“There are two ways through life, the way of nature and the way of grace. We have to chose which one we’ll follow. Grace doesn’t try to please itself. It accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. Accepts insults and injuries. Nature only wants to please itself. Get others to please it too. Likes to lord it over them, to have its own way. It finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world is shining around it. And love is smiling through all things.”
These are the words that fall from the lips of Mrs. O’Brien in Terrance Malick’s latest film, The Tree of Life. There are not many words I can use to describe this cinematic adventure except to say that it is something that must be experienced rather than explained. The Tree of Life is a very important film. It features an all-star cast of Brad Pitt (Mr. O’Brien), Sean Penn (Jack O’Brien), and Jessica Chastain (Mrs. O’Brien).
Serving as a prologue, Malick begins by quoting of Job 38:4 and 7 where God asks Job where he was when the foundation of the earth was laid. The opening sequence suggests a family member has tragically died. As time passes, we find a very candid Jack O’Brien as a successful New York business executive. During a phone conversation with his father, Jack expresses that he thinks about his brothers often and loves his family. However, it is apparent by Jack’s tone and mannerisms that he is struggling with the meaning of life and the love of God.
The film then switches gears and by creating a visual masterpiece Malick follows the evolution of nature starting with the cosmos and ending with the birth a human (Jack O’Brien.) If Malick’s tour-de-force doesn’t get an OSCAR nomination for it’s cinematography, myself and many critics alike will be quite shocked! The film’s use of imagery is absolutely breathtaking. For the first 30 minutes, we see a visual depiction of nature. Malick displays (at least I think so) that nature doesn’t care about the others involved but instead let’s survival of the fittest run its course (here we even see Dinosaurs!)
While the film relies on little extensive dialog, Malick weaves a stunning masterpiece of aesthetics that go beyond the limits of story, while the limited dialog presents the two proposed dualities as experienced by a young Jack O’Brien in his boyhood. From the beginning of the film we can see that Jack believes that God is love. In one particular sequence we see an infant Jack and his mother pointing to sky and exclaiming, “that’s where God lives.” Jack wrestles with nature and grace, life and death, and love and pride. A young couple, Mr. and Mrs. O’Brien model the polarity of nature and grace to young Jack. Mrs. O’Brien models a life of simplicity, beauty, and love, and reminds her sons “unless you love, your life will flash by you” whereas Mr. O’Brien is a stern authoritarian who demands his sons call him “Sir” when addressing him and tells them that “it takes a fierce will to get ahead in this world.”
Throughout the film we see a battle of Jack’s affections. He is torn between his desire to embrace the love and gentleness of his mother and but to also gain the approval of his father, who isn’t so gentle. He holds his parents in tension, exclaiming “Father. Mother. Always you wrestle inside me. You always will.” After his first experience with pain, loss, and suffering Jack begins wrestling with who God is, asking how a loving God could allow such affliction and why he has to endure the hardship of his father’s rule.
We are then returned to the opening scene of an adult Jack, but this time walking through the frame of a doorway into a desert like terrain. Malick, I believe, is visually illuminating the O’Brien family’s emotional subconscious, and displaying “the way of Grace.” The final twenty minute sequence appears this way. Some may say the story is open ended and leaves you hanging, but in terms of the nature/grace polarities the film flows quite well, almost like movements in a symphony.
As mentioned before, The Tree of Life is best described as something that must be experienced rather than explained. It blurs the lines of narrative between word and picture and written and visual. I think it has much to offer us in our Christian walk. As we see the experiences of a young Jack O’Brien, we cannot help but see ourselves in his place. The film wrestles with questions that have been asked for centuries and it sheds light on what the love of God might look like if we were able to see it and can’t help but make us think of life in the Kingdom of God. In our most vulnerable state, God finds us and brings us into a family of eternal and communal love. As fallen humanity, we wrestle with submitting to God’s love or submitting to our own nature of selfishness. Just as grace “doesn’t try to please itself, it accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked”, so it is with Christ. Christ didn’t seek to please himself, but he accepted being forgotten and disliked so that we could enjoy a restored relationship with Him. I suppose if I were to rephrase the opening quote, it would read,
“There are two ways through life, the way of selfishness and the way of Christ. We have to chose which one we’ll follow. Christ’s way doesn’t try to please itself. It accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. Accepts insults and injuries. Selfishness only wants to please itself. Get others to please it too. Likes to lord it over them, to have its own way. It finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world is shining around it. And Christ’s love is smiling through all things.”
God desires to extend his grace to all of us through Christ, and The Tree of Life gives us just a mere snapshot of that grace.