Grace
- Nature – One way hug
THE TREE OF LIFE. Starring BRAD PITT, SEAN PENN AND JESSICA CHASTAIN, Introducing Hunter McCracken, Laramie Eppler and Tye Sheridan. Written and Directed by TERRENCE MALICK. Director of Photography EMMANUEL LUBEZKI. Running time: 138 mins. Rating: three stars out of four.
Two quotations introduce this astonishing work of philosophical story-telling.
The first, from the Book of Job, invokes suffering, and God’s rebuke to the the sufferer. “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation…while the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” (Job 38: 4-7 KJV)
In the second, Jessica Chastain’s character as the wife and mother of the nuclear O’Brien family says in a hushed voice-over, as though talking to herself, “The nuns taught us there are two ways through life—the way of Nature and the way of Grace. You have to choose which one you’ll follow.”
Nature is cast as God’s way. Grace as that of mankind.
Malick and his DP then show the stars singing together with breathtaking footage of the laying of the foundations of earth in the context of the cosmos.
Photo montages and time-lapse photography, based on animated images like those familiar through the Hubble Space Telescope, collapse light years of time into simultaneities.
The cosmic world of galaxies, black holes, super novas, cosmic dust, eclipses, and boiling suns is counterpointed by the global world of erupting volcanoes roiling stormclouds, seething tsunamis, and the microscopic world of restless cellular twitchings within the biological soup in which life on planet earth began.
The time line roughly traces the journey from the Big Bang to a small-town Texas suburb, where, in a light-filled 1950s house set down in a spacious lawn sprinkled with trees, the story of the O’Brien family begins with a telegram announcing the death of a child.
They live in a small Texas town in the 50s, attend church regularly, and are tortured by the pain of coming to terms with the death in the family.
Their home is airy, spacious. Set down in a park-like suburb of broad streets, generous lawns and enough trees to cradle space without crowding it. It is all light and vista.
Husband (Pitt) is authoritarian and by today’s standards often unfeeling to his wife (Chastain) and sometimes cruel to their three boys. Fearing to spoil the boys he does not spare the rod and runs a tight ship on principles of Christian strictness. His wife puts up with him mutely, though not unresentfully.
She loves and nurtures her children and keeps her mouth shut.
The story tracks the infancy and education of the eldest boy, Jack (Hunter McCracken), from birth to maturity. As the eldest he gets the blunt edge of the stick and the benefit of the lectures on how to behave.
He walks a tightrope, because moments of tenderness from his father keep him from outright hatred but not from insidious self-doubt.
Sean Penn takes over the character some 40 years later having exchanged the idyllic, rural Smithville for the steel and glass towers of a modern city (Waco).
Now a successful architect, he is tortured by his demons, the birthright from his, upright, humourless father. His life is a struggle to keep from developing a pathological need for approval. Closure is never to be his.
And that’s about it. The plot is open-ended. On the whole the film, despite the stunning grandeur of its photography and the almost mystical style of acting in which more happens in the silences than in the dialogue, tracks uncomfortably close to preachiness.
Suffering
