Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
Life, the Universe and Clean Laundry
EVER since the enigmatic trailers started appearing -- babies, Brad Pitt and dinosaurs? -- it was clear that Terrence Malick's new film was about Life, the Universe and Everything. The Tree of Life, which opens this weekend in Winnipeg, centres on a family in 1950s Texas, but radiates outward to explore existence from the microcosmic to the cosmic scale. With a sincere and searching faith, Malick treats the subatomic world and the expanding universe, the beginning of life and the end of time, the inevitability of human suffering and the unknowable face of God.
The reclusive 67-year-old American filmmaker's depiction of the rise and fall of the dinosaurs, which appears suddenly about 20 minutes into the film, has become a talking point, both for the film's haters and for its passionate supporters. Huge, odd and unexpected, the dinos have come to represent Malick's fascination with Big Ideas. Mostly lost in this discussion is the fact that Malick has just as much interest in the small, the ordinary and the familiar.
The dinosaurs may be dominating the critics' reviews and the fan forums, but most of the film deals with everyday family life. And strangely enough, family life is almost as rare in American movies as the non-Jurassic Park appearance of prehistoric animals. Hollywood movies often pay lip service to the family, but they rarely bother to show it -- I mean really show it, with all its mundane rhythms and rituals -- on screen.
There is a fear that audiences will be bored by watching something that most of them already have at home. Malick, who can linger on sunlight through leaves for serenely unhurried stretches of time, isn't worried about that. He gives careful, measured attention to dozens of little domestic chores, to babies bathed and babies soothed, children sick and children put to bed, a mother hanging up laundry on the line, a father watering the lawn on a hot day.
There are dogs, running loose like they did in those days and following their kids, children playing kick-the-can in the dusk, brothers jostling each other as they walk down the street.
It could all seem like the generic golden haze of nostalgia, except that Malick gives it such consecrated specificity. There is a precise physical clarity to The Tree of Life's smallest details. You can smell the heat of a buzzing, sleepy summer field, hear the slam of an old screen door, feel the press of the paternal hand on the back of your neck.
In this almost dialogue-free film, gestures and looks and touches matter more than words. The story -- a non-linear narrative of loss, grief and acceptance -- is conveyed through impressions, especially a child's impressions. A son sees his mother ready for a rare evening out in a dress and pearls, or watches his preoccupied father jingling the change in his pockets. He catches a stolen view into the mysteries of his parents' marriage.
In The Tree of Life, family life is not about momentous events but about moments, many of them repetitive, many of them in and of themselves quite ordinary, maybe even a little dull, but all adding up to something important.
Malick has done something strikingly strange by actually picturing the Big Bang and the afterlife, volcano explosions and asteroid crashes, cell division and dinosaurs crawling out of the ocean. But his depiction of domesticity, something that is often dismissed by our culture as trivial and unimportant and boring, isn't the opposite of the film's ambitious reach. The same light that shines on the birth of the world illuminates the remains of a meal on a well-polished table. The wind that moves through human history like the breath of God is the same breeze that rustles the laundry on the line. Reaching after the sacred, Malick grounds his work in the gloriously mundane.
