens to include something that resembles a narrative? I say – absolutely, and even both at the same time to the degree that each are substantiated, and since it is fairly clear that the narrative provides only grasping and the aesthetic provides a great many people with an overwhelming degree of bliss (I, too, favored the simple bliss of the Waco childhood section in the moment, but I have come to appreciate the formal structures which Malick front-loaded the film with more in retrospect, which is of course the only way such elements can function). In the end, another day, another formalist film from Malick, only moreso, indulging in his definitive style of montage and acting, only moreso, which is to say I found it both magnificent and its nuances surprisingly unfamiliar.
Jason and Ed. I registered here to simply tell you that I enjoyed the conversation on this profound and moving film. A poster on Imdb named "Bondiablo" posted what I have copied for both of you and your readers. It is the text from the final act of the film from Malick's screenplay. Of course, the screenplay often changes from the final film (especially with Malick) but I thought it would be interesting to read to perhaps have a greater understanding of the ending. After reading it, I believe Matt has come to the closest to explaining what Malick intended. I would be interested in hearing your thoughts.
"Enclosed at the bottom is the ending of the screenplay (to all of those I've e-mailed this to, sorry that it's the "screenplay" and not the "script"). I apologize if there are any typos. I had to type it out because the whole thing is in PDF and some of it was handwritten out instead of typed (Part Three starts on page 120 and goes to the end on page 128).
Even though Terrence Malick films are often defined by subjective interpretation, I wanted to show people the end of the screenplay because "the beach scene" seems to have upset a lot of people. I can see how some people interpret that scene as "Malick pretentiously putting the entire cast around some water for affect," but there was a lot more going on in that scene in the context of the ending. Although I haven't seen the movie for 2 weeks now, I do remember Malick including the Red Giant/ White Dwarf, the doorway, the sunflower field, the shores of eternity, and Jack's return to the present as described in the script (there are obvious differences, but the central themes are there).
I think one of the biggest things that Malick left out of the movie was the tribulation (at least the beginning/ earth view of it) and the talk with RL and his mother. "I've found you" was such a powerful part of the screenplay; I'm surprised I didn't see it in the movie (at least I don't remember it). When this screenplay was released about a year ago now, I remember thinking the last act was one of the most powerful endings I've ever read. Hopefully some people will agree with me and this will help some of the naysayers understand at least what Malick intended at the end of the film.
In advance, I wanted to say that I understand that the screenplay has been changed since this was written in 2007, and it's possible (if not likely) Malick changed things because he intentionally wanted to go in a different direction. I just wanted to show people Malick's original intent for this movie (remember, he's been writing this thing since the 70′s) so they may better understand what Malick was thinking for the ending and make their own interpretations afterwards. Also, I typed this in Word, and copy/pasted it from there so if there are some formatting issues… well that's why.
Enjoy!!"
PART THREE
EXT. CITY – JACK (ADULT) – THE FUTURE
Jack, an adult now, wakes up from his reverie His soul has come to life. He sees the order of things, the sanity of the creative scheme; a moral purpose underlying all.
Now, before his eyes, the future unfolds.
THE WOLD IN RUINS – THE GREAT TRIBULATION
Scenes from the Congo, from Bangladesh, Iraq and Chad. Children stranded by a flood; their mute, inquiring eyes. Dry, abandoned wells. Riots, fires. Grief and dread have seized the earth.
EXT. NEW EARTH – THE FAMILY OF MAN
The music shifts to a major key. The C minor of the chaos section is resolved into a triumphant E flat major as, after the great catastrophe, a new earth appears; a new land of the spirit.
Evil is overcome, wrong is set right. Men lay down their arms. Manacles are undone. Bolts and locks fly open. Black embraces white, Muslim Jew. Man recovers his lost inheritance. The soul is reconciled with nature.
Women from Guatemala, India, Kenya, Greenland: They smile at their children. Scenes of peace and harmony: from the Dordogne, from Bhutan and Switzerland, and other happy lands where the earth is still a garden.
THE END OF THE EARTH (CGI) – BLACK SKY – MUSIC
The last days of the earth. Man has long since left its surface to seek asylum on worlds yet unknown. The atmosphere has vanished. The seas have boiled away. The land melts. Lava streams down the naked hills.
