The third-grade recipe for natural history goes like this: start with a few cells swimming in a sea of nutrient-rich gloop-soup. Fast-forward millions of years and those cells have multiplied and diversified. We’ve gone from plain miso to a chunky cup of wonton. Now there’s a sponge – a starfish – even a flounder! The flounder flops onto land and becomes a dinosaur, and then a mammal of some kind. Then – if we’re lucky enough to be taught this, and we’re probably not – the mammals, post-dinosaur-killing-asteroid, split into the ones we know today. A few of the lucky ones become primates, and eventually us humans.
This story is told and retold to eight-year-olds across the country. Now it’s been retold in a visually stunning and otherwise flaccid film by Terrence Malick. Tree of Life is about inheritance, and it tries hard to leap between the kinds of things we humans inherit: innate biological impulses, national histories, religious faith, family trauma. It leaps like a flounder.
The film follows the 1950s O’Brien family. Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain raise three boys in the suburbs. Pitt is overbearing and strict. He wants his kids to be tough and ready for the world. Chastain is quiet almost to the point of submission, but she has her moments of fierce protectiveness and quiet defiance. A characterization like this could work in a sitcom (no joke, The Simpsons and That 70′s Show drew brilliantly on our preconceptions of American households) but here, it’s an overly serious vision of 1950s stereotypes. True, the abundance of detail and specificity in this film prevents the characters from being paper cutouts. But 3-D models are models nonetheless.
Into these molds Malick pours a complex world. Tree of Life has broad roots. Mrs. O’Brien is perfumed with whiffs of the Virgin Mary; Mr. O’Brien’s toughness hovers over the story like a memory in the musty air of a psychoanalyst’s office. One of their sons, Sean Penn, is characterized by the cinematography you’d expect from a (excellent) car commercial – complete with fancy clothing, glinting skyscrapers and abstract desolate landscapes.
Yet the neatness of the family – as we’re primed to expect from the standard narrative of the 1950s – is actually complicated, tentative, teetering. Perhaps most importantly, it’s unprepared for tragedy. We’re hardly told the specifics of the tragedy, because the narrative is soupy and disorderly. Malick’s main interest seems to be stirring the pot, not telling us a cohesive story.
That’s why you shouldn’t expect order in Malick’s narrative, even though you will find some. Tree of Life contains plenty of scenes with clear thematic relevance: in one, the brothers learn to trust each other when one tells another to place a piece of metal into an electrical outlet. It doesn’t electrocute him. It’s a moment of learned trust, and it complicates a scene that comes later. There’s another in which O’Brien fails to save another father’s child, and it seems to mix foreshadowing with tragic impotence. These scenes are compelling and almost stand alone – their nostalgia is vivid, not contrived, and as a part of a more (or less) cohesive narrative they could be remarkable.
Which brings us to the root of the problem. I say ‘more or less’ because it’s unfair to fault Malick’s film for the mere presence of disorder and confusion. Rather, Tree of Life falls awkwardly between compelling cohesion and challenging disjointedness. It’s ambitiously abstract: it uses images of planets and oceans (and, in one of the most unintentionally-funny scenes ever, dinosaurs) when it wants to transcend the narrow realm of human emotions and actions. It’s as if Malick imagines that the conceptual leap between types of inheritance – for example, between the tragedy felt by the O’Brien and the tragic harshness of a Darwinian lineage – can be bridged by the spirituality of ocean shots.
It’s absolutely true that abstraction can make for powerful film. We might look to Michelangelo Antonioni to see this in action. But his L’Eclisse isn’t pegged to era stereotypes; its narrative is consistently challenging, understated, and oblique, not selectively so. His images of writhing ants and streetlights at midnight resonate because they resist explication; they don’t fit into a reductive symbology. Tree of Life‘s abstract moments, on the other hand, seem to yearn for some unified theory made of Darwinan-Freudian-Christian gloop. Its mostly-cohesive, rooted narrative is mixed injudiciously with the abstract, unexplainable shots like orange juice poured into milk. So naturally, it curdles.
It’s a shame, because the abstract nature shots and simulated graphics can be truly gorgeous. With the notable exception of the couple scenes of predator-prey dinosaur play (a scene that’s as alienating as it is frustrating, because its ‘abstraction’ is annoyingly symbolic) it’s a beautiful movie to look at. Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki should be praised for that. But it’s not enough to save the film.
I liked the third-grade narrative of natural history. It’s built of compelling moments: the spontaneous rise of life from liquid; the stunning transformation of sea life into shore life; the unfathomable extinction of the dinosaurs. True, it oversimplified for the sake of our small struggling minds. But it did something Tree of Life didn’t: it refused to frame the compelling moments in terms of human struggles and emotions. Anthropocentrism would reveal the whole thing to be a sham. Once we’ve tried so hard to connect the dots into a human-framed world, we can’t go back to one that’s not made of dots at all. In groping for the roots of the tree, we forget how remarkable – how primordial, even how magnificently opaque – that tree has always been.