100 Movies Every Catholic Should See #2: The Tree of Life (2011)

Written and Directed by Terrence Malick. Starring Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain, and Sean Penn.

The Tree of Life is perhaps legendary director Terrence Malick’s most complex and challenging film: initially developed by him back in the 1970s under the mysterious title of Q, the little information we have on the original project indicates it would have explored the “origins of life” with ambitious visuals such as a “sleeping god, underwater, dreaming of the origins of the universe, starting with the big bang and moving forward, as fluorescent fish swam into the deity’s nostrils”. Pre-production actually got under way, but after receiving pressure to deliver quickly from Paramount Pictures, who was funding the project for a tidy sum of $1 million, Malick disappeared into Paris and from the filmmaking world for 20 years, displaying a commitment not to be “on anyone’s timetable.” Malick returned in a big way in the late 1990s with The Thin Red Line, a loose adaptation of the book of the same name by James Jones. The film was a critical and commercial darling, and brought the reclusive director back to directing for good.

The Tree of Life, Malick’s third film after his return to filmmaking, stars Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain as the parents of a young boy growing up in midcentury America, played in adolescence by newcomer Hunter McCracken for the majority of the film (found in a casting search in Texas that auditioned thousands of students, it remains his only film role) and in adulthood by Sean Penn. The film follows the boy, named Jack O’Brien, along with his parents and two brothers, R.L. and Steve, as they navigate life in Waco, Texas. However, to simply call this film a “coming-of-age” story would be doing it a grave disservice.

In Malick’s screenplay, the script is prefaced with a single sentence for the reader, stating: “The ‘I’ who speaks in this story is not the author. Rather, he hopes that you might see yourself in this ‘I’ and understand this story as your own.” For first time viewers of the film, this preface is small comfort: the audience is given no easy answers or a clear plot to follow. The film opens with Job 38:4-7: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth?...When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” Immediately following this block quote appears out of the darkness a mysterious, flame-like light, accompanied by a whisper from an unknown voice saying: “Brother…mother…it was they who led me to your door.” Angelic voices begin to sing and we see a young girl with auburn red hair and piercing blue eyes: the girl grows up to become Mrs. O’Brien (Chastain) and we see snapshots of her and her family before landing on a scene where she receives a letter in the mail. Upon opening the letter she breaks down uncontrollably, and the scene is followed by a scene of Mr. O’Brien (Pitt) receiving the same news at work over the phone, but since he is working on an active airfield we still do not get to hear what the crushing news is as his voice is drowned out by a nearby plane. The scene shifts yet again as we see the devastated couple react in different ways to the news, and through the snippets of their conversations we begin to understand that one of their sons has passed away. And just as our brains begin to start asking questions about what happened and the significance of these scenes, the film has its first radical shift.

The film cuts to black and that same, mysterious flame appears again, with even more mysterious whispering. Suddenly the film cuts to Sean Penn in the middle of a desert, before he suddenly wakes up in an apartment that very much looks like it was designed in the 21st century, and then we are following him through his work day in modern-day Houston, with little to no dialogue. Who is this man? What happened to Pitt and Chastain? Snippets of context and flashbacks reveal he is the older brother of the boy who died, but just as the audience has time to process this revelation the film has one of the most jarring transitions since the famous “match cut” in 2001: A Space Odyssey: with the “Lacrimosa” sequence from Mozart’s Requiem in D Minor playing in the background, we see the Creation of the Earth. Planets forming, volcanoes erupting, and even dinosaurs hunting fill the screen for not two, not four, but fifteen minutes of screen time with not a single word of dialogue.

While the majority of the rest of the film follows young Jack O’Brien as he grows up, let us consider these first 35 minutes of the film: so much happens, and yet so little clear information is given out by Malick. It is no surprise that when the film premiered at Cannes in 2011 it was met by both boos and applause, and despite winning the Palme d’Or (Malick wasn’t even there to receive it), jury head Robert De Niro’s explanation for the panel’s choice was so vague that it didn’t even seem like the Cannes Jury who selected it as the grand winner of the festival fully understood the film. The film seemed destined to fade into obscurity, and yet around 2019 almost every “best of the decade” list had it somewhere close to the top.

It is this refusal to give any easy answers that is part of the key to understanding the film; every shot, every cut, is a crucial piece of the puzzle and must be scrutinized as such. Trying to understand it fully on the first or second viewing is like trying to sum up the entire life of a person you just met. 

The mysteries the film alludes to—creation, death, suffering—are all only comprehensible to us to a certain degree, but much about them we will not understand until we behold the face of God in the Beatific Vision. As Bishop Robert Barron wrote in his review of the film for a Chicago Tribune blog, “in the play of good and evil, in the tension between nature and grace, God is up to something beautiful, though we are unable to grasp it totally… ‘Tree of Life’ is communicating this same difficult but vital lesson.” This pull between the “way of nature” and “way of grace,” alluded to in the whispered voiceover narration that is characteristic of Malick’s post-Thin Red Line filmography, is something that many of the director’s protagonists feel in their lives, and this pull is definitely present in McCracken’s young Jack O’Brien. As he grows we see him struggle to discern between right and wrong; between what his demanding father wants him to be and what his gentle mother sees him as. All of this having taken place in the grand context of all the life that has come and gone before him, as portrayed in the breathtaking Creation sequence: a scene where Jack begins to notice a girl in his class is just as important and as consequential as a volcano erupting on earth and forming land masses. As Thomas a Kempis writes in the Imitation of Christ: “My son, mark diligently the motions of nature and grace; for in a very contrary and subtle manner these are moved, and can hardly be discerned but by him that is spiritually and inwardly enlightened.” Watching this film is the equivalent to watching an adaptation of something like St. Augustine’s Confessions, focusing on a “single life drawn upward to God”: the film serves almost as a reconstruction of adult Jack’s memories to remember how God shaped his life into what it has become. And in the end he must choose whether to continue his life in the desert of cold rationality and a soulless job, or walk amidst the sea of grace and accept faith in His omnipotent Creator.

Terrence Malick asks a lot from his audience with a lot of his films, but none more so than The Tree of Life. Yet those who seek for answers will find them again and again as they watch, re-watch, and study the film. And just like Malick portends to the possibility of a higher understanding of his work upon diligent viewership, so too does God reward us for the contemplation of His works, incomprehensible as they are in our limited human state.

To quote one of the last lines of the film’s screenplay: “And still the vision is not the journey. The real journey has yet to begin.”