TulaneLSU Review: The Tree of Life (2011)

I want to again thank the poster Leauxgan, who in 2011, recommended that I watch this. It is good to see the film getting the credit it deserves, recently being named the top movie of the 21st century. I go beyond that and argue that it is the greatest movie ever made, and perhaps the greatest work of art produced in American history. Nearly a decade after my first viewing, I still am trying to unfold its dense layers. Each viewing gifts the attendant viewer with grace heaped upon grace, and new insights into the movie, the world, and myself.


The Tree of Life

To watch The Tree of Life is to stand before the expanse of the ocean or the heavens, knowing that every little thing you see has meaning, even if you don't understand what the meaning of each thing is. A day removed from watching this film, I feel like Christopher Columbus upon his landing in the new world or Frederick Cook. There is a mysterious infinity of faith and love in The Tree of Life.

Mr. Malick does not want to confuse people. He wants to open their eyes to faith and to the huge questions of faith, questions that are often reduced by fundamentalists of every stripe. For the fundamentalists who claim faith, faith is reduced to certainty. For the fundamentalists who assail faith, faith is a remnant of evolution gone awry. Faith is something to be jettisoned as baggage that has no worth in the modern world. But Mr. Malick sees and believes right through both forms of the same arrogant idolatry. So when Malick begins the film with an epigraph from Job, the divine question in response to Job's creaturely theodical question: "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth...when the morning stars sang together?" we are to view the movie through that passage in Job more than the Genesis creation account(s). This movie, like Job, is one person's, Malick, attempt to reconcile his faith in a good God that brings life to be with the God who allowed his brother to die at an early age. The movie is an an honest prayer, a supplication of integrity to God: God, why did you allow my brother to die? How can you say you are good and how can you ask me to be good, if you, God, are not good?

I think this question, uttered in a soft whisper, as all the movie's direct communication with God is done, is what drives the movie. But the movie begins with the answer: a beautiful sweep of history from the electron to DNA to the dinosaur to destruction to the specific story of one family, all are the work of the God who freely moves as a gaseous spirit of fire, the loving, birthing, consuming fire. We have the question of divine goodness and power within the boundaries of goodness in the beginning and goodness at the end. Thus, I think, it is Malick's way of saying, God, I know you are good. I know you are good, but why? Why? I know you are good. God's goodness is not known in the acetonic assurances of Mrs. O’Brien's mother, who cites scripture, just as Job's friends did. No one, not even God, who does not dwell in the depths of despair with another has the right to do such things. And that is why this movie only can make sense in a Christian worldview, a lens that sees the Creator as the Suffering Servant, the one who bore our iniquities and carried our sorrows. Only this God has the right to answer Job's question with another question: Where were you when I laid the foundations of the world? Only the God who knows suffering of the most real sort can understand Job or Jack O'Brien or Terrence Malick or you or me.

Doorways play such a huge role in this movie. But the most significant doorway is that at the end, when the grown Jack cautiously walks through, or boldly leaps through the door. This is the Kierkegaardian leap of faith. "Very truly I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep," says Jesus. And it is only after taking that leap into a new existence that the question of why falls to the wayside and he is reunited in a prelapsarian, or rather, post-redemptive paradise, reunited with his family, transported to a place where every tear has been wiped away, every imperfection made pure. Near the end, Mrs. O'Brien says, "The only way to be happy is to love. Unless you love, your life will flash by." This is the way, the truth, and the life of grace with which the movie opens. And the message is this, I think: That until we leap into the Christ, who was with God in the beginning and who suffered with and for us, and who loved us to the ultimate distance, unless we are bound to that Christ, we will have no love. Without love our lives wither and fade, and death is the end. But with love, with Jesus, we live forevermore in the valley where the tree of life bears fruit for us forevermore.

There is so much more to say about this movie, and perhaps I will one day say it. But I believe this movie to be an inspired work of God. It is a true masterpiece against which all works of art should be compared. It is the greatest movie that has ever been made. 10/10.