Terrance Malick’s The Tree of Life (2011) is often dismissed as arthouse pabulum. It confounds most who stumble upon it, especially those unfamiliar with Malick’s other work.
But despite the claims of its naysayers, The Tree of Life is artistically coherent. With the proper signposts, any lover of cinema can navigate its mysteries and enjoy its rewards. Providing those signposts, then, will be my goal in this essay. I’ll identify (at some length) the unifying arc of the film, which will explain opaque sequences such as the depiction of the universe’s creation and the melancholy ending on a beach. Let’s answer once and for all: what is this movie about??
I’ll state my thesis and go from there: The Tree of Life is a modern meditation on a biblical scripture: The Book of Job. Jack O’Brien, the protagonist, represents Job. Note the initials: J.O.B.
The Book of Job is referenced even before the movie begins, in the opening epigraph:
“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth?… When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” – Job 38:4,7
It’s worth stating that if Malick’s well documented interest in religion repels you, then you may not enjoy a frank discussion of The Tree of Life’s themes. In the ensuing analysis, I might sound unacceptably credulous to religious skeptics. However, I’m simply reflecting the perspective of Malick, who often explores Christian faith in his films.
With that said, let’s refresh ourselves on the Book of Job. It’s about a sort of bet between Satan and God. Satan argues that those who love God only do so out of self interest—essentially, that they love what God gives, not God Himself. God disagrees. To settle the debate, God allows Satan to do harm to one of His most faithful servants: a farmer named Job.
At first, God seems to have won the debate, as Job stays true to God despite Satan unleashing massive harm to Job’s family and property. But when Satan curses Job with a rash of vicious boils, Job loses faith. He finally lashes out at God, railing against the injustices that befall the innocent and demanding that God make Himself accountable for arbitrary tragedies. In response, God appears to Job and states that a mere man could not possibly understand His majestic ways: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth?” Hearing this, Job repents and turns back to God.
As I said before, The Tree of Life is a meditation on this ancient story. I’ll demonstrate the parallels by dividing the Book of Job’s narrative into sections that correspond with parts of Malick’s film:
1) An undeserved misfortune befalls Job, leading him to rail against God’s lack of accountability, specifically regarding His permissiveness of tragedies that befall the innocent.
This corresponds to the movie’s introductory sequence, in which Jack (Sean Penn) and Mrs. O’Brien (Jessica Chastain) struggle to reconcile their faith with the unexpected death of R.L. at only 19 years old.
2) God appears and demands to the anguished Job, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth?”
This corresponds to the film’s second section, a striking visual sequence that chronicles the Earth’s creation.
3) God continues with, “…When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?”
This corresponds with the film’s third and longest section, an account of Jack’s upbringing in Waco, Texas, experiencing joys of childhood and soon learning hard truths of adulthood.
4) Job repents and turns back to God.
This corresponds to the concluding “beach” sequence, which I’ll revisit later. To properly analyze it, we need to first interpret the first three parts of the film.
As we can see, the film’s epigraph is highly useful, providing us with a roadmap for the movie’s progression. But to stop here would be to minimize Malick’s work. He doesn’t merely want to retell a famous story. Rather, he aims to use the art of film to explore why God’s forceful response to Job in the original scripture is so successful in convincing him to repent.
After all, as you may have thought to yourself when I summarized the Book of Job, the reason for the character’s repentance isn’t immediately clear. In fact, it seems that his angry claims about God’s unaccountability have proven correct. God confirms that He will not account to anyone. Why, then, does Job repent?
Answering this question is Malick’s true project in The Tree of Life. And it’s an enormous project, given that the Book of Job is one of the most studied and discussed narratives in all of theology. But Malick undertakes the task, in my opinion, with great skill and nuance. I’ll illustrate how he goes about it by referencing the sections I’ve already proscribed.
