by Chris Bodenner
Liel Leibovitz traces the tension between Catholic and Jewish teachings about grace that run through Terrence Malick's latest:
Herein lies Malick’s true genius: As The Tree of Life ends and we file out of the theater, we are left—if our legs and our minds aren’t too numb from all those gasses and Cretaceous creatures milling about—contemplating not only creation but also creators. On the former front, Malick is a committed Catholic, and he bravely surrenders his characters to higher powers. On the latter front, he is far more radical. His quote from Job isn’t accidental. Read it before you’ve seen the movie, and it’s a Catholic exhortation on man’s eternal dependence on God’s good grace. Read if after, and it’s almost a Jewish teaching, shedding light not on man’s wretchedness but on God’s: Just as man cannot know the creator, the creator can never really share man’s earthly delights and is condemned to eternity in a lonely celestial prison cell.
Perhaps it was partly the huge caffeinated drink I consumed during the film, but I walked through the streets of New York afterward with a heightened sense of the objects and gestures around me, similar to way the film lingered on the minutia of everyday life, and I felt a little more connected to the world. As a non-religious person, watching The Tree of Life was the closest I've come to prayer or meditation in a while.
I was particularly drawn to the film's flickers of boyhood – neighborhood kids running through the grass with arms flailing, a boy thwacking a stick on a tree for no good reason, a mother waking up her sons with ice cubes. Such simple moments triggered my own memories and lent to a feeling of connectedness with the people on screen and those around me. All the abstraction in the film, while tedious at times, made for a somewhat spiritual experience (despite the Catholic and Jewish allusions flying over my head).
Such abstraction actually fed into my biggest criticism of the film: the casting of superstars Brad Pitt and Sean Penn (particularly Penn, whose limited presence felt like a cameo). Pitt's a fantastic actor and nailed the role, but I kept looking at his character and thinking, "Oh, there's Brad Pitt again." His wife and oldest son were also wonderfully played, but the generic nature of the actors (Jessica Chastain and Hunter McCracken) lent to the abstract nature of the film and allowed the audience to better connect with the life experiences they portrayed.
More muses on Malick's film here and here. It was of course inexplicable and pretentious at times (too much so for many people in Stamford). I love how Chris Orr characterizes the cloying final act:
As the long, central tale in Waco winds down with an emotional epiphany, Malick jerks us abruptly back to the present day for a metaphysical one. Without going into detail, I will say that it takes place on a beach, that it involves Penn again as the grown Jack, and that it is as soggy as one might fear from that combination of factors. Some viewers may find this conclusion moving; I was instead reminded of the finale of Lost, a comparison that can in no way be construed as a compliment.
The Dish 