Questioning faith and the existence of god: Malick’s Tree of Life

The search for god goes by many other names. Few of us are seeking an ethereal figure, donning white billowy linen and sporting impressively long hair (which may inadvertently turn out to be Alanis Morrisette) What links us irrefutably as human beings is the probing of our state of existence. How did we get here? Why do we exist? Is there a deeper explanation to life beyond what we can see? Does some supreme force oversee us and if so, in what form? The search for god is all this and more; the search for answers, for meaning, for understanding of our universe. As Gandhi once said: ‘I claim to be a passionate seeker after truth, which is but another name for God.’ 

Despite the unanswerable nature of our questions, we continue to ask them. And yet to be alive and not to question seems the stranger concept. These are the greatest uncertainties we shall ever face, the conundrums for which no-0ne has a definitive answer, yet they are so inherent to the human condition itself we carry them tolerantly, often quietly and sometimes indifferently through the prosaic jungle of everyday life, some struggling more than others to compensate the vastness of our uncertainties with the necessities of routine and the personal.

To build a film’s premise solely upon these existential queries is incredibly adventurous, and yet paradoxically, perhaps the most obvious theme of all. For after all, if such questions are so fundamental to the human condition, at some level surely they precede and underlie all else which we do? As life is a mixture of the prosaic and extraordinary, the physical and metaphysical, the personal and universal, so must be their artistic representations. Films deal with the big questions a lot of the time, just not necessarily so overtly so. Nevertheless, we understand the themes are there. Perhaps this explains to some extent why Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life has split its critics, with those who deem it “a gargantuan work of pretension” (Stephanie Zacharek, Movieline) to those who describe it as a “transfixing odyssey” which ”represents something extraordinary” (Justin Chang,Variety)

Malick’s Tree of Life is an homage to the human quest to understand its world. For its characters, there is evident belief in a metaphysical energy or being to which these questions are directed (mostly in voiceover narration) throughout the film. At the outset of the film is a written quote taken from Job 38:4,7:

“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth, when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?”

Beginning the film by referencing Job gives an early indication of the concept behind Tree of Life. Like Job, the film’s characters will question the meaning of human suffering; asking why especially, do those who try to do good, to be good, still suffer great tragedy and pain? If there is a god, and if god is good, then why must we suffer? It is easy to recognise this as one of, if not the core question at the heart of the film, yet not as easy to decipher Malick’s intentions of where to run with this as the story progresses. Of course if we follow TOL as a direct representation of the story of Job, does this suggest Malick intends us to find an answer, a belief, a moral, by the film’s end? If this be the case, it’s to be expected that some may find this hard to swallow. However, if Malick were simply attempting to portray a monolithic personal belief, would it have taken him a decade to formulate this?  I’m reluctant to believe that Malick’s design for the the film would be this naive. Like the questions it poses, Tree of Life warrants diverse interpretation.

 The god question is explored via the story of Jack O’ Brien, played in present day by Sean Penn, who spends a day contemplating the death of his younger brother (RL), on what is presumably the anniversary of his passing. This leads to the remembrance of their childhood together, played out through the duration of the film. Thus we meet Sean Penn’s younger self  (played by Hunter McCracken) his two younger brothers, ethereally graceful and beautiful mother (Jessica Chastain) and authoritarian father (Brad Pitt). We firstly meet Jack’s parents as they are receiving news of their son’s death, reinforcing the integral part this has to play in their story. This tragedy will form the catalyst to their crisis in faith.

Though all seems a reasonably conventional narrative so far, it’s mere minutes before we are whisked far away from this. For Malick wishes to explore the god question beyond the mere microcosm of a family unit. Indeed, he is inviting us to explore existence at an entirely macrocosmic level.