In the first section, we see and hear Mrs. O’Brien (Jessica Chastain) attempt to cope with the early death of R.L., her middle son. She delivers an opening monologue about the ways of Grace and Nature, but it appears that she no longer believes in the content of her speech. For example, while she recounts, “they told us that no one who follows the way of Grace ever meets a bad end,” this is juxtaposed with an image of a young R.L. We later learn that R.L. was the gentlest and most sensitive of Mrs. O’Brien’s three sons, yet he alone died early.
The tragedy is also shown to leave a lasting impact on R.L.’s older brother Jack (Sean Penn), who appears adrift and dissatisfied with adult life. He apologizes to his father after an apparent fight about R.L., showing that the tragedy continues to cause family conflict. We hear Jack’s wandering thoughts: “Where were you?” “How did she bear it?”
The point of this introductory section, then, is to emphasize the question: “Why?” Why do bad things happen to good people?
This in turn sets up the next two sections. Before we discuss these, though, let’s note a very important point. Since we’re viewing The Tree of Life as a modern version of the Book of Job, the images in the second and third sections, which correlate with God’s response to Job’s wavering faith, are being presented to Jack as an adult. In other words, Jack sees what we see on the screen.
This is crucial to understanding the film. Just as Job is addressed directly by God (one of the few moments in the Bible in which God literally appears), Jack too is addressed directly, via the movie’s images, in response to his questioning of God in the first part. Later, when we arrive at our analysis of the film’s fourth and final section, we’ll gauge whether he’s convinced by what he has been shown.
Back to the story structure. The “universe creation” sequence corresponds, as I indicated before, with the beginning of God’s reply to Job as presented in the film’s epigraph: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth?”
But how is this an effective reply to Job, and by extension to Jack?
We can use our aesthetic sensibilities to answer this. The section summarizes, with alternately faraway and intimate cinematography, the entirety of time. The cosmos shapes itself. The molten Earth solidifies. Oceans swell, cellular life originates, and dinosaurs display the quality of compassion. It’s an incredible show that invokes our feelings of wonder and grandeur.
And indeed, these feelings may have a strangely comforting effect on our perception of tragedy. Just as one might look at nighttime stars and appreciate one’s own relative insignificance in the grand scope of the universe, one experiences this section of the movie to be reminded of his or her littleness in all of creation. Thus, the accusatory questions directed at God in the first section aren’t so much answered as minimized: a life lost at nineteen is compared to trillions of years of cosmic processes.
And when you think about it, what could be a more honest response to the pain of loss? A presentation of the universe’s grandeur minimizes human tragedy by sheer scope.
Even so, I admit it’s a fairly cold, logical response, insufficient on its own. This is why God continues, in Malick’s interpretation, with the third section: Jack’s childhood, which corresponds to the second half of the epigraph: “When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for Joy?”
It’s important to make clear that this third section doesn’t comprise Jack’s memories. We know this, firstly, because Jack isn’t in all the scenes. Secondly, he’s too young in others (an infant) to have any recollection of the events. Our framework, though, explains this nicely, since we’ve determined that these are images being shown by God to Jack as an adult. Thus, it’s no surprise that we see a smitten Mr. and Mrs. O’Brien laying on a picnic blanket predating Jack’s birth: God has understandably included this in the narrative of Jack’s early life.
One of the questions Jack asks during the first part of the movie is: “Where were you?” And in this section, God answers. Every shot in section three indicates God’s presence in Jack’s early life. An incomplete survey of some powerful examples might include a loving Mr. O’Brien (Brad Pitt) holding Jack’s newborn foot, the wrinkled face of an elderly relative, rain in a puddle beside the house, and the sun setting behind an exuberant playground. Malick’s attempt to make palpable or at least conceivable the presence of a beneficent God is, in my opinion, highly authentic.
But in addition to these shots of obvious beauty, there are darker moments. Jack and his brothers and friends, for example, mock adults with disabilities and abuse animals. Jack feels that his father’s disciplinary style is smothering and hypocritical. A peer drowns in a swimming pool, and another is injured in a fire. In one extraordinary sequence, a sexually maturing Jack sneaks into the bedroom of a female neighbor, lays out her undergarment, and then runs away from the house with it, distraught.
