Monday, April 30, 2012

Calling The Tree of Life a "religious film"




To call Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life a religious or spiritual film would be, I think, a little too simplistic. While there are certainly elements of religious imagery throughout, the central image of the tree of life also has various connotations in philosophy, mythology and science that I think can be secularly applied to interpretation of this film. Analyzed through a sometimes problematic autobiographical lens, it is true that Malick himself is said to be a man of faith and this is evidenced in many elements of his films — from the biblical imagery in Days of Heaven to the Christian hymns in The Thin Red Line and in similarly religious leitmotifs in The Tree of Life's soundtrack, as well as opening the film with a quoted passage from Job and following a church-going family. And I do believe there to be religious elements in The Tree of Life, especially paralleling the Book of Job, but these elements are compatible with an inherently less religious reading of the film (to Malick's credit) to the point where I would not consider it to be, singularly, a "religious film." 
 
In the religious sense it is easy to see a great deal of influence on The Tree of Life, even separate from the Book of Job. I think there are interesting parallels made between the scenic suburban lifestyle and the garden of Eden in Genesis, where the Christian idea of the "tree of life" comes into play, as an idealized paradise that the O'Brien family is eventually forced out of (although I do think Malick also portrayed the paradox of this paradisal place with a darker undercurrent of repression and a generally deceiving appearance). Narratively, it mirrors The Book of Job in testing the faith of a righteous family with trials and tribulations and a general sense of injustice in their lives which leads characters like Mrs. O'Brien to ask “why,” and leads the central character of Jack as a young boy to doubt the existence of a god altogether. In The Book of Job, God eventually offers his response in lyrical prose that Job is unaware of so much about the formation of the world and how it works, and that God is ultimately not subject to questions from men in the grand scheme of things. This can, most easily, be seen mirrored in The Tree of Life with the poetic and evocative imagery of Malick's cinema in the creation sequence which takes the spectator from the universe before the big bang to the Texas town where the O'Brien family had eventually settled down in the 50s — offering a scale and scope to possibly contextualize the perspective of God in these Old Testament passages. 
 
While it seems like a convenient fit to understand this sequence within the film in solely this religious context, it remains applicable to a number of other interpretive lenses that can exist separately from a religious reading. Malick doesn't inherently imply a role of a larger hand at play throughout the sequence, which generally stays true to what we know about the creation of the universe by current scientific understanding. The sequence suggests an evolutionary lineage that many believe contradicts how Genesis specifically and literally describes the birth of life, and "the tree of life" has a history of being used by Charles Darwin to illustrate his evolutionary theory pertaining to the relatedness among species throughout time. Any non-religious viewer can follow the lives of this Church-going family and still accept all that goes on in the sequence without a thematic conflict of interest, as the generally universal question of why bad things happen to good people can still be answered by Malick's illustration of nature's literally awesome scope in a way that heavily minimizes the role of man and his individual problems (a common thread in Malick's filmography) with the family's religiosity used as a salient means to narratively facilitate their disillusionment of how they understand life to be. Other traditions of the central image include the mystical concept pertaining to the interrelatedness of all life on Earth, which is another theme Malick's films have expressed interest in exploring and which the creation sequence here does. Historically, the use of the “tree of life” image as appropriated by African American communities in the wake of lynchings in the South can also speak to the false facade of paradisal Texas suburban life in the 50s. Ultimately, the religious allusions present throughout the film should not be ignored, but the film should be seen as a work more dense and complicated than to simply label it as a religious and/or spiritual movie.
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Thursday, April 19, 2012

Month early Cannes predictions

Palme D'or: Reality by Matteo Garrone
Grand Prix: Beyond the Hills by Cristian Mungiu
Jury Prize: Après la bataille by Yousry Nasrallah
Best Director: David Cronenberg for Cosmopolis
Best Actor: Tadashi Okuno for Like Someone in Love
Best Actress: Marion Cotillard for Rust and Bone
Best Screenplay: Mike Nichols for Mud
FIRPRESCI Prize: Amour by Michael Haneke

Let's see how this compares with my predictions closer to it, and how it actually unfolds. Read more!