Trumpets sound as the sun swells outward, spewing its last reserves of energy into the night of space.
The earth skims through an envelope of luminous white gas, in eventless rounds.
THE DYING SUN (CGI) – PLANETARY NEBULA – TENDER MUSIC
The dying sun collapses to a fraction of its former size, a white dwarf now.
All man’s sacrifices, his work, his suffering and genius are gone without a trace. Nothing seems the better or worse for it, nothing improved or diminished. He was here one day, swept away the next.
The sun, torn from its axis, drifts through space without purpose or direction, an undistinquished cinder glowing with a faint blue light, no brighter than today’s full moon.
Behind it, like a lost child, trails a remnant of the earth.
NEW WORLDS, IMAGINARY LIFE (CGI) – PANDROMEDA
New worlds spring up from the ashes of the old. New suns, with new planets in their spheres. Numberless galaxies, in a universe without center or circumference.
As the universe grows older, life assumes new forms. It runs like a fire to the uttermost reaches of space and time – breaks free of its confinement to mortal flesh – resolves itself into the unbounded and ethereal – into spirit, light.
DEGENERATE ERA (CGI) – A THOUSAND TRILLION YEARS FROM NOW – LAST WORLDS PERISHING – DEATH OF THE UNIVERSE – END OF TIME
At length these new worlds perish like those which preceded them. Their mountains burn like tar. Their suns go out like candles in the wind. Stars are scattered like chaff, and the heavens roll up like a scroll.
The expansion of the universe accelerates. The galaxies recede out of sight of each other. All but those in our local group become invisible. Gradually, as they run out of hydrogen, star formation ceases. Only brown and white dwarfs remain, with neutron stars, black holes, atoms the size of the Milky Way, and other bizarre products of this era. With each passing year they drift farther and farther apart from each other.
Night sinks into a deeper night. Now and then there is a burst of light as two dwarfs collide to form a new star.
When there is nothing left to devour, the black holes themselves evaporate away.
All dies, even death itself. Time comes to a close, and all is as it was in the beginning.
Shall the creation leave off here? Has death no purpose, great as life’s?
The same triumphant music accompanies the departure of these celestial scenes as greeted their arrival at the start of our story, when the stars were first born. A hymn of joy.
Though all that lives is doomed to die, something yet remains. Though even our universe is not eternal, there yet is that which is.
THE MULTIVERSE (CGI) – MULTIPLE BIG BANGS – THIRD EXPANSION
From the sadness and gloom of the last night, new universes burst forth, one rising out of the other, a fountain of light.
Creation is eternal birth. A beginning without end. It happens in every instant of time.
The same power which burns in the stars and nebulae burns equally in us. Our being is a miracle, equal with the creation of the universe, and like the universe, each day is created anew.
For a third time, the cosmos expands. Universes froth and dance like bubbles in a pot of boiling water. Most contain no life – unstable seas of neutrinos, photons and electrons, incapable of combining to form any higher structure – but what can we say of the countless others?
We have reviewed the whole of time, in order that we might see what is without beginning or end – without growth, without decay – eternity revealing itself in the phenomena of time – as active in undoing as in doing.
TIGHT ON JACK (30) – DAWN
The first shafts of dawn reach into the city of desolation.
EXT. CITY – CROSSROADS – DAWN
Jack finds himself at the edge of the city. A choice is offered him: he may either go back into the labyrinth where he wandered so long, or come out into the unknown and unfamiliar.
EXT. WALL, RAMPS, DOOR – REIMERS RANCH SET – DAWN
He sees a ramp, a ladder, a gateway, a door.
Gathering his courage, he goes forward. The door is ajar. He stands at the threshold. There is no sound of life, only the wind. What lies on the other side? Does he dare to see?
One step, and he is through
EXT. FIELD BEYOND THE WALL – SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC
He stands in a field beyond the wall, which already seems to lie far behind him. He hears the singing of cicadas. The land is dry. He looks for water. He will not find it here
EXT. SLOT CANYON – GOBLIN VALLEY – SLICKROCK (UTAH) WITH TIME LAPSE OF FLOWING WATER, CLOUDS – _________________ CLIMB
He passes through the narrow defile of a slot canyon. His heart pounds with dread. He climbs through the rock.
