After seeing "Tree of Life", I have long forbidden myself to write about this film. Two forces clashed in me. Subjugated by poetry, by the state of bliss in which I was plunged, I was afraid of disturbing the surface of this work. I got so tangled in the mystery of this film that I did not understand the negative reactions and was unable to have a critical mind ¹ . "Tree of Life" is based on a book from the Bible, "Le Livre de Job". And this dark book speaks of the life and relationship of man to God. Which is present in many books in the Bible. But Job's book begins with a dialogue between God and Satan who play man. The impression that this inaugural dialogue leaves us is strange. Of course, the start dialogue would not be entirely from the same era as the central story. No matter in fact, the impression left is during the book. How can God play with his beloved creature? A hasty conclusion reports on the improbable of the situation. In truth, once the bark has been removed, Job's book delivers the heart of the relationship between God and man. And "Tree of Life", the film of Terrence Malick, has this same ambition.

What is life? The era sticks the expression: "individual freedom", that is to say pleasure, to explain life. And the time experienced many techniques to dissect life ² . Those who explain life by pleasure remove in particular from life before and after. They withdraw from life, birth and death, and give themselves a good conscience to evil. These people are helpless. Misery awaits them. May evil strike them, and misunderstanding, emptiness, nothingness encompassing them. Annihilate them. But these have the excuse of not knowing, materialism has closed their hearts to God. What to think of a believer who would rely on the technique to reassure himself? What to think of believers who tirelessly take refuge behind a technique, the technique of thinking that they will be spared because their conduct allows him? To think that there is a logic in the world, a logic to God and starting from the principle that this logic is understandable by man is the technique of remuneration which as the technique of pleasure is a means but not an end.

The Book of Job Revisited

"Tree of Life" is a picture of the "Job book". The start of the film, the first twenty minutes, shows a woman a woman two ages in her life: at ten years old, a little girl waking up to the beauty of the world, reassured by her father's shoulder, communicating with nature, speaking of innocence innocence, she recovers the lost sheep, we are in paradise before the fault. And then, in adulthood, playing with her children, a happy and convinced mother whose remuneration is comfort, and suddenly, because it is always sudden with evil, when she learns that she will never see her son again. A parent to whom we learn that his child is dead, whether believing or not, first thinks that he will never see his child again. The pain felt is out of this world. Terrence Malik drags us in this pain. At the heart of this pain. When the mother receives the mail informing her that her son is dead, she has just recited a harmonious life lesson learned in school: "The sisters told us that there were two ways in life: the way of nature and the way of grace. You must choose the one you are going to borrow. "And the little girl, and the sisters through her, secretly invoking Saint Paul and" the imitation of life of Jesus Christ ", sets the way to an orderly life:" Grace does not seek its profit. She agrees to be ignored, forgotten, unloved. She accepts insults and injuries. Nature seeks only its profit. Nature imposes its will. Likes to dominate, to act as he pleases. She finds reasons to suffer while the world shines around and love smiles in everything. "According to the sisters:" The ways of grace never lead to misfortune. "And the mother, Mrs O'Brien, played intensely by Jessica Chastain, finished remembering this bliss with these words, her own words:" I will be loyal ... Whatever happens. Yes, but now, it's easy to say these words before the event. It is easy to say these words before evil. Before evil, everything is easy, since we are in the world, in our world with its easily identifiable attributes, and the technique protects us. But life is not a tale. In life, it is not possible to close your eyes, to say that this letter has never arrived, to repeat yourself that one has chosen the way of grace and that it never leads to misfortune. "I will be loyal to you ... whatever happens. When she says this Mrs O'Brien sentence does not know that she is close to Pierre saying to Christ: "Even if all succumb, at least not me! […] I have to die with you, no, I will not deny you. (MC, 14, 29-32). The first break, the essential break in the film comes with the death of the son. We feel angry pointing. With regard to relatives and friends with this flood of words having no meaning for those who touch the evil the finger ³ . "He is in the hands of God now" ( - as if he had not always been). "Over time, your sorrow will pass, even if it's hard to admit". ( - I want to die, be with him). “God sends the flies to the wounds he should treat. (-What have you won there?). A human attribute connects all the epiphanies of evil in the world: injustice. Terrence Malick does not explain anything. He does not analyze. He does not judge. He showed us the end of a world with pain hitting the heart of a family. Anger that deaf as the first reaction to injustice. Shout his rage and hatred with everything that is not this pain. From anything that does not understand or kiss this pain. However, nothing can embrace evil than the one who undergoes it. In the vision of Malick is the moment to recall this sentence of God which opens the film and opens the dialogue of God in the "book of Job":

“Where were you when I founded the earth?… When the morning stars burst into songs of joy, and all the Sons of God shouted for joy? » ⁴