The daunting prospect of how to approach this all-encompassing subject for a feature length film, goes some way to explaining the reputed decade it has taken Malick to craft Tree of Life. One way however, which Malick has opted for, is to portray images of nature and the cosmos in all its inexplicable, subliminal glory, and let the reminder of all which gives rise to awe in the human consciousness do the talking. Of course this is simplifying ad infinitum a process which has no doubt been painstaking throughout its meticulously-considered composition. Malick is not the first however, to evoke a response of the Sublime via the power of natural imagery set to a rousing soundtrack (the twenty-minute ‘universe creation sequence’  is played out to Zbigniew Preisner’s ‘Lacrimosa’, originally part of the requiem composed in memory of Krzysztof Kieslowski.)  There are hints toward Ron Fricke’s Baraka (1992), even mimicking the film’s iconic solar eclipse moment, and its predecessor Koyaanisqatsi (1983). Whilst Koyaanisqatsi and the subsequent parts in the Qatsi trilogy pointed specifically toward the degenerative relationship of humanity with earth in the face of technological advancement, Baraka posed a more ontologically ‘observational’ take. Both share a lack of spoken word or distinct plot and as such exploit the format to its fullest potential, to vastly open up the possibilites of meaning taken by the audience. Malick uses the same mechanism to free up the contrictions of his narrative, to convey that which can’t be easily conveyed by characterisation, and equally to comment upon the narrative itself, placing it within the universal perspective. Malick draws our attention to the creation of the cosmos, to boiling molten rock forming the earth, to strange organisms in the deepest depths of the sea and suddenly our wish to know it all becomes absurd in the face of that of which we know so little. More than this, the juxtaposition of the ’natural’ sequences with the family narrative suggest the ‘other half’ of a dialogue we have presumed to be one-sided. Jack looks back on his life and struggles to validate its meaning, recognising where this questioning began as a young boy and searching for deeper reasoning behind his brother’s death; Mrs O’ Brien asks why, having chosen the “way of grace” through life, accepting being ”slighted, forgotten” accepting “insults and injuries” through selflessness, because ” no one who loves the way of grace ever comes to a bad end,” her son had to die. “Where were you?” she asks, questioning god’s location at the time of her son’s death. ”Did you know”… ”Do you care?”  The natural sequence is (presumably) god’s side of the dialogue. Whether we deem this to be a Christian god, as the O’Brien’s do, of any other monotheastic religion, or of a more pantheistic or transcendentalist inclination, is up to us. Malick may have portrayed the O ‘Briens as traditional Christians from Waco, Texas, but the film is truly open to all interpretations. What Malick really seems to be saying, is that god is talking to us all the time, we just don’t necessarily take the time to truly notice, or understand the language of god, for it speaks through all of nature, and through everything and everyone. The interconnectedness of all. The tree of life. This idea is cemented as Jack questions how he ever came to be aware of a mystical energy, beyond the mere habits of a religious upbringing: “How did you come to me? In what shape? What disguise” and remembers: “You spoke to me through her. You spoke to me from the sky, the trees, before I knew I loved you, believed in you.” For the belief in a source of life beyond the physical comes from more than doctrine, and Jack knows he felt it, long before he had the awareness to question it.

There are a number of symbolic references to the bible and a segment where young Jack breaks into a neighbour’s house and steals a lady’s undergarment. The implications of why he does this are not explicit, though he expresses feelings of deep shame and guilt afterwards, questioning “what have I started?” and wishing he could get back to “where they are” (indicating his younger brothers) insinuating a state of purity and innocence now lost to him. This could reference the fall of man, though it could simply be recognising the tendency of children to affiliate their thoughts or behaviours to unrelated suffering which takes place in the future.

There are repeated motifs through the film, most obviously trees of course, open skies, light through darkness, doorways, circles…but one image which Malick takes us back to several times (at the nature sequences) which struck me at the time and has stayed with me since, is one of a flame-like entity – an ethereal luminescence, glowing in the darkness. As all other sound fades away, the ‘light’ seems to breathe, and for that moment or two it truly is like staring at the source of god. This reminded me of the buddhist concept of ‘ground luminosity’ – the innate luminescence or clear radiant light believed to reside as the core nature of everything. The source with no beginning and no end. The image is a simple one, but a powerful one, and it transcends religious positioning, to be universally spiritual. Whether god, or the soul, or ground luminosity, it exists beyond the realms of time; and it is this realisation which sparks the acceptance of tragedy for the film’s characters and inspires the highly metaphysical ending to this spectacular film. On the shore of a beach which spans for infinity, older Jack (Penn) bears witness to the reunification of his family (as they were in his childhood). His father and mother and younger self (McCracken) embrace lovingly the son and brother they had lost and finally letting go of her son’s small hand, guiding him to walk through an open doorway alone, we hear Mrs O’ Brien say:

“I give him to you. I give you my son.”

We presume this is the final acceptance of her son’s death, the willingness to accept god’s will in the way of grace, but it’s set up in a way which makes it hard to avoid inevitable comparisons with the sacrifice of Christ . Whether this is intentional or not on Malick’s part, again is completely unknown. Admittedly, the ending has been painted with a heavier-hand than the rest of the film, and seems to have thrown up more criticism than any other scene (except perhaps the CGI dinosaurs, which do come over as tacky in an otherwise seamlessly stunning work of art.) It’s an ending which works however, if we allow it to, because it brings a required closure to the narrative, suggesting not that the answers are suddenly apparent necessarily, but that the characters have learned to live in the unknown, with trust in its mechanisms.

There are no words which can truly do justice to Tree of Life. It must be experienced in full sensory glory. I often gauge a film’s merit in my mind by the extent to which it makes me think afterwards. Often, films which I’ve disliked on initial viewing have taunted me into remission and second viewings because I simply haven’t been able to stop thinking about them. They very often become favourites thereafter. Tree of Life has had the rusty cogs of my tiny mind working overtime, and I believe it may well turn out to be the best film I’ll see all year.

S.