Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard are astute observers of contemporary cinema. Recently they conducted a lengthy conversation about the five films that make up Terrence Malick’s body of work as a writer and director. Their conversation can be viewed beginning at
The Bellamy and Howard discussion contains insightful observations and stimulating thoughts about Malick’s films. So it is curious that, when these two critics approach Malick’s most recent work, they are reduced to hysteria.
In commenting on The Tree of LifeBellamy and Howard fall over each other in their rush to pour scorn on the concluding vision of Malick’s film.
According to Howard, it is so bad that it “very nearly extinguished the good feelings I had about the hour leading up to this nauseatingly new agey coda.”
It is, Bellamy complains, “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.” It is, he goes on, “cheesy, cliched and feeble… it’s a buzzkill.”
On and on they go hyperventilating in their attempts to outdo one another in their castigation of a portion of the film whose point they evidently entirely missed. It is curious that two critics who have a clear admiration for Malick’s work should not stop for one second of self-examination. How could they not wonder if perhaps, just perhaps, Malick might be up to something they had missed?
What could possibly motivate a thoughtful critic to accuse Terrence Malick of resorting to a visual sensibility that is “lame and cliched, an unthinking regurgitation of the most turgic form of religious imagery”?
You would think the preceding four brilliant Malick films, not to mention the obviously luminous moments that even Bellamy and Howard are able to see in The Tree of Life, would give them pause to wonder and engage perhaps in a tiny bit of self-doubt. Such a tirade of distaste seems to be the reaction of people who feel betrayed by someone they have admired.
What is Malick’s terrible betrayal?
At the end of The Tree of Life Malick offers a transcendent vision. It is not a “crushingly obvious vision of heaven” as Howard suggests, nor a vision of “heaven off earth” in Bellamy’s words.
Malick’s portrayal of crowds gathering on ocean shores is a symbolic vision of eternity. While the concept of eternity is often connected to the idea of “heaven”, they are not synonymous.
Eternity is an ineffable state of being that Malick wants us to understand is dawning within Jack O’Brien’s awakening consciousness. It is a reality that transcends all temporal states. It is not a location in the “sweet by and by,” nor merely a final reward for “good” people. It is an inner experience that exists beyond time and interpenetrates the material realm.
At the end of his film, Malick strives to show that the strands and influences of Jack O’Brien’s life are woven together in one unitive whole within this other dimension of consciousness. Jack is connected to all the people he has encountered in his life. He is linked even to people he has never met. Eternity is populated by all beings, known and unknown. Humanity and all of creation form one integral whole in this parallel universe.
Malick is struggling to symbolically represent the fact that a new awareness has begun to dawn in the depths of O’Brien’s soul. His inner journey, confronting the grief and pain of his past, has led him to see that all of life is held in the light. All the disparate elements of his being and of the whole of creation finally come together in a unity of love, and reconciliation. If the imagery seems contrived or even cliched, it is only because these are the images Malick imagines conjured inside Jack O’Brien. They are the visions captured in the imagination of a good 1950′s Sunday School trained child. But they point, none the less, to a deeper reality that is in fact real.
This state is not defined by happy emotions, or satisfying psychological catharsis. It offers no tidy intellectual answers to the painful conundrum of human suffering. But, it also refuses to walk away from the glory of life with a skeptical question mark and a non-committal intellectual shrug of the shoulders.
As much as Bellamy and Howard may want it to, The Tree of Life does not end with the O’Brien family driving away from their home after Mr. O’Brien has lost his job. There is more to life than suffering, loss, doubt, pain, and regret. It is this “more than” dimension to existence that is most challenging to portray in any art form and most upsetting to those whose view of existence is confined to the physical realm.
The terrible transgression Malick has committed in The Tree of Life is that he has acknowledged overtly on screen that he sees another dimension to life beyond the physical, psychological, material dimension.
How could Bellamy and Howard have missed the clues along the way?
Did they not stop to wonder about:
- the title of the film. The tree of life appears in the Garden of Eden at the beginning of the Bible. It appears again at the end where it grows on either side of the river, a “tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.” (Revelation 22:2)
- the Lumina image of Thomas Wilfred that emerges at the beginning, and then at least three times throughout the film, evoking an ethereal presence that haunts the movie
- the image of sunflowers which turn their faces towards the sun at the beginning and end of the film
- images in church of baptism, confirmation, and Sunday worship
- a chair that mysteriously moves out from the table under its own power in the O’Brien’s kitchen
- Mrs. O’Brien suddenly floating up from the ground and hovering in mid-air after Jack has prayed
- Mrs. O’Brien giving a cup of water to a convict (an image that refers to Matthew 25:37 and also occurs in The New World)
- the stained glass window depiction of Jesus awaiting crucifixion that fills the movie screen just as the preacher asks, “Is there nothing which is deathless? Nothing which does not pass away?”
