Regardless of your opinion of his
five films – squeezed out over thirty-eight years, with a yawning gap of twenty
between number two and number three -- Terrence Malick, the Harvard educated
son of a Waco, Texas oilman, is neither a critic’s darling nor an opening
weekend driven box office whore.
Ever so loosely based on a real
life crime spree (Charles Starkweather), Malick’s auspicious 1973 debut, Badlands,
feels very much of a piece with its bratty film school contemporaries:
nestled somewhere between the genre revising blood spattered visual poetics of
Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde and the hyper Disney pop slickness of
Steven Spielberg’s Sugarland Express, Badlands gives us a gloriously
cocky Martin Sheen as a James Dean styling serial killer who seduces his
slightly dim girlfriend (Sissy Spacek) on a corpse producing jaunt across the
Great Plains after shooting her pop and burning down the family homestead.
I bring up Badlands precisely
because its hot wired energy and off-kilter focus on the family as the source
of our ills, illusions and neurotic longings is clearly topic A in Malick’s
possibly genius level new work The Tree of Life. Whereas in Badlands the
mother energy was almost entirely missing, rudely shoved aside by a pistol
packing prodigal son bent on a nihilistic attack on the father -- Sam Peckinpah
regular Warren Oates is devilish fine as a too mean to live dad – The Tree
of Life can be viewed as a passionate debate between a violence prone
fifties dad and a not entirely submissive, slightly battered homemaker
mom.
“There are two ways through life,
the way of nature or the way of grace. You have to choose which one you’ll
follow.”
“It takes a fierce will to get
ahead in this world – come on son, hit me!”
“He’s afraid of you. You expect
things of him only an adult can achieve.”
“Some day you’ll fall down and weep
and then you will understand things as they are.”
“Unless you love your life will fly
by.”
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In Malick’s 1998 lyrical almost free
verse adaptation of James Jones’ WWII novel The Thin Red Line, an as
cool as the other side of the pillow commanding officer (George Clooney) tells
combat weary grunts that their unit is a kind of family with himself as the dad
who must be obeyed and a prickly misanthropic sergeant (Sean Penn) as the mom
who really runs the show. The Tree of Life’s 1950’s Waco clan is in many
ways modeled on this American Sparta prototype of the family as a basic
fighting unit: with the frequently absent, authoritarian dad (a lean and mean
Brad Pitt), the mostly nurturing mom (newcomer Jessica Chastain) and a feisty
trio of real boys -- heartfelt performances delivered in an almost dialogue
free zone by pre-teens Hunter McCracken, Laramie Eppler and Tye Sheridan – as
the restless grunts, seen both cowering under dad’s drill sergeant worthy
dinner table rants or out-of-doors with their feral buddies getting into
trouble. Malick demonstrates that these boys’ lives teeter between the claims
of a Lord of the Flies descent into chaos and a Norman Rockwell/Walt
Disney version of a crew cut nirvana. With an editing style that totally
fractures any obvious coherent narrative -- death intrudes at the municipal
swimming pool, as well as claiming one of the brothers in a mysterious late
adolescent accident – Malick evokes the brutal freedom of an Eisenhower era
boyhood: bad frozen food, adults teetering on a murderous domestic breakup,
combined with an exhilarating taste of freedom’s mad possibilities.
As throughout most of the slim Malick
cannon the imagery is seductively male, if not obviously homoerotic. Gay boys
of all ages will be struck, mesmerized and haunted by how much of our
unofficial erotic underworld flows from Waco, Texas, circa 1950. If Oliver
Stone missed some bets by not plumbing W’s fifties Midland, Texas world,
Malick has come to his rescue.
And, oh yes, there’s outside of the
core (approximately ninety minute) family story, huge chunks of The Tree of
Life that spin a Kubrick worthy origins of life on the planet, complete
with Christian imagery vs. Big Bang science theory, colliding with scenes of a
depressed Sean Penn, as son Jack, wandering through a Felliniesque white modern
office complex, culminating in a future Rapture like vision. I don’t know what
to make of these spiritual musings, but don’t let them distract you from a
vibrant, challenging piece of filmmaking.
Terrence Malick’s complex,
naturally illuminated films have been praised as pastoral and dismissed as
pretentious, but this son of Texas brings a nuanced European film language and
sensibility to a very American quest to the dilemmas about the purpose of
childhood and the larger meanings of life. I would venture that this Bible belt
raised philosopher has transcended his Christian upbringing and that Malick
number six – rumored to be in production -- should be a knockout.