He sees a coral snake on the ground. This and other images from his past gradually take shape – assume a sense they did not have before. At last he begins to understand the meaning and the pattern of his life. Everything seems a clue, and oracle: the nighthawk overhead, the rising moon, the faint sound of a guitar.
EXT. STREAM – POOL AMONG PETRIFIED DUNES – DAWN
A stream runs through the rock. He approaches it. A canyon wren is singing. He kneels down beside the rock. He drinks from it. He bathes his face and neck.
We have traveled up the river of time – ascended, from nature to the soul.
Paradise is not a place here or there. The soul is paradise; it opens before us; here, today. The humblest things show it. We live in the eternal, even now.
EXT. SUNFLOWER FIELD
Sunflowers, their heads turned towards their source: the unseen sun, illuminating all with its bright shafts, pressing eagerly through chinks and cracks, driving the darkness before it –
EXT. LAND OF THE DEAD – MIST – DUST – CAVE/SEA/CITY/QUARRY – UTAH SALT FLATS – MONO LAKE – GRASSLAND – BOMARZO – DAWN
Dawn tints the high clouds as a fresh wind finds its way into the land of death, at the end of that road from which there is no return, where men sit in darkness, where dust is their food.
The mists dissolve away. Light breaks through a high window, awakening the dead. The sleepers open their eyes, look about. They rise up exultant, changed – fresh as they were in the days of their youth.
They gather from different places – all who have ever lived. They ascend towards the light at the mouth of a cave. They come out of the city streets where they last walked – out of quarries and abandoned factories, and up from the depths of the sea.
Their faces are covered with ash. Each wears that costume which indicates his character or occupation while he was alive: a ball gown, a cassock, a military uniform or simply his Sunday best. One drags a chain; another pushes a large ball. Gradually, as though at the close of a masquerade, they put these disguises aside.
They stop by a pool to wash their faces. Their features grow more distinct.
They wander over a salt flat. At first the ground is dry and cracked. Then, with mounting excitement, they discover water beneath their feet. Ahead lies a mountain. Rain clouds stand above its peak.
Shoots of young grass spring up through the hard ground.
EXT. SAND DUNES – REUNION AND REBIRTH
Men and women embrace in the dawn, reunited at last. Husband and wife, mother and child, greet each other in joy and awe. Eagerly they tell each other all that has happened. The ages since they last saw each other have passed off like a dream. Here there is no before or after.
EXT. SHORE OF ETERNITY – MUSIC OF UNBOUNDED JOY
They go down toward the shore, entranced by a growing brightness in the east. They speak with each other in whispers.
The shore teems with people now. Water laps at their feet. A crown lies cast down on the wet sand. Mrs. Stone finds her son, Mrs. McKeever her husband. Jack sees other figures from his past: Mr. Reese, O.C., his grandmother and his uncle, Betty and Rush, Cayler and others: the prisoner, the lame man, Marsha and Robert. It is as though they were coming together in one great chorus.
This is the end of the voyage of life. The music sings: all came from love, to love all shall return.
Jack has crossed over death’s threshold, gone beyond space and time, to some greater life which includes death within it.
HIS BROTHER
Now from a distance, he hears that sweet voice which he trusts most in all the world.
JACK
Brother!
As RL approaches, Jack reaches out and takes his hand. We see him from the back; never face on.
JACK (CONT’D)
I’ve found you.
They melt into each other’s arms. Here, in the eternal, they have not been apart.
The walls of the world fly away. It can hold them no longer. They know each other in that which is without end.
MOTHER AND FATHER
Turning, Jack sees his mother, father and Steve looing on. He leads RL towards them.
MOTHER
Is it you?
RL wipes the tears from her eyes.
MOTHER (CONT’D)
You!
She embraces her lost son. She touches his hands, his face, ecstatic. Wonder! Unspeakable joy!
FATHER
My son!
Now, with open arms, his father comes towards him. Love unites what death and suffering have put asunder. He turns to his wife. She caresses her child’s hair. She looks at the strangers who are standing by, as though to ask if she is dreaming. She looks at Jack. She nods. Her grief is cured. Her doubts are ended.