- Jack’s quote from Romans 7:15 “What I want to do I can’t do. I do what I hate” in which the original texts points to forces that transcend human will
- Mrs. O’Brien alluding to I Corinthians 13 in a statement that might well serve as the thesis statement for the entire film, “Unless you love, your life will flash by.”
- then of course there’s the music, the spectacular stirring devotional music that accompanies so much of the film – the Agnus Dei of Berlioz, The Funeral Canticle written by John Taevener, and, as the final credits roll, a piano playing the overtly Christian resurrection hymn “Welcome Happy Morning”
These are a few of the hints that Malick is up to something more than making pretty pictures, narrating compelling stories, or peddling in profound unanswerable questions. If the viewer is unable to perceive these pointers to the transcendence that breathe through all of Malick’s films, the viewer will be unlikely to suddenly open to this reality at the end of The Tree of Life.
Mr. Malick inhabits an enchanted universe. There are more dimensions to existence than can be contained by the human intellect or perceived by the physical senses with which we are accustomed to navigate through life.
It may make the sophisticated modernist intellectual uneasy, but Malick boldly declares in The Tree of Life that he perceives a dimension to reality that transcends the physical, time-bound dimension with which we are most familiar. Like Jack O’Brien, Malick has stepped through the doorway of faith into a world haunted by divinity.
The source of the beauty Malick so powerfully portrays is that love that in her son’s mind is embodied in his mother. This love is the force that brought all existence into being. It is the power of life that has existed since the beginning of time and holds all of existence in tenderness and mercy.
Malick is so daring as to suggest that this power of grace may even have been present in the actions of a dinosaur whose gentle touch of a wounded beast is reflected when young Jack puts his hand on the shoulder of a boy who bears the scars of a house fire. Mercy is present throughout the universe. When our consciousness expands, we become aware of a bridge that crosses the great gulf extending from the visible to the invisible. The varied realms of life are united into one whole reality in which healing is possible and love is known as the eternal power of creation.
It is no doubt a reflection of the tight little materialist world occupied by so many sophisticated western intellectuals that Malick’s film has stirred such controversy. It is a sad choice to join Mr. O’Brien in the one dimensional universe he has inhabited and “miss the glory” that Malick sees so clearly in all of life.
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August 12, 2011 at 10:21 am
jaqueline
They didn’t miss the glory at all.
Each of them are complimentary that TTOL contains some of Mallick’s finest work and most magnificent moments.
The ending is a cliche…it really is….beautifully filmed with Mallick’s touch, but a cliche none the less ( enter Bono singing oh great river run to the sea )
That some look beyond the cliche to try and understand what Mallick is wanting to say is the viewer’s grace to him, not the other way around.
These blokes criticised the passages of cliche for hiding / detracting the glory. Mallick is an experienced filmmaker, with great esteem…he should be able to handle it, and frankly he needs to get it if he says he is a master and paints like a schoolboy. For heavens sake, you should have heard what people said about George Lukas when he gave us his overblown prequel offerings.
However, I will take these two to task in kicking up the dung and themselves obscuring what is magnificent. If they are versed in Mallick’s films they will notice that the motif of river and water ( or the lack of it) runs through all of Mallick’s films and he is being consistent with his imagery and it’s meaning to him .Their ridicule of it is a a reflection of their lack of adequate comprehension.
These drongos don’t like it….. so??? Why write yet another post that says what you have already said in other posts? This movie speaks to those who are willing to hear it. Does the whole world need to love it for it to be OK to love the film? You can’t have it both ways Christopher,,,saying you do not care for technical criticism and then complaining when people give it. Some of us do care about the form as well as the feeling.
August 13, 2011 at 5:20 am
inaspaciousplace
You are right. Some of the images in the Shores of Eternity scene are cliched. But, this is a vision that is taking place inside Jack O’Brien. These are the images his 1950′s Sunday School education would have provided.
