On The Tree of Life (Extended version)

The first thing to know is that this is not a “preferred” cut by the director. It is what it was before it became the “theatrical” cut, when all the beautiful buoyant moments were stripped out to make the film more interpretive, enduring and enigmatic. The broad strokes are all there from what we knew before, but in between are quick slashes of painted impressionistic light bringing more vitality and flourish to scenes long since memorized by its most cherishing viewers.

Take, for example, the “eternity” scenes at the end of the film, there is, for a brief second, an ethereal-robed girl carrying a rose as she gingerly steps through the sunset waters overwashing a ribbon of tidal flat. She is lit like a pre-Raphaelite water color vivid in its delicacy and precision. Without such an enigmatic shot, it would not impact the scene whatsoever, but with its addition, it makes the sequence all the more haunting.

At the beginning, older Jack has been given more screen time, but it isn't to further justify his reasons for being there in the first place, but to ground the purpose of the film, which is to satisfy the arc of the boy Jack who has somehow transmogrified his troubled boyhood into a fallen state made all the more troubling at the death of his younger brother. The blue candle is lit, and it goes from a kitchen countertop to the hands of a little girl in the afterlife. Jack has fallen into some dark night of the soul that moves to plague his entire adulthood so that all he comes into contact with can hardly be justified at all. The corporate world is as cold as its steel and glass skyscrapers. He endures a pushing match with a group of thugs, mirroring the boyhood altercations he had with a group of troubled bullies.

His is a boyhood fraught with breaking glass, torturing animals, breaking and entering, and witnessing the first inclinations of sexuality. As Jack climbs the stairs of a neighborhood married woman, Mrs. Kimball, who has left the house, the forbidden atmosphere is foreshadowed earlier when he climbs the stairs as a young boy to the forbidden attic space. Jack rifles through Mrs. Kimball’s dresser drawers, and, if we want to make a mental leap to Knight of Cups, we can. Jack holds for several seconds a bracelet of pearls that are figuratively lost to him.

At last he retrieves his chosen loot as if he were mysteriously drawn by forces he is yet aware of. TMrs. Kimball’s night clothes yield a sensual nectar. Perhaps he saw it on her clotheslines as she was hanging laundry. He watches water from a hose lusciously splash her bared leg.

He is all too aware that what he holds in his hands has barely concealed the heat of her body. They embody the shame of Eve. Holding up the the peach-colored negligee by slender shoulder straps, Jack pierces the veil of its shimmery sensuality readily apparent by filtered fingering sunlight shining through it.

We are forced to relive our own sexual awakening, standing across from that other shore spanning childhood from adulthood. We again peer from childeyes watching shadow shapes on the wall aping an adulthood we cannot fully inhabit, before the shapes are closed into enveloping darkness. Jack cannot fully conceal the depths of his sin. He runs along the shore of the Colorado River seeking a place to hide the forbidden negligee until at lasts he drops it into the rushing waters where the delicious current tears it away from view. Though he is at last temporarily cleansed by symbolic waters, he is stained by guilty. He cannot even bear his mother’s holy countenance. He asks her not to look at him. He is Adam hiding from the footfall of the Father in the Garden after partaking of the forbidden fruit.

It is only the calm of caged-in animals that bring adult Jack to any sense of peace. The pacing animals are caged like Jack’s anxieties, restless and prowling. On a phone call with his father, Jack tells him that he is “bumping into walls.” He indulges the weakness of a co-worker unsatisfied with his married life. He is like Jack: “the chapter is closed, the story’s been told.” Jack is seen with other women that are not his wife. There is restless brooding nature to Jack. He is present but not present, going inward to the wellspring of his own mysteries, every bit as enigmatic as the Hieronymus Bosch painting he gazes at as we hear the pulsing strains of the second movement of Bizet’s 1st symphony. Jack stares into a visual representation of a medieval Hell that is no different than the one he is standing in. It is the “new hell” as it is described in the original screenplay, “entirely of our times.”

“a glass box. The sky is covered over. Man has shut himself in.”

