Answering the question “where is God?” with “everywhere and nowhere” is usually a bit of a let-down, so it’s a sign of just how skilled a film-maker Terrance Malick (The Thin Red Line, Badlands) is that he doesn’t just get away with it in Tree of Life, he makes it seem truly profound. It helps that he crafts some of the more beautiful images seen in film today – there’s a reason why at least one of the posters is comprised of nothing but still images from the film – and, more importantly, it feels like a question he’s actually interested in answering. A lot of arthouse films down the deeper end of the pool dabble in the metaphysical but only succeed in making the meaning of life feel like a hipster pose: Malick has made a film that feels like a man trying to explain what he feels rather than one trying to impress you with how deep he thinks.
That’s not to say he’s not afraid to get heavy: the film opens with a fuzzy shot of glowing light against darkness while a whispered voiceover – and Malick loves his whispered voice-overs, with pretty much everyone getting their chance to muse about the nature of existence and their place in it in hushed tones – asks “Brother. Mother. What are we to you?” It’s the type of ponderous pondering Malick loves, but it’s not just idle speculation: the story proper begins with the delivery of a telegram (it’s the mid 20th century in small town America) announcing the death of one of the sons of Mr O’Brien (Brad Pitt) and his wife (Jessica Chastain).
Wracked with grief, the mother walks the streets. Her son is dead: where is God? The film answers with an extended wordless sequence basically detailing the history of the universe, Earth, and life upon it. Yes, that includes dinosaurs. It’s awe-inspiring in scope, if a little straightforward in subject: Malick doesn’t have a whole lot to say about the development of life on Earth past marvelling at it, but here at least that’s enough.
Eventually we return to small town America, which we eventually figure out is Waco, Texas. It’s a decade or so before the death at the film’s beginning, and the focus is the pre-teen Jack (Hunter McCracken), eldest son of the O’Brien’s. He and his two younger brothers play and explore their world under the guidance of their parents, who’re gradually revealed (Malick doesn’t do anything in a hurry) to have very different takes on the world.
For their mother (and, you might suspect, for Malick), the world is a wondrous, holy place, filled with grace and kindness. For their father, it’s a hard world where everyone will screw you over if they can and weakness is fatal. We see her literally dancing on air; he teaches the boys to fight by ordering them to hit him in the face.
This is the real meat of the film, which comes as a bit of a surprise considering an hour ago we were watching dinosaurs in a river. Half of this film exists in the reality of the past, where life is hard-edged and Jack is increasingly angry for reasons he can’t explain. Then there’s the half that drifts through time and across the surface of the Earth, with a grown up Jack (Sean Penn) wandering through a metaphorical landscape and passing through an empty doorframe to a vision of everyone he’s ever known.
In a lesser director’s hands it’d be all but impossible to reconcile the two, but Malick makes it work. If grace or God or nature or whatever you want to call it is everywhere, then everybody’s story is a story about grace. Despite some excellent performances, Tree of Life is perhaps a little too reserved to be truly moving; it’s a hard to really feel deeply for individual characters when you’re suddenly swept away to witness the end of life on Earth. But it is a beautiful, intelligent film, sharp and insightful about the bond between father and son, thoughtful and amazed at the world that created them.
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