The voice of the reactionary Right is often amazingly seductive! Reviewing the Cannes prize-winner “Tree of Life” by Terrence Malick, the film critic of The New York Times, A.O. Scott, states, “The sheer beauty of this film is almost overwhelming, but as with other works of religiously minded art, its aesthetic glories are tethered to a humble and exalted purpose”. Malick comes obviously from an orthodox Christian point of view, embracing the idea of God as creator and one who demands that his creations acknowledge him with reverence as he continuously intercuts between images of the solar system, nature and human behaviour in a small Texan town of the 1950s.
I believe that Cinema is ‘creation' while Life happens in an ‘ evolutionary' way. During the years that Terrence Malick was shooting his film, the US under George Bush was bulldozed into believing that life was an act of ‘creation' as interpreted in the Bible. The Bush agenda proposed to eradicate the Darwinian claim that the universe and its living beings evolved as an act of natural selection and instead insists that god created man in his own image. “Tree of Life” opens with a quote from the Hebrew Bible, ‘The Book of Job' where god asks Job, “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?... when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?”. This quote has obviously been critiqued through the ages of Enlightenment and ostensibly resolved in the scientific exposition on evolution by Charles Darwin in 1859 through his book The Evolution of Species. Malick is obviously uncomfortable with such a ‘godless' universe and scripts Brad Pitt as O'Brien playing Job, the male ‘nature'; his children and workplace play the satanic adversaries while his gentle wife displays the qualities of ‘grace' by suffering through the patriarchal conflicts played out in her family obediently! And he has a disgruntled Sean Penn also walking aimlessly in a glassy skyscraper of modern times.
Overtly religious
Delving straight into the religious fervour of the film, M.J. Phillips of The Chicago Tribune writes, “This may be the most overtly Christian mainstream picture since ‘The Passion of the Christ'.” Strangely, the Christian Science Monitor wrote, “There is something essentially inhuman about his cinematic approach, as if people only existed as philosophical concepts”. Malick is certainly not the first art-house filmmaker in the Christian world to deal with the subject of God. He has some very tough precedents in the likes of Ingmar Bergman, Tarkovsky, Bunuel, Pasolini and Robert Bresson. What distinguishes the early masters from Malick is their intense discipline, both in terms of their screenplay and the filmic structures employed. As conscious modernists, they questioned the very process of image making and its editing rhythm in the way their ‘representation' of the philosophical concepts defied/ transgressed the reproduction of the image within powerful design structures.
Malick revels in a kind of random arrangement which mocks the fundamental process of organised editing. Honestly, the film can allow itself to be rearranged in as many ways as possible and the little threadbare plot would undergo no change whatsoever. The film relies upon religious off-screen incantations to the background score of arias and choral music from the compositions of Holst, Berlioz and Brahms: the computer graphics and cosmic images borrowed from NASA; the dinosaurs from Discovery's HD Channel placed in an unnecessary non-linear narration. Did god's creation take place in a non-chronological way? I will not however be as impolite as Dan Schneider of Critical Critics who said “Had Malick simply edited the film in chronological order; I think the film could still have gotten over the bar. But he didn't and this poor editing basically urinates on the intelligent viewer. If all art can be judged by whether it measures up against those masterworks that define and embody greatness, then ‘The Tree Of Life' is inarguably a failure”.
Sloppy technique
How can a modern filmmaker resort to such lazy strategies of voice-overs, religious music and borrowed special effects to create the required cinematic feeling? In order to critique religion, Bergman struggled with psychological insights; Bunuel for his political positions; Tarkovsky with his spiritual zones; Pasolini used his provocative stances; and Bresson with his austere compositional/ editing styles took on the institution of religion in the most intelligent ways that cinema had ever seen. None of them alluded to religion as their debating point, leaving the viewers to see for themselves the stratagem. Sadly, Malick's ‘creationism' is on the face and even makes Mrs O'Brien attain ‘grace' with a cheap visual effect of having her float in joyous celebration! He even has a computerised dinosaur slap a baby dino like the way the patriarchal O'Brien beats his son! It's all supposed to be natural. An indulgent Malick seems to be saying that the world is amazing and beyond our comprehension. It is so intelligently designed that human beings cannot explain it rationally (hence evolution is a myth and not acceptable).
And yet, the small Texan town Waco of the 1950s where the film is located in was witness to some of the worst racism and cruelty ever. How profound it would have been if the scene where Jack, the eldest boy, notices little black boys in a truck was prolonged a bit more; if the film had more references to the ravages of World War II from which it was emerging and the strong Whites only policy of the Eisenhower/ McCarthy regimes. In fact it was in this town of Waco that cult leader David Koresh led his team of 76 devotees to the grizzliest death by self-immolation in 1993. This is the reality of the space and time in which the ‘Tree of Life' inhabits. But Malick remains unmoved by history and refuses to cross his own thin red line to stay back in his confidential autobiographical mode. Now, with the ‘Palme d'Or' under his sleeve, I am afraid that Hollywood and their powerful ‘orthodox' bosses will not lag behind in awarding this fundamentalist film the legendary Oscar too!