JACK (O.S.)
What you are can’t die.
The plain and ordinary has become a door to the infinite. He lives in that which neither comes into being nor passes away.
He takes his mother’s hands. The music drops away. He knows love and not its semblance. The world itself is music now.
ETERNITY
Dawn approaches.
We pass beyond death. We arrive at the eternal, the real – at that which neither flowers nor fades, which neither comes into being nor passes away – that in which we might live forever. Hitherto all has been mere image; all that we think solid and permanent. Space, time, evanescent all; images only, the purpose and last end elsewhere; the life of life.
Eternity – that realm of pure and endless light – how shall we represent it? A ladder leading up into a tree. Sparks flying up from a fire. A bridge. A kiss. A solitary island.
A single image might serve better than several combined. The whole creation in the figure of a tree. The smallest leaf communicates with the lowest root, all parts feeding on the same sap, breathing in the same air and sunlight, drawing the same life up from the darkness of the earth below.
Simple images, captured with a pinhole camera. After the nervous movements of time, we see that of which time is a moving picture.
A child; the similarity in form between the shape of his ear and that of an oyster shell, between the cowlick at the crown of his head and a galaxy. A lotus, its stalks rising clear of the water; its leaf to which nothing clings. Sequoias. A rose, unfolding. Life surpassing itself.
A locomotive approaches the end of a tunnel. The light draws closer. Soon it shall burst out into the day. No longer a blind mechanism, it has become (quick dissolves, quick cuts) a river – living, flowing – the pure waters of the river of life, rushing down from a mountain peak.
Winter has passed. The leafless woods our hero wandered in are green and cool, murmurous with the song of birds.
You separate the true from the false. You, to whom all things return, from whom all proceed; in whom they are; the beginning of things and their last end; the goal of each and all.
The whole of the picture has been a sifting. The chaff flies away, the kernel remains. Something lives in you that shall outlast the stars.
EXT. SHORE
As Jack watches, his mother spreads her arms towards her children, restored to faith and happiness, reconciled to life.
Now he sees that it was she – his mysterious guide, the guardian of his heart, the source of his moral being. She is the mother of all creation. All flows out of her; she is the gateway, the door. She smiles through all things.
Through her the eternal sought him. From out of her mouth it spoke. Through her life and actions she brought them near it.
MOTHER (O.S)
Fear no longer. You shall find me.
The camera rises with the music’s circling strings – over the trees, over the hills and plains. Now there is rest. The peace of eternity spreads about him, and all is as it was in the beginning.
EXT. CITY
Rain. Weeds in the cracks of a sidewalk. Children playing. We are back with Jack in the city. Even in these streets, the eternal shines. This is God’s world, and not an infinite plain of chaos and sorrow after all.
Though he must linger here a while yet, he will not despair. A new life lies before him. A faith which sees through death.
MOTHER (O.S.)
Know that I am.
EXT. O’BRIEN HOUSE
We return to the present, to the noise and confusion of the everyday, to the place we set out from. We see it now as though for the first time What seemed plain and familiar glows with radiance it did not display before. We have found the infinite in the everyday, the commonplace.
Jack looks about. Will the revelation be forgotten? Will it seem a passing fancy – a dream?
Inside the house, his father is playing the piano. His mother has gone into the backyard. A bell sounds.
The great oak tree stands like a sentient being – thoughtful, benevolent – looking down on him.
He puts his ear against the trunk and listens for those words that, it was foretold, would destroy the evil in men’s hearts and bring them good.
The camera rises up through the branches, cranes up and up until it breaks out of the canopy of leaves into the sky above.
All ends in peace, as music does. The last chord melts into ordinary production sound. Time has reappeared; resumed its sway.
And still the vision is not the journey. The real journey has yet to begin.
Will he give himself to this new life? Does he dare?
A stranger, smiling.
A threshold.
A star.
