The Real Question of “The Tree of Life”: Are We Alone?

Much has been written in the press regarding the overtly Christian elements of Terence Malick’s The Tree of Life. (Kent Jones offers up the most beautiful of these assessments in the July/August issue of Film Comment.)  Interestingly, however, the film seems not so much “Christian” as inquisitive and desperately hopeful about the possibility of a divine shaper–a human angst hardly exclusive to Christianity.  I suspect, in fact, that many in the Christian community might take issue with Malick’s portrayal of the Earth’s creation and the subsequent evolution of life on this planet.  (Malick omits any theories about the evolution of human life following the extinction of the dinosaurs, preferring to leap ahead to the lives of three boys born to a young couple in Waco, Texas, in the early 1950s.)  The only real reference to a fundamentally Christian concept in the film is the claim of Jack’s mother (Jessica Chastain) that we grow closer to God in this life through an acceptance of grace.   An image of Christ in an extended shot of a stained-glass window halfway through the film seems somehow empty and distant, and even a local minister’s sermon on the inevitability of pain and suffering in this life sidesteps any references to the power of Christ’s atoning sacrifice on Calvary.  Indeed, if in need of Christian allegories, one would do well to look elsewhere–last year’s stunning (and vastly underrated) Tron: Legacy , for example, or the remarkable (and, sadly, the recently completed) Harry Potter series.

The Tree of Life shares more in common with the likes of Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, or even Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind than with the kind of overt Christian allegories we might expect from, say, the Lord of the Rings or Matrix trilogies.  The central theme of films such as The Tree of Life, after all, is not the redemptive power of Christ’s martyrdom but, rather, the anxiety aroused by fears that we might be genuinely alone on this planet and, in our lives.  In Winter Light, this belief crushes a Lutheran preacher who has lost his faith in the face of God’s silence.  In 2001 and Close Encounters, this belief gives way to a reassurance that–at the very least–benevolent alien forces will help to guard and shape the course of human endeavor and destiny.  In The Tree of Life, the acceptance of a higher power’s existence leads an adult Jack (Sean Penn) to a reconciliation with his past and a recognition that–like Dave Bowman in 2001 or Roy Neary in Close Encounters–he does

not walk this earth alone.  “How did I first come to you?” Jack asks in voiceover near the beginning of the film, his question directed to a personal and nameless deity–one that offers him, we presume, the epic revelations that comprise the bulk of The Tree of Life: visions of Earthly origins, childhood memories, and vague imaginings of an afterlife.  As Jack wakes from these visions in the near-final moments of the film, walking as if drugged among the cold precision of human achievements that here take the forms of looming skyscrapers, the film would seem to have answered its own question.  We are not, in fact, alone, and the dead need not feel far from us.  But as the film rests on its final image of a multicolored flame floating and flickering silently in a sea of blackness before fading, finally, to end credits, we still feel the heavy thickness of an enshrouding veil obscuring our earnest vision.  We know something lies beyond–but what?  Who?