Around the time “The New World” came out, Malick gave one of the very few interviews he has ever given. In that interview he said, “When people express what is most important to them, it often comes out in cliches. That doesn’t make them laughable; it’s something tender about them, as though in struggling to reach what’s most personal about them they could only come up with what’s most public.”
August 13, 2011 at 9:58 pm
jaqueline
ooooh I like that!! I was thinking something like that today: sometimes cliches are what people understand and what register…they become cliches because they have resonated with the majority somehow.
The difference with Mallick’s clicheis that he is not being lazy with them…naive perhaps, sometimes I wonder if he is at the edge with them and does not know how to go beyond them…but he does not rely on them just to regurgitate or please.
(I am not so sure about the vision being just in Jack O’Brien as it has been described…I think Mallick has multiple points of view …one of them being ours, the observer….we, the audience have taken on that role in TTOL, whereas in his other films ( the ones I have seen thus far, there is an obvious observer/ narrator within the film itself))
August 15, 2011 at 11:26 pm
Carlos D.
For what it’s worth here is my take on the ending of the film and how it ties to the rest of the movie. Note: Some of the quotes have been taken from Christopher’s Tree of Life post # 8.
The day in which the movie takes place, and in which Jack has the vision, is probably the anniversary of R.L.’s death – hence the candle in the blue vase and his comment in the office: “No…it’s just this day.”
Jake is spiritually lost in a desert – he walks and walks, always toward the sun. Sometimes he changes direction and ends up looking at a wooden pier jutting out to nowhere. A dead end, it seems. Other times he gets to a doorway in the middle of nowhere, but he is reluctant to go through. So he wanders some more. This “situation”, one imagines, has been going on for some time. He has dreams about it.
On the day the movie takes place Jack sees a young tree, encased in concrete, being planted outside his building. A few moments later he hears his brother R.L. whisper the words: “Find me.”
“How did you come to me, in what shape, what disguise?”
Jack “finds” R.L. in his memories. More importantly he recalls that day in the woods when he hurt his brother and received nothing but grace in return. That day was the true beginning of his moral universe – which is why Malick scores the early part of the scene with Preisner’s ‘Lacrimosa’ (this time on piano, no vocals).
“What was it you showed me? I didn’t know how to name you then. But I see it was you. Always you were calling me.”
Later on he gives “grace” to the burned boy while they play on the street. Jack is (in a matter of speaking) R.L.’s first disciple and he uses the same simple gesture his brother taught him: a touch – of human solidarity and compassion – on the shoulder.
“How did I lose you? Wandered. Forgot you.”
But in time Jack forgot all about this, about the glory, about grace, about his mother’s admonitions, about his brother’s lesson. His brother’s memory became only an object of unendurable pain, a harsh symbol of the meaninglessness of it all.
That’s where Jack was.
But later that day, riding an elevator going up, and after much spiritual anguish, Jack says a prayer: “Brother, keep us, guide us, to the end of time.” And he has a vision.
Why an elevator? Maybe Malick likes Godard because this is something Godard would do: show the sacred traveling by totally mundane means. Maybe it’s a bit of theological humor from Malick. Or maybe it is a barbed comment on our times and cities: where else, so far from nature, can a man find himself transported to a higher plane?
We then see the end of the earth and the solar system. We see the sun, now a white dwarf, coming out of the earth’s shadow. At this moment we hear R.L. again, this time saying: “Follow me.”
“Follow me” does not mean any actual physical trailing. It means: “do as I did”, or “follow my ways”.
Then we see a flurry of truly enigmatic images: the woman in a brown gown leading Jack to the door and standing on the other side when he finally wills himself to cross it; the young women in a barn (?) performing some ceremony with candles; the house with big door and gate; the two wrapped bodies outside a city; the wooden ladder; the woman pulling someone from a hole (grave?); the room with adjacent doors; the woman in bridal gown resting on a metal bed frame (emphasis on her left hand); and so on.
I have no explanation for these images. They are beautiful and profoundly enigmatic and part of me wishes there were more of them. But I cannot make any sense of them individually or in their sequence. I’m beginning to think of them as Malick’s own Book of Revelations – an eschatological array of arcane and mystical images that must have some profound meaning for Malick and Malick only. One thing though: most of the characters in these images are women. (Note: When young Jack is looking at the girl in his classroom and later following her down the street we hear a piano rendition of the hymn ‘Welcome Happy Morning,’ which is also used during the closing credits of the film. Women are very special beings in this movie.)