(What has Jack done to the undergarment that necessitates discarding it in a river? Well, given the adolescent Jack’s entering into sexual maturity, the sexual overtones of the scene, and Jack’s ensuing angst, I think I have a decent guess.)
Where was God in these darker moments? Malick answers this difficult question in two ways. Firstly, he often intersperses these moments with metaphoric clips of nature’s beauty. For example, after Mr. O’Brien laments his missed opportunity to become a musician, Malick shows a fleeting clip of sand blowing through a desert. This technique asserts a link between negative human experiences and the larger schema of the Earth, suggesting that these negative experiences are linked to the beauty of time and creation and therefore not wholly negative.
Secondly and more importantly, these dark moments have an overarching theme: Jack’s struggle to accept his place in society. He conflicts with his father, ignores the value of animal life, sees himself as superior to others (like the man with cerebral palsy), destroys property, and illicitly enters a neighbor’s house. He tells his mother, “I want to do what I want.” Perhaps most alarming of all, he tells R.L. to put his finger over the nozzle of a BB gun and pulls the trigger. Even as a toddler, Jack throws a tantrum when he doesn’t receive the totality of his mother’s attention.
In each of these cases, Jack displays the tendency to disregard his place within his family and within society. This condition—attempting to unduly hoist one’s self above one’s rightful place—is the human condition as laid out in the Bible. Recall Adam and Eve’s fall from grace after the serpent promises them equality with God if they eat from the forbidden tree.
This condition is also the same one that, after R.L.’s death, will cause Jack to question God’s motives. His interrogation of God, we can conclude after watching Jack grow up, is just another example of Jack putting himself above his rightful human status. Since, as we’ve said, Jack sees the childhood section of the movie, we know that Jack, too, can observe this pattern—hence its presumed effectiveness in lessening his frustration.
This, really, is the most important point of the third part. If we combine it with the more positive, wondrous instances of God’s presence, we can summarize this section with the following statement: God was present all along in Jack’s life, but Jack frequently ignored this. Therefore, it shouldn’t be surprising that adult Jack is doing so yet again, this time by questioning God’s plan following R.L.’s death.
Similarly to part two, then, part three is an effective and appropriate response to Jack’s crisis of faith. In the original Book of Job, these rhetorical strategies of God’s aren’t explicit, but Malick’s goal—and, arguably, achievement—is to illustrate them through the medium of film.
We now come to the fourth and final part: the beach scene. This is when viewers tend to get really frustrated. After all, we’ve stuck with Malick through some confusing sequences, and now, instead of giving us answers, he completely drops all pretense of linearity. But since we have a foothold on Malick’s themes up until this point, we can follow his conclusion.
The section begins with adult Jack walking through a desert in a suit. He appears to be chasing a child. There are also shots of Jack sitting in the same suit in his office. Eventually, Jack reaches some kind of doorway and appears a beach, where he sees family and friends from his childhood.
It’s clear that these are symbolic, not literal events. The first clue to understanding the symbolism is Jack’s business attire during these scenes. We can infer that the strange desert imagery represents his mental activity while he is sitting in his office at work (as noted before, he wears the same suit in both clips).
What is Jack thinking while at his office, then, that this surreal imagery conveys?
Given the Jobian structure of the first three sections, it’s only reasonable to view the last section as an illustration of Jack’s reaction to what he has seen in the second and third sections. We’ve established that adult Jack sees the images in those parts in response to his questioning of God in the first part. We’ve also concluded that the images indeed constituted an effective response to that questioning. But we haven’t proved that they succeeded in persuading Jack. Does Jack actually change his mindset, as Job does, following this mighty response from God?
The beach sequence demonstrates that he does.
The shots of Jack chasing a child through the desert represent his efforts to rediscover God during a faithless time in his life. Once he arrives at the beach, he encounters images that may seem random or pointless; however, each one reaffirms things that Jack has seen and learned during the preceding two sections.
