If The Tree of Life is to be taken as the personal statement that it seems to want to aspire to (and that everyone writing about it seems to take it as) then we can probably conclude that Terrence Malick’s childhood in Texas in the ‘40s and ‘50s was a wholly unremarkable affair that evoked nothing so much as those shopworn images that have come to signify “growing-up-in-the-heartland” as filtered through a half-decade’s worth of films and television. The crux of Malick’s latest film is an hour-and-a-half stream of glimpses of this coming-of-age, focusing on the oldest of three young brothers in Waco and his relationship with his disciplinarian Navy-man father and earthy, saintly mother. Moving his camera up close to his characters, relying on wide-angle lenses to supplement his off-kilter compositions and replacing dialogue with a soundtrack that ranges from ambient drones to opera, Malick attempts to make strange the “archetypal” images of childhood. Those who swear by the director will no doubt claim that by showing us the familiar through a deliberately estranging aesthetic, Malick makes the quotidian unfamiliar and thus, given his obviously spiritual orientation, sacred. Those less inclined to be generous might note that the central section of Tree is a mass of clichés: a baby being born to adoring parents mesmerized by his tiny foot, kids roughhousing in the front yard, a long-suffering mother long suffering, but Malick’s aestheticizing and the fact that all these scenes are depicted in small impressionistic glimpses simply cover up for the fact that what the director’s really given us is a gallery of shopworn images that aim to universalize the particular, in this case one white boy’s by-the-book boyhood in the middle of the last century.But holiness is the theme here, as frequent invocations to God and family – all breathed in a pseudo-profound whisper – make clear, and out of nowhere the eldest boy, now grown up into a successful architect, recites an invocation to his boyhood, which leads to Malick employing a cosmic display of the earth’s origins as an introduction to that kid’s childhood and following it up with a glimpse of his adult self being transported from a glass skyscraper in Dallas to what feels like a mental defective’s view of some mythic spiritual plane where he’s reunited with his family. It’s a regressive vision to say the least: in Malick’s world, a man can only be fulfilled by convening cosmically with his not particularly happy past, but our director is ever the nostalgist, so long as that nostalgia isn’t troubled by the pesky demands of particularizing details. In his takedown of the film, Robert Koehler smartly remarked that Malick “has fatally forgotten the wisdom that in the specific lies the universal.” Instead the filmmaker takes a top-down approach to spirituality that results in a generic set of circumstances being worked into an underimagined framework. We know nothing about this family or their Waco surroundings – except that they travel to the black part of town to buy brisket – and we don’t really need to know more. Bringing up questionable dichotomies between grace and nature via voice-over helps little. These people are simply clichéd props to deliver Malick’s increasingly out-of-touch vision of dubious spiritualism.
*****
My reviews of two documentaries, Rejoice and Shout and The Last Mountain have been posted at Slant Magazine.
