Tree Believer

The cosmic vision of Terrence Malick

By Richard Corliss Monday, June 06, 2011
    • Emanuel Lubezki / 20th Century Fox

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    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.

    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.

    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?"

    "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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