The RE-run of Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life

It’s always pleasant to hear that the Criterion Collection, the American DVD/Blu-ray label, are releasing a film in their uniform. This pleasure was compounded when I heard tell of a reissue of Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life (2011), a film I love intensely, being on the way. But it somehow got better. This release also includes a new extended cut of the picture, increasing the running time for 140 to 190 minutes, filling in key details excised from the feature that played in cinemas, adding greater narrative shape — the result is more meditative, fuller, psychologically richer, and has to my mind augmented what was already great.

The film begins sorrowfully. A mother (Jessica Chastain) and father (Brad Pitt) receive word that their young son has been killed. The eldest son, Jack (Sean Penn), is informed. The film’s first section stays with them as they internalise this news, fitting the description provided in a wonderful passage of the English philosopher Gillian Rose, in Love’s Work: ‘When something untoward happens, some trauma or damage, whether inflicted by the commissions or omissions of others, or some cosmic force, one makes the initially unwelcome event one’s inner occupation….In ill-health as in unhappy love, this is the hardest work: it requires taking in before letting be.’

Before Chastain’s character can let it be, she questions God, asking, in one of the film’s many whispered voice-over invocations, “Lord — Why? Where were you?” (The answer to this, a quotation from the Book of Job, is the first thing that appears on-screen.) The images that follow are the visual equivalent. The sequence starts with the creation of the universe, the formation of the planets and their features, followed by the appearance of the first life forms and those that followed, alighting briefly on a wounded plesiosaur, before recreating the mass extinction event, and returning to the present. (Combining a deistic conception of the universe with evolutionary biology is, bewilderingly, not the boldest of Malick’s achievements in The Tree of Life.) Although CGI was utilised, primarily for the rendering of the dinosaurs, the majority of the effects are practical; Malick enlisted the skills of Douglas Trumbull, effects supervisor on Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) — the sequences consist, for the most part, of slow-motion close-ups of chemical reactions.

The fantastic leaps, from the domestic to the celestial, are motivated by the kind of philosophising a child does: it’s all about the wonderment inspired by the astonishing scale of existence. Malick returns to his human cast — although he really didn’t leave them for a minute — and everything seen is refracted through the perspective of Jack (now played by Hunter McCracken), as he remembers his young life in Texas, growing up with his brothers and parents. This amounts to a symphonic memory-play in the vein of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror (1975) or Terence Davies’s The Long Day Closes (1992), all placed in a narrative plan which exists somewhere between radical subjectivity and free-indirect style; for instance, the vision of Jack’s mother that the film casts is one formed by a devoted child — she is patient and caring and nurturing, impossibly benign, possessing a kindness unlimited. She is an abstraction. The father, as played by Brad Pitt, is the complete opposite.

She is grace and he nature. Chastain is asked to work in details that signify her goodness: passive frustration at her husband’s lack of feeling, tenderness towards her children (a moment in which she dabs a cut on her son’s foot with iodine is about as gentle as gentle can be), before she becomes abstract — she floats for a few frames, not before having a butterfly land in her sun-dappled hand. The idyll of these images are revealing of the intensity of Jack’s love toward her. Pitt’s father, on the other hand, is a lived-in, fully recreated example of a certain kind of man. A former naval officer, now an employee at a power station, he’s a man of extreme discipline and no small dose of coldness, towards his family and just about everyone else in his life. This resentment is visible not just in his face, the hard stare with which he meets every transgression, but in the way he hikes up his trousers, and in his righted posture. And yet he’s exceptionally vulnerable.

“Always you wrestle inside me. Always you will”, young Jack whispers. The contradictions and irreconcilable aspects of his parent’s personalities play on Jack in a profound manner as he approaches puberty. Malick, with his cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, represents the turmoil of Jack’s childhood in a relentless stream of images. Compositionally, Malick favours close-ups, often employing wide-angle lens distortion; the camera is always agile, ready to follow the characters wherever they might go, and the editing follows suit, cutting for feeling rather than sense. The camera interrogates particulars, enlarging their significance. In other hands, this method could play out horribly. But Malick’s visual scheme catches the rush of being a child, a time when all is new and every day is an experiment in living; so the camera’s endless parade of visual detail feels like someone truthfully trying to apply their mind to the matter that surrounds them.

Then the ending arrives, and invites us into another kind of world, removed from memory. What exactly it is, I’m not sure: it could be a psychological space of Jack’s, or a theological one. But one thing it incontrovertibly is: a cinematic space, like the final shot of Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1958). Jack walks through a desert, which leads him to a shoreline, populated by figures from life. His mother and father are there, his neighbours, people we’ve not met. Even the younger version of himself materialises. And then, there’s his brother, exactly as he was when they were growing up. Mother and son, separated by time and circumstance, meet again. How enlivening this space is — how generous, how graceful, and how unspeakably moving.