For instance, the beach sequence recalls section two’s emphasis on the grandeur of nature and creation. Both land and sea are depicted in their full beauty, and animal life is captured majestically soaring across the area. More difficult to catch, but also present, are the more complex lessons from section three, which emphasize the godliness of the people from Jack’s childhood.
Consider Mr. O’Brien lifting up R.L. and holding him lovingly. This contrasts with how Jack viewed his father when he was a boy: as selfish and authoritarian, a world apart from the gentle and compassionate R.L. But having seen the third section of the film, it makes sense that Jack would have a new perspective, since several moments from that section emphasize his father’s love for R.L. and the other boys.
For example, in one touching scene, Mr. O’Brien and R.L. wordlessly bond over their love for music, a love not shared by the others in the family. In other scenes, Mr. O’Brien horses around with the boys before bed, tells dramatic bedtime stories, and attempts to better the family economically by working hard (“never missed a day of work”) and struggling against an unfair system of patent law. In the scene where Mr. O’Brien tries to teach the boys to fight, R.L. is reluctant and awkward, which disappoints his father. But rather than taunt R.L. as he does with Jack, Mr. O’Brien demonstrates awareness of R.L.’s sensitive nature and merely discontinues the lesson.
To be sure, these are nuanced moments. But Jack likely hasn’t reflected on these nuances before. Recall the early scene in which Jack as an adult alludes to a fight he had with his father about R.L., indicating that he still resents his father’s treatment of R.L.—possibly even blaming him partially for R.L.’s death. If you’ll allow me to stretch a bit, the way R.L.’s death is relayed to his mother (and R.L.’s age at the time) suggests that he died in a military setting, and Jack may feel that his father’s influence pushed R.L. to pursue this vocation, when he otherwise would have had no inclination to do so.
Regardless, Jack, having been presented with a more comprehensive picture, can now reflect on a truer version of events: that R.L. and Mr. O’Brien were fundamentally different, but nevertheless shared a loving bond. This version, therefore, is reflected on the beach.
Also emphasized in the beach sequence is Mrs. O’Brien’s embracing of R.L. as a child. This recalls another question of Jack’s in the first section: “How did she bear it?” We can understand why adult Jack would struggle to comprehend how his fiercely loving mother could move past such a tragedy. But after seeing part three, in which his mother’s near-angelic grace and moral strength are underscored repeatedly, Jack can imagine it. He pictures his mother loving R.L. but also finding the strength and faith to say: “I give him to you,” as symbolic images convey R.L.’s departure to a new life.
Thus, Jack now perceives the tragedy of R.L.’s death as less devastating than before. He has new insight into his mother’s character, now recognizing that she came to terms with what happened, eventually accepting it as God’s plan.
Near the conclusion of the film, Jack falls to his knees on the beach, a clear indication that he, like Job, has repented and turned back to God following God’s response to his frustration with the undeserved tragedies of life. The movie ends with, fittingly, a bridge, as Jack, by rediscovering his faith, has formed a “bridge” between his childhood and adult lives.
Remember that prior to the events of the film, Jack seemed adrift and detached as an adult, gazing confusedly at the city from his office and behaving awkwardly after waking up with a woman. Since he has rediscovered God, it can be inferred, he has rediscovered the wonder and belonging he felt as a child, before R.L.’s death. Perhaps Malick implies that God is like the trunk of a tree, and all the extending branches stem outward from Him.
The Tree of Life is a challenging film, and sometimes too much challenge can unduly cloud a film’s artistic value. If I’ve failed to convey the aesthetic power of The Tree of Life by prioritizing an explanation of how to understand it, then I encourage you to use this framework to discover that power for yourself. There’s so much more to enjoy in Malick’s masterpiece. I’ve omitted entire sequences and symbolisms from my analysis, but this is out of necessity, not out of indifference. Because for me, The Tree of Life is in the very top tier of filmmaking: a work of ridiculous creativity, intense emotion, and beautiful imagery—a masterpiece maybe unsurpassed in 21st century American cinema.
—Jim Andersen
For more movies explained, see my analysis of Hereditary.
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