Help each other. Love everyone. Every leaf. Every ray of light. Forgive.
The Tree of Life is a masterpiece if I’ve ever seen one. It is a truly visual experience, poetry for the eyes and ears. Nothing I say will really do it justice unless you’ve seen it.
It is one of those movies that has wonderful acting but is set apart by its vision and ambition. Malick’s eye for beauty and poetry in both nature and the dynamic of human relationship is phenomenal. He melds together the grand and the small, the impersonal and personal, the infinite and finite, with such grace and care. It’s really magnificent. This is why we can go from an abstract creation sequence to a family in small-town-Texas and strangely feel like this is normal. This is perhaps the most wonderful thing about the film. It displays the grandiosity of the universe but shows that despite its seemingly uncaring march forward in time, there is love and grace and hope in the midst of it. A star explodes into light and fire and magnificence and a child prays asking God where he is in the confusion of grief. A raptor gracefully spares a weak, trembling fellow dinosaur, and a mother swings from a tree with her children after a threat from a frustrated father. It’s all connected. It’s all from God and of God. The physical is spiritual and the spiritual is physical. There is a graceful hope that survives the brutality of nature. And it’s survival is somehow not by luck or by chance, but perhaps because of the life and love that grace brings and the purpose and boldness that follows it.
I say all of this, but, again, it is something you have to experience. I realize that this movie isn’t likely for everyone. It is very abstract, and doesn’t have any semblance of narrative or story. It is more poetry than prose. But I absolutely loved it, and it’s images have been stuck in my head since I first saw it about a week ago. It spoke to me in a way that I’m having to still unpack.
One thing in particular really moved me at the point in life that I find myself. There is a struggle in the film between grace and nature, grace being compassionate and kind and nature being brutal and unforgiving. I have a one-year-old son. Something about the film struck me and encouraged me to be who I want my son to become. Jack was largely the result of his parents. I want my son to become the best parts of me and learn from the worst parts. I want him to not regret it or resent me if he ends up being like me. I want to lead him in the path of grace.
The nuns taught us there are two ways through life: the way of nature and the way of grace. You have to choose which one you’ll follow. Grace doesn’t try to please itself. 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, when love is smiling through all things. They taught us that no one who loves the way of grace ever comes to a bad end. I will be true to you. Whatever comes.
