Tea of Life

Early Saturday afternoon, my wife and I drove down to Bethesda to see The Tree of Life. I have to say, with the exception of the worst CGI dinosaurs in cinematic history, it was a visually beautiful film. That is the only positive thing I have to say about the movie.

Throughout the entirety of the 138 minutes I sat in the theater, I thought of Michelle Bachmann. While not being political, The Tree of Life was an unintentional ode to the Tea Party’s vision of America. When it was over, I sat and thought about it for a minute. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a movie with fewer lines spoken by women. There was a funeral scene during which Jessica Chastain’s character had brief conversations with her mother and a friend. There was also a scene of her teaching a young son how to say kangaroo. Other than that, I don’t think she—or any other woman—spoke a word to another person. Granted, most of the spoken words were spoken to God or self.

What I do know is that I’ve never seen a movie in which women had less agency than they did in The Tree of Life. Brad Pitt’s Mr. O’Brien was the stereotypical domineering head-of-household father of that time. His word was the law; he was the disciplinarian. Jessica Chastain’s role as the mother was to be the children’s friend. She did not discipline. She did not stand up to her husband. She did absolutely nothing but hug & kiss her children, teach them how to ride the swings, and smile at them. I’ve seen more motherly behavior from older sisters.

The only women outside of the family that we see are the mother and daughter next door. Neither speaks. We see Pitt and Chastain’s son stalk the daughter and we see the mother berated by her husband.

OK, I can deal with that. Just like I can deal with the lack of any minority representation in the film. It is 1950s Waco, Texas after all. But in order for me to deal with it, the story has to acknowledge or steer toward certain things. The Tree of Life, however, had no plot. No real one, anyway. What Terrence Malick did with this film was create a dream. This was not a movie that was designed to draw the audience in and tell a story. Instead, it was to create a setting and allow the audience to daydream, reminisce, and become immersed in nostalgia. As Roger Ebert wrote (emphasis mine):

I don’t know when a film has connected more immediately with my own personal experience. In uncanny ways, the central events of The Tree of Life reflect a time and place I lived in, and the boys in it are me. If I set out to make an autobiographical film, and if I had Malick’s gift, it would look so much like this. His scenes portray a childhood in a town in the American midlands, where life flows in and out through open windows. There is a father who maintains discipline and a mother who exudes forgiveness, and long summer days of play and idleness and urgent unsaid questions about the meaning of things.
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I wrote earlier about the many ways this film evoked my own memories of such time and place. About wide lawns. About a town that somehow, in memory, is always seen with a wide-angle lens. About houses that are never locked. About mothers looking out windows to check on their children. About the summer heat and ennui of church services, and the unpredictable theater of the dinner table, and troubling sounds of an argument between parents, half-heard through an open window.

Watching the film, I remembered Ray Bradbury’s memory of a boy waking up to the sound of a Green Machine outside his window—a hand-pushed lawnmower. Perhaps you grew up in a big city, with the doors locked and everything air-conditioned. It doesn’t matter. Most of us, unless we are unlucky, have something of the same childhood, because we are protected by innocence and naivete.

That is the setting that Malick created. For those of us who cannot relate to that—and that is a whole lot of people—this type of movie cannot work without plot and story. However, as Ebert also wrote, “What’s uncanny is that Malick creates the O’Brien parents and their three boys without an obvious plot: The movie captures the unplanned unfolding of summer days, and the overheard words of people almost talking to themselves.”

There you have it. Without plot, heavily reliant upon the viewers’ own experiences, The Tree of Life is not for people who did not grow up like the O’Briens. This is a movie for people whose hearts harken back to the “good old days” when White men ruled, women were invisible, and life was “innocent”. It was the film version of A Tale of Three Cities, and I found that very disgusting. The Tree of Life looked like the world Michelle Bachmann wants.