THE END
I think D_B nailed it, guys: the ending really reminded me of 8 1/2; I didn't see it as a clear-cut depiction of an afterlife but more of a gathering of all of Jack's memories that he's finally ready to recognize and come to terms with. I need to see it again, but this film really struck me as film about raising our level of recognition so that we may have the ability to see the small things that help make sense of the larger, cosmic mysteries (whatever they may be…family, community, the universe, nature, God).
This was one of your best conversations, by the way. Great stuff, guys.
I was relieved to scroll down to the comments section and find so many in agreement with Matt, as I felt an incredible urge to write the same. I don't think that final sequence is a literal depiction of heaven, and it is only disappointing to me if I think of it as such. It is all the things that others here have written. One thing I noticed was how deeply rooted in faith it is, and how powerful it can be because of that. After all of these questions asked throughout the film, questions directed with a camera often pointing straight up toward God, the film flashes forward, far beyond explanation and ends with complete faith, complete acceptance, and therefore a depiction of the only way to find complete peace. You just gotta let go. And Jack may not yet have done that, but he at least understands what he has to do to achieve complete peace, the very essence of faith.
I too noticed it was like the finale of Lost, but once again, a great reason the finale of Lost is disappointing to so many (not me) is because they wrongly think that it contained a sappy depiction of "heaven." The finale of Lost may be poorly executed and sappy, but, once again, its not heaven, but most likely a higher form of consciousness achieved before being thrust back into the light for rebirth. In the end, in both artworks, its the letting go that helps you to achieve all of this. The end of the Tree of Life may simply be a higher level of consciousness, waiting to be tapped.
I wanted to jump back in here to thank everyone for the typically thoughtful comments. Very rewarding and thought provoking! (Special props to first-time commenters!)
I wanted to pose a question about the beach sequence* — which we seem to agree (1) isn't "Heaven," (2) but sure looks like some traditional depictions of Heaven, (3) but that doesn't mean much because Malick ain't traditional, (4) then again, if this is Jack's vision, and he grew up in a genuflecting Christian family in the 1950s, this might be what Heaven looks like in his mind … but where was I? Oh, yeah, the question …
If this is the place that Jack is going to reconcile his feelings, in particular about his dead brother and family in general, who in the heck are those other beach roamers? A few are faces we saw in the film. Some might be cutting-room casualties, as Matt said. But there sure seem to be a lot of people on that beach that Jack doesn't know, or at least shows no signs of knowing. They seem faceless to him. And isn't that a bit odd?
To be clear: I'm not asking this question with intent to prove fault with the sequence. Rather, this is one of the elements of that sequence that keeps it from "fitting" for me. As I told someone today: I can explain the beach sequence; I can interpret; I can even defend it; but it doesn't really speak to me, the way so many other scenes in this film do. Thoughts?
* Up to you whether you rely on the excerpt of the screenplay that Delbert provided (thank you!), or if you want to examine the film solely based on what's actually on the screen — which is where I think we need to end up, although the screenplay excerpt is interesting.
One more thing: David, this is a great encapsulation of the shifting perspective of the film …
In a general way it's the memories and dreams of the Sean Penn character. But never always and never entirely.
Yep!
Jason:
I don't know, I think the ending locale of this movie seems more like "8 1/2″ then it does any Christian idea of heaven I know of. I think the way that evolution in this film is – to my mind – presented as 'fact' gently puts it at odds with a straight Christian interpretation (although possibly most Christians DO also believe in evolution).
Come to think of it – how can the ending locale of this film be any sort of literal 'afterlife' if older Jack and younger Jack are both there in the same place?
I think one could interpret all the other people wandering around in the ending as being:
1. other people in Jack's life – that Malick is acknowledging that there is more to his life than just the incidents presented in the film
and/or:
2. People who are part of Jack's past (and maybe future?) family tree. The reason I say that is that the instigating incident that causes Jack to muse on his childhood and evolution (and therefore, the reason there IS a movie) is the death of his brother. Jack's family tree begins with the beginning of life on earth, through Dinosaurs and through his more 'literal' family. As long as there is life Jack's brother will never be completely 'dead' because he had been part of the tree (just like the Dinosaur that died in the river).
I think there is a certain religious/spiritual element to the movie in that Malick acknowledges the need people have for god is legitimate, I think he is just gently trying to nudge it away from the Bible to something else.