Then we get to the beach proper – which is not heaven (because we see the burned boy still showing his terrible scars), but might be some form of eternity (I like that, although I don’t understand how exactly eternity differs from heaven), or maybe it’s just part of Jack’s spiritual landscape (like the desert wasteland). To me it is simply Jack imagining a meeting place of sorts, no different and no more special than any such place I’ve imagined myself. Maybe it’s no more than the first stirrings of what people call faith.
And here on this beach he meets his father, and following his brother’s example he puts his hand on Mr. O’Brien’s shoulder – who responds in kind. Later on he finds his dead brother and along with his father they return R.L. to the arms of Mrs. O’Brien. This is something Jack wanted very much to do for his mother (“How did she bear it?”).
Then after night falls on the beach we move to the salt flats – which I take to be the very entrance of heaven and/or eternity.
In a house like the one they shared so many years ago, but whose door now opens to the arid salt flats, Mrs. O’Brien does what she must and lets R.L. go. Jack stands behind her, one hand on her shoulder.
The house sort of flies apart and we see Mrs. O’Brien walking on the salt flats. I believe this means she died some time ago.
Then we see a truly heavenly vision: Mrs. O’Brien attended by angelic beings and exalted in pure light. “I give him to you, I give you my son” she says.
Most reviewers and commentators have elaborated on the obvious Christian symbolism of these words – and they’re not wrong; R.L. is after all a “Christlike” character in the film and even directly linked with Christ during the scene in the church. But for some reason they read the scene as some sort of Abrahamic acceptance on the part of Mrs O’Brian. That she is willingly giving her son to God.
But that doesn’t make much sense to me. R.L. always belonged to God (if you accept the film’s religious perspective) and furthermore it makes little dramatic effect. “The Tree of Life’ is about Jack’s spiritual journey to the ‘door.’ It’s not about Mrs. O’Brien reconciliation with the idea of her son’s death.
That’s why I believe the “you” in Mrs. O’Brien’s words refers to Jack. From her heavenly abode (or from deep in his vision at least) she is telling Jack that her son came to this world, if only briefly, to help him on his path of grace. And now she is giving him to Jack, to keep in his memory forever, and to continue living by his example.
The last image of the vision is a field of sunflowers – those faithful “followers” of the sun.
When Jack “returns back to earth” he knows his brother life was never in vain or meaningless. R.L. is with him and in him. Always has been, since that moment long ago when he first saw him, bathed in white light, in his little crib.
With this knowledge Jack’s world is once again restored to its glory (which was always there, of course). We see the glass building perfectly reflecting the heavens and the clouds above. Jack smiles (sort of) for the first time.
And last, the bridge: an object with ancient religious meanings (e.g. pontifex maximus), a sign of communion between two worlds over an expanse of life-giving water.
August 16, 2011 at 12:07 am
jaqueline
Well Mr Carlos D, your post; rather wonderful it was, reading that..no wonder you appreciate Christopher’s posts
Some ideas re the images:
“Then we see a flurry of truly enigmatic images: the woman in a brown gown leading Jack to the door and standing on the other side when he finally wills himself to cross it ( the Holy Spirit leading into all the truth ); the young women in a barn (?) performing
some ceremony with candles ( the two Mary’s tending Jesus tomb ) ; the house with big door and gate ( in my fathers house are many rooms ); the two wrapped bodies outside a city ( the dead used to be wrapped – lazarus ); the wooden ladder ( Jacob’s ladder ); the woman pulling someone from a hole ( what women do when they give birth to us…a rebirth from the earth ); the room with adjacent doors ( the liminal space ) ; the woman in bridal gown resting on a metal bed frame ( the ancient Snow White in the casket in the woods); and so on.
August 16, 2011 at 8:39 pm
Carlos D.
jaqueline – Very interesting observations. Allow me a couple of days to dwell on them and respond properly.
August 16, 2011 at 6:15 am
inaspaciousplace
thank you Carlos D. This is magnificent. I am tremendously taken with your idea of Mrs. O’Brien commending RL to Jack rather than reconciling to his death as if the movie were her journey and not Jack’s.
I hope you will not mind if I put your “Comment” up on my blog as a separate Guest Post. I would not want people to miss your insights because they lie buried in the Comment section of an archived post.
August 16, 2011 at 8:28 pm
Carlos D.
Christopher – Many thanks for your kind words and for the privilege of being a guest poster in your superb blog.