Tree Believer

8 minute read
Richard Corliss

In August 1973, a quiet young courier took a print of Terrence Malick’s debut feature Badlands from Los Angeles to Manhattan for submission to the New York Film Festival. After the screening, festival chief Richard Roud said to the messenger, “Would you please tell Mr. Malick that we loved Badlands and want it as our closing-night film?” The unassuming fellow replied, “I’m Mr. Malick.”

After that, he was harder to find. In his fulfilling but furtive 38 years since Badlands, Malick has spawned just four more features: Days of Heaven in 1978, The Thin Red Line in 1998, The New World in 2005 and The Tree of Life, the highlight of this year’s Cannes Film Festival. The legendarily shy auteur skipped his new movie’s press conference, leaving his star Brad Pitt to explain things, and materialized at the end of Tree’s black-tie screening after insisting that paparazzi be banned. (A recent shot of Malick is as elusive as Osama bin Laden’s death photo.) When jury president Robert De Niro announced that the top-prize Palme d’Or had gone to Malick’s film, the director was again AWOL, leaving two of his producers, Bill Pohlad and Dede Gardner, to accept in his stead.

(See Richard Corliss’s thoughts on Tree of Life.)

Some who saw The Tree of Life think it’s as maddeningly Delphic as its maker. At heart a portrait of a 1950s suburban-Texas family, the O’Briens — father (Pitt, above), mother (Jessica Chastain) and their sons Jack (Hunter McCracken), R.L. (Laramie Eppler) and Steve (Tye Sheridan) — the film scoots backward a dozen years, forward to the ’60s, when the mother learns one of her boys has died, and into the present (with Jack now played by Sean Penn) and the celestial future. Near the beginning, Malick breaks all narrative rules by offering a wordless history of the cosmos, from the Big Bang through the emergence of plant and sea life and finally dinosaurs. Those viewers who don’t go, “Wow!” may say, “Huh?” or “Phooey.”

The man who provokes such apposite reactions has an imposingly wayward résumé. The son of an oil geologist, Terry grew up in Oklahoma and Texas, working summers in oil fields and as a farmhand. Settling in Austin for high school, he then studied philosophy at Harvard and as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford. By his mid-20s he was teaching philosophy at MIT and had translated a treatise by German existentialist Martin Heidegger, while writing for LIFE, Newsweek and the New Yorker.

(See Richard Corliss’s blog from Cannes.)

But what he really wanted to do was direct. Joining the American Film Institute’s director workshop in 1969, he made the 17-minute anarcho-comedy Lanton Mills, in which he and Harry Dean Stanton played western hombres. With help from AFI contacts and his first wife, Jill Jakes, who worked for director Arthur Penn, he got jobs writing or doctoring scripts (including an unused draft for Dirty Harry), then made Badlands, which dreamily reimagines the ’50s murder spree of Charlie Starkweather and Caril Fugate.

Badlands took just a year from first day of filming to final cut. Thereafter, Malick would spend ages in the editing room (two years for Days of Heaven; three for The Tree of Life), whittling movie prose into visual poetry. In 1978 he moved to Paris, and he did not release another film for 20 years. Legends grew around his silence: Was he living in a garage? Teaching philosophy at the Sorbonne? He married a French woman and, by the mid-’90s, had re-entered the film world with The Thin Red Line, his free-form adaptation of the James Jones novel. He now lives in Austin, an hour’s drive from the Smithville, Texas, location of The Tree of Life, with his third wife, Alexandra “Ecky” Wallace.

The Tree of Life is both his most personal film (Malick had brothers, one of whom died young) and his most overtly philosophical, with God and Nature lurking in every branch. Pitt, who dominates Tree with a sensitive reading of a most insensitive man, says the piece is “not a Christian so much as a spiritual film.”

See Terrence Malick accept the Palme d’Or at Cannes.

The visual and spiritual abundance of Malick’s work — its head-snapping mix of microcosmic nature, intimate human behavior and considerations of mortality and immortality — is why cinephiles respond to his films as visual symphonies. Malick makes not so much movies as feelies: tactile in their exploration of the ecosystem, luxuriating in verdant life.

A naturalist and sociologist, Malick sees his characters as dwarfs amid nature’s wild splendor who harbor goals beyond their reach. They want to cut a murderous swath through the upper Midwest (like the Badlands killers) or trick a rich man into marriage (in Days of Heaven) or just get home alive from the Pacific war (in The Thin Red Line). In The Tree of Life, Mr. O’Brien has no loftier goals than being successful in his career and as a father; yet he is a failure at both, especially with his eldest son Jack. The film’s central tension comes from Jack’s growing hatred of his belligerent dad and his fear that he will turn into him. The surprise is that Mr. O’Brien shares that apprehension.

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In its stethoscoping of nature, of light moving slowly across a forest or a front lawn, and its reliance on gesture over dialogue, The Tree of Life is a near sibling to Badlands and Days of Heaven. Malick began writing the film in the late ’70s, and it has the feeling of a movie from that adventurous decade, when directors expanded the cinematic vocabulary instead of simply parroting it and took audiences along for the exhilarating ride.

The cosmos sequence, for example, is Malick’s visualizing of the scientific theory that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny: that the growth of any organism mimics the evolution of life on earth. (To underline this point, Malick then synopsizes 10 years of O’Brien family history in a few minutes.) But this planetarium spectacle, which Malick has considered extending to an hour as an Imax film for National Geographic, can also be seen as the director’s impudent F-you message to today’s timid moviemakers.

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Malick’s philosopher-hermit persona seems an unlikely fit with the field-marshal traits required of a film director. But he has managed it five times in his life (six, if you include the untitled work he has already filmed with Ben Affleck and Rachel McAdams). Pohlad says he was “a little nervous” that Malick might run a tense set. “In fact,” he says, “Terry would almost always be in a great mood, having fun — all while he had a whole different level of complexity in his head than was on the page. He reminded me of athletes when they are in that particular zone, that ultimate high level of performance when all your senses and abilities are at their peak and even the most complex, demanding things become easy.”

It wasn’t always easy for the actors, including Pitt (who took his role when Heath Ledger bowed out a few months before his death). Each morning, Pitt recalls, “we got handed these four pages, single-spaced, and they’d be these stream-of-consciousness ideas that we would incorporate into the day’s work.” Malick, meanwhile, would be metaphorically “standing there with a big butterfly net,” waiting for some natural or behavioral truth to land. Pitt may have found Malick’s style frustrating. “But I figure, if you know what it’s gonna be, why do it?”

(See if Tree of Life really was the best movie at Cannes.)

“When starting a film with Terry,” says Jack Fisk, Malick’s production designer since Badlands, “I feel like I’m trying to catch a moving train, he is so far ahead of me in his vision and knowledge. But he doesn’t talk the cosmological big picture when describing his works to me. On Tree we talked of swings, dogs barking and light through trees, and of memories from our childhoods. We wanted to make a world having a timeless and universal feeling, one that evoked memories and let the viewer in.”

So The Tree of Life is not a challenge but an invitation — into an old world of 60 or 4 billion years ago — and an evocation of the primal urges of survival, domination and transcendence. If, over his career, Malick has shied from publicity, he is fully confessional in turning his thoughts and passions into films. His latest work is a heightened, hallucinatory experience from the god-sphinx of movies.

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