I would add that the empty doorway that shows up at the end of the film (and I think other parts too?) may be a variation of a 'torii' – those Japanese gateway-like structures that I think are rooted in Shintoism. i am hardly an expert in Japanese religion but I googled the meaning of 'toriis' and basically ascertained that they are usually placed in pathways leading up to temples/shrines, so is is POSSIBLE Malick means to make a nod towards a kind of spirituality other than Christianity here.
D_B: I agree that a "straight Christian interpretation" might not seem to work. Still, as much as I'm trying to avoid arguing for that strict interpretation, I do find it interesting that so many of the comments above seem to so easily dismiss that reading considering all that's on the screen — all those references to a religious upbringing, from Jack's Baptism (the foot scene), to the scene where he plays with a toy Noah's ark, to "That's where God lives," to the scene in church, and so on. What I'm trying to argue, perhaps poorly, is this …
If the beach sequence is a construct of Jack's soul-searching imagination, wouldn't it make sense that the place he would go (mentally) to reconnect with his dead brother would be his vision of Heaven? Wouldn't that be the place he'd expect to find his mother? And wouldn't that be a place where he'd expect to find peace?
I agree, absolutely, that the beach sequence isn't Christian specific, that it's about a broader spirituality, and that it's meaning isn't necessarily fixed. But Malick doesn't give us older Jack walking through his old Waco neighborhood. He takes us to this very ethereal location in which various souls seem to walk together united only by their sense of peace. (If Jack made eye contact with anyone on the beach who isn't his family, I'd find it more compelling that these are all people from his life.) Doesn't that essentially describe Heaven? And considering that the film begins by thinking all the way back to first creation, it seems as if it must end at the other end of the spectrum, in some spiritual beyond, where the dead live on, where grace is found. And for Jack, I would think that place would be Heaven (which isn't to imply that he's actually dead and there). I guess what I'm trying to say is that — unless I'm not understanding the comparison — I don't think an 8 1/2 interpretation and a heaven interpretation are mutually exclusive.
If the beach sequence is a construct of Jack's soul-searching imagination, wouldn't it make sense that the place he would go (mentally) to reconnect with his dead brother would be his vision of Heaven? Wouldn't that be the place he'd expect to find his mother? And wouldn't that be a place where he'd expect to find peace?
This is exactly my feeling. Most of the comments so far have been about how the ending scene is not necessarily heaven, or not necessarily a Christian heaven, at least literally, and with that I agree. Nevertheless, I think what's getting lost is that the ending is clearly meant to *evoke* heaven, or a vision of heaven, or a version of heaven. The imagery, the aesthetic, suggests something spiritual and non-material. The shot of the mother flanked on both sides by women in white robes is clearly meant to evoke angels, whether they're literally there or just imagined by Jack or the mother. I think to dismiss the heaven interpretation outright is to ignore the very deliberate imagery that Malick is choosing here.
People seem to be getting caught up on the idea that this is not heaven, that instead it's Jack's mental reconciliation with his past and his family. I say, those two interpretations amount to more or less the same thing. The ending is clearly spiritual, I think everyone could agree on that. It's clearly meant to be a place, whether physical, metaphysical or mental, that is *beyond* the earthly plane that we've seen throughout the rest of the film. A lot of visions of heaven sort of are like the end of 8 1/2, where we're reunited with the people we loved and spent time with on earth, and I think to some extent that's what is happening at the end of this film.
But, as Jason has said, the fact that the O'Brien family is also surrounded by other people they don't seem to know and who haven't been in the film suggests that Jack isn't just envisioning a personal heaven for himself and his loved ones; their reunion seems to happen in some larger spiritual plane where many people are visiting and perhaps having their own reunions and reconciliations. Malick has often worked at a scale far beyond the individual, and in this film he leads up to the O'Briens' story by starting, quite literally, at the beginning of everything, the creation of the universe. So it makes sense that when he travels to the other extreme, to some kind of vision of existence beyond the material world, this is also not entirely a personal or individual vision but one that includes a larger mass of humanity all experiencing the same spiritual or metaphysical catharsis.