Yet, in Jack’s pensive moments, he flashes into memories where he is a boy once more rushing through the shallows of the Colorado River. Jack Kerouac called such memories a “TIC” which he describes as a “vision suddenly of memory.” In this river, if we choose to meditate deeply, we will come to know that the perspective of it resembles the location where the compassion of one dinosaur toward another has taken place. The moving waters serves as a constant visual motif where “nothing stands still.” The “birth-of-consciousness” sequence of the dinosaur choosing not to prey on a fallen beast. It is book-ended by Jack’s birth-of-consciousness that takes place in the last third of the film, Jack helps a scalp-scarred boy saved from a house fire (the other boys shun him for his new deformity; one aims a toy pistol at his head). Jack reaches out to the boy that is turned away and places his hand on his shoulder. He does the same in the afterlife sequence, where he reaches out to place his hand on the shoulder of his mother who is about to accept the loss of her dead son in the doorway of eternity.

In adult Jack’s portion of the film in its first third, we witness a fiercely-edited sequence of random source material fully-illustrates the compounding neurotic state of confusion he suffers. The nature of it prefigures the later edits into abstraction of Knight of Cups, for both serve the same aesthetic purpose.

We can fall, if we allow it to, into a meditative state as soothing as Klaus Weise’s “Ta-Ha” tracks. This reshuffling of the cinematic cards, its cohesive whole, bedrocks the entire Tree of Life experience anew. The viewer will either throw up his hands and dismiss the whole affair, or succumb to its mysteries.

The film’s centerpiece is Jack’s boyhood and it is rightly given most of the screen time. Here we see the illusory house of cards built up from his mother and father begin to fall. Jack suffers his loss of innocence, the first rite of passage, and he is at odds to understand why. The wonderful glade of his world, symbolized by the majestic tree in their yard, becomes a Fallen Eden. He is cast from the garden that he is seen entering in the sequences following the “creation” segment; the tiny book of life handed by the ethereal mother to the newborn souls is rudely shredded by a force as volatile as the tornado that leaves his neighborhood quaking in the wake of its destructive passing. Jack pines to his mother that he wants to be “little” again. He looks at the relative innocence of his younger brothers and “wants to go back where they are.” We see the realities of the modern world crush in on him: illness, a cripple, an unwashed alcoholic, a volatile prisoner and then, the restlessness of his parents. The temptations of sin tempers Jack, and he falls under its sway. The world is like the cackling jackals older Jack sees in the Houston zoo. He is at odds to understand how to justify his father’s hypocrisy, and then God’s. There are others, like the inclusion of an abusive father of a neighborhood boy (played by The Thin Red Line’s Ben Chaplin) to the troubled boy himself justifying to Jack why he is entitled to obey the seductive allure of his errant ways.

Looking back, I see that the addition of one scene in a new sequence of older Jack, is that he is in the Houston Museum of Fine Arts and he gazes at a Heironymous Bosch painting with hands in his pockets while a wistful blonde accompanying him stands off to his side (and what a wonderful Malickian moment to see her streaming hair cut to the strands of kelp plying to the rhythms of a sea-current and then another jump cut to the wind blowing her hair and the leafy fronds of a tree all in a space of two seconds or so) The painting is “Saint Christopher Carrying the Christ Child Through a Sinful World”, and in the plenteous details of that mysterious painting it is possible to unbox and interpret the entire of The Tree of Life (in either cut).

The extended The Tree of Life is not for mere watching, but to experience as a vital skeleton key unlocking the films to follow. In essence, there is no difference between elder Jack (played to haunting effect by Sean Penn) and Rick of Knight of Cups (played to equally-haunting effect by Christian Bale). Both are the epitome of Christian of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress: both have lost the symbolic pearl, are seduced and slayed by their empty careers, disenfranchised by the seductions of the material world, dizzied by an array of women coming and going, of a death of a brother, and a troubled relationship with a father.

It is great to see that Mr. Malick’s beloved three-legged dog has made the cut, to which he wished to illustrate that nature moves on, endures through life despite its handicaps.

Lastly, the music again is used to full effect. Terrence Malick makes more copious use of Alexandre Desplat’s music, using “River” from the official soundtrack as a musical motif, illustrating the impact of the everflowing nature of the film, always moving forward, its kinetic-energy appealing to the restless nature of younger and elder Jack. I have almost an eight hour playlist from the film.

There is much more to say about this new experience, but I will leave it up to the viewers to experience it for themselves. As always, I will probably continue adding to this as my thoughts begin to crowd once more. --- PM