More to the point, most of my complaints (and the complaints of others who dislike the sequence) about the ending don't hinge on whether or not this is literally heaven, but on whether Malick's imagery is actually compelling or interesting. There are a lot of ways to read that ending and I think the ideas behind it are very much worth exploring, as we've been doing here, but I still don't find the actual imagery anything other than cliched, whatever it represents.
Anyway, thanks for all the great comments so far, everyone. We love it when a piece prompts a debate like this.
"As I told someone today: I can explain the beach sequence; I can interpret; I can even defend it; but it doesn't really speak to me, the way so many other scenes in this film do. Thoughts?"
I would say the problem I had with the ending is that, regardless of its interpretation, it feels imposed on the film rather than earned. I would think for the ending to work, you would have to feel more of a connection to the adult Jack looking back on his life, which I don't get from what's left of that in "Tree of Life", which is reduced to shots of Sean Penn looking tired walking around the big city.
In fact, I think the framing device is what hurts the film overall. Malick's previous films evoked the spirit of memory without them showing someone literally thinking about what happened to them in the past. But once Malick imposes this structure, which for all the talk about Malick being a filmmaker who doesn't succumb to traditional narrative structure, I found it to be more than a little obvious juxtaposing the cold present with the warm past. My first thought when sitting through that ending was that it felt as if it came out of nowhere emotionally. "Grace" would be the last word I would use to describe it as much as I felt I was being slammed over the head with symbolism.
I guess I can understand what others are getting out of the movie. As I had told Jason when he was in New York to see the movie, I appreciate the reach of Malick's ambitions. But, at the same time, the film made me feel more during the quieter scenes observing the family than the beach finale or the creation sequence which feel more like a filmmaker straining for something profound that is not quite there. This was actually a film where I think a longer cut would have maybe helped because the movie feels, not unlike my issues with "The New World", compromised by the director trying to find the movie in the editing room, which leads to a movie composed of scene fragments rather than anything that allows any moment breathing room. I thought this article was one of the few that showed how the editing undercut the emotional effect this film was striving for:
http://petertonguette.blogspot.com/2011/06/my-problem-with-tree-of-life.html
I posted the end of the script before and based on my reading of it, I tend to agree with Edward and his thoughts above. I know there may be a resistance here to read the experts but I think it can provide real insight into what Malick intended. It really is very descriptive, poetic and a joy to read (I would love to read the entire screenplay). On the other hand, if he couldn't get across what was so descriptive in the screenplay then he might have completely failed as a filmmaker (assuming of course that the screenplay was not radically changed later on; even so, I think the essence is the same). Some additional thoughts from the screenplay:
*It describes the final sequence as Jack's "vision" or "revelation".
*It most certainly is not literally heaven because Jack is not dead.
*The chronology of the last sequence is Jack seeing the (1) The Last Tribulation (isn't this a Christian concept?) (2) A dawn of era of man-a time of peace, understanding and utopia (3) The end of the earth and death of the sun (generally as scientists predict it will happen, (4)"New Worlds/planetary life/Pandromeda" described as "New worlds spring up from the ashes of the old. New suns, with new planets in their spheres. Numberless galaxies, in a universe without center or circumference. As the universe grows older, life assumes new forms. It runs like a fire to the uttermost reaches of space and time – breaks free of its confinement to mortal flesh – resolves itself into the unbounded and ethereal – into spirit, light. (5) The end of the universe a trillion years from now (as I believe scientists see it) and the (6) The Multiverse Theory (a popular scientific theory) where multiple Bing Bangs cause multiple universes and the whole damn thing starts all over again.
Only then do most of the events of the end of the movie concerning present day Jack occur. I believe the film only shows the death of the earth and sun inter-cut with the final Jack sequence (I could be wrong about this though).
Of key importance for me is this (from the Multiverse section):
"Creation is eternal birth. A beginning without end. It happens in every instant of time."
"We have reviewed the whole of time, in order that we might see what is without beginning or end – without growth, without decay – eternity revealing itself in the phenomena of time – as active in undoing as in doing."
With regard to the people on the beach, they are (at least according to the script) NOT just people from Jack's life:
"The mists dissolve away. Light breaks through a high window, awakening the dead. The sleepers open their eyes, look about. They rise up exultant, changed – fresh as they were in the days of their youth.
They gather from different places – all who have ever lived. They ascend towards the light at the mouth of a cave. They come out of the city streets where they last walked – out of quarries and abandoned factories, and up from the depths of the sea.
Their faces are covered with ash. Each wears that costume which indicates his character or occupation while he was alive: a ball gown, a cassock, a military uniform or simply his Sunday best. One drags a chain; another pushes a large ball. Gradually, as though at the close of a masquerade, they put these disguises aside."
A little bit later on the "reunions" are described:
"EXT. SAND DUNES – REUNION AND REBIRTH
Men and women embrace in the dawn, reunited at last. Husband and wife, mother and child, greet each other in joy and awe. Eagerly they tell each other all that has happened. The ages since they last saw each other have passed off like a dream. Here there is no before or after."
My reading is that Jack finally recognizes grace and is able to reconcile his life and forgive his father. At this point he has a vision and/or revelation of the future (just as he imagined the past). He sees the end of the universe and the end of time. Jack (if only for a few fleeting moments) sees beyond the end of time where time and space simply don't matter and where he will be re-united with his loved ones. I guess you can call this heaven but it won't happen for trillions of years although Malick points out that there is no time here; it is something eternal that is not confined by space and time.
Malick sees Jack's vision as just the beginning for him and something that may be quickly forgotten:
"We return to the present, to the noise and confusion of the everyday, to the place we set out from. We see it now as though for the first time What seemed plain and familiar glows with radiance it did not display before. We have found the infinite in the everyday, the commonplace.
Jack looks about. Will the revelation be forgotten? Will it seem a passing fancy – a dream?"
Also, at the end of the script:
"All ends in peace, as music does. The last chord melts into ordinary production sound. Time has reappeared; resumed its sway.
And still the vision is not the journey. The real journey has yet to begin.
Will he give himself to this new life? Does he dare?"
I also think the ending sequence (at least in the screenplay) has a certain continuity with the beginning sequence which mixes Christianity/spirituality with science and evolution. The end of the earth (red sun/white dwarf) and sun; end of the universe, multiverse theories are all scientifically sound and melded with Jack's final spiritual journey on the beach.
Perhaps the reason Jack sees his younger self and his father at a younger age is because the whole plane of time is before him. He can see everything now, time does not matter. So his younger and older self can exist at the same time in this spiritual realm.
One more thing regarding the final "bridge" shot which is only referenced toward the end of the screenplay. Malick makes it explicit that it represents some sort of crossing over into eternity:
"Eternity – that realm of pure and endless light – how shall we represent it? A ladder leading up into a tree. Sparks flying up from a fire. A bridge. A kiss. A solitary island."
Sorry if I was long winded but I am captivated by this film!
Matt, in case you're still checking this thread: will you ever grace us with at least one essay on 'The Tree of Life'? Would love to hear from you (and Ryland and Keith if possible). That would really round up the picture started here by Jason, Ed, and others.
Regarding the final sequence: I read the portion of the screenplay posted here by Delbert (thanks!) and was surprised at how different it is (and feels) from what I saw in the movie theater. In the screenplay this shore where the last portion of the 'vision' takes place is a very elaborate and poetical representation of Heaven – or at least a place most Christians would say approximates their idea of Heaven. More precisely, it is a last stop before life eternal, no more births, or death, or partings; or as Malick writes: "the life of life." The last words of Mother in this place are: "Know that I am" (which are reminiscent of Pocahonta's last words in "The New World")
In the film the sequence is more centered on Mrs. O'Brien. Her last words (which I don't see at all in the script) are "I give you my son." In the screenplay her grief is cured by her reunion with her dead son. In the film she is in this mysterious place where she can let him go voluntarily. This is very, very different – and less Christian than it sounds at first. In fact it reminds me of the Buddhist notions of suffering and attachment. And it feels slightly circular too: the film begins with her grief over her lost son and ends with her giving her son away.
Perhaps Malick rethought and retooled the ending quite a bit either during filming or post-production. Maybe that's part of the "problem" with this sequence. I just don't think the sequence is as simple as it looks at first blush. Time will tell.