Malick then tries a daring bet. American journalists and not the least compared Terrence Malick to Herman Melville, but these journalists are fortunate to be much more free than their French counterparts. Terrence Malick is one of those rare contemporary artists who do not offer the vision of their incarceration, the vision of a method that has locked itself in itself and seeks apitation, Terrence Malick seeks freedom and claims it. He decides that the time has come to inspect the world. Or rather to inspect creation. You have to review life, and "Tree of Life" is an emanation of this idea. The American director therefore decides to show us the moment of creation. This moment hic and nunc where "the morning stars burst into songs of joy, and that all the sons of God push cries of joy". Alpha. For fifteen minutes, through a symphony of images and music, Malick walks us from the beginning of the world behind the O'Brien family. The alpha of a family like Alpha in the world. Terrence Malik decides to show everything. It is not an ambition, it is a theophany. Like Job's book. Terrence Malick films a huge kaleidoscope on childhood; He picks up all these lifestyle and composes stained glass windows. Life is wonderful. The first son, Jack, is an Adam in his paradise. But very quickly the clouds come together. A second son is born. Jack is no longer alone. He feels like he is no longer loved. He wants his mother for himself, as before, before the event: the birth of his brother. Envy points very quickly in human relationships. And Terrence Malick films all these moments, this freedom, this intensity of childish joy. Again few films have managed to follow the difficulties of growing up with a child. Jack is one of those children who do not find their place in siblings, in the family, in life. It always seems or too wide or too narrow to him. He feels a difficulty in living. Jack and his brother walking with their mother in town will thus see misery: thugs captured by the police, disabled, alcoholics. One of the children asks a natural question: "Can it happen to anyone?" And the mother who is like an angel, but as a terrestrial angel, who therefore undergoes the law of the world, will intimate him to be silent. The desire feathered. “Will not be bad eye. And she doesn't answer. She decided to follow the path of grace - we can say in view of the film that she follows perfectly, scrupulously, and with voluptuousness the way of grace, but she obeys earthly laws. It is in a philosophy of remuneration. Reassuring philosophy. Effective philosophy in the world as long as in this world evil does not intervene.

The uselessness of technique against evil

"Tree of life" takes place in the 1950s in Waco in the state of Texas. Childhood has always been in the same way since the beginning of the world. Childhood has its own world where adults do not enter, where transgression represents the most extraordinary adventure. But very quickly, the questions praised childhood: "Who am I?" ». "What should I do in this world?" ». The relationship to God goes through questions. Questioning is the foundation. By following the relations of the father and his son, we discover that in questions, certainties are essential; true or false certainties, but certainties strengthen; They are the restoir of character. The policy of remuneration is a certainty often used by adults with children. It explains the inexplicable. Above all, it tends to channel the inexplicable, to make it reasonable. Explain is to master. When Job is struck by God, when he loses everything he has, his family, his property, his health, three friends come to visit him and sermn him one after the other. The three friends come to explain to him what he does not know of himself and his life. They come to tell him that he has acted badly, that he does not seem to know it and that if he ignores it, he is all the more guilty. In short, they overwhelm him. Job, their friend, cannot be condemned without having acted badly, and only his ignorance blind makes him believe that he is a virgin of all crime. Have we never met these friends who know better than us what happens to us? How many discussions with friends do not lead anywhere? When the misunderstanding reigns supreme and without sharing, when we know intimately that the event that occurs inaugurates a new adventure and that these friends take advantage of the truths of another age completely escaping the intensity of our new world ⁵ . As soon as Job is struck by God, he knows that it is God who strikes him. The question is refined. Not: "Why the world rather than nothing?" "In the manner of Heidegger or Leibniz, but:" Why evil in the world? From childhood the world is fragmented and the questions flocked. "Why do people die?" "Why do people suffer?" The questions are always more numerous and above all more attractive than the answers. But in the adult world, only the answers are loved. The answers express a power. Time is reversed in relation to childhood. In the world of adults those who ask too many questions specially with regard to a misfortune that happens to them act as cursed. Any form of curse or events, all that can be interpreted as such, creates envy. The three friends of Job frequent him and sermn him and do not listen to his questions, because otherwise they would enter his intimacy. And they do not enter this intimacy, because they are afraid, they die of fear, because they also risk, in turn, the same punishment as their friend. They isolate themselves from Job by speaking with him, slamming from their certainties and being deaf to the anxiety of their friend. Their answers are there to partition the discussion because Job is pestified. Job suffers from deep anxiety. He drags this anxiety from the start of the story. His anxiety turns out to be legitimate. Job knows that God punishes him. God is good. Job is good and obeys the law. Why would a good god punish a good man who obeys his law? Job's anxiety takes its source from this question. In this apparent inconsistency.

"Without love, life passes like a flash"

Anguish comes from misunderstanding. Jack, the eldest son O'Brien, is in the grip of anguish, very early and very quickly. From the moment his brother was born (the performance of the young Hunter McCraken should be underlined—these children of America have an incredible propensity to become one with fictional roles as if they were seasoned actors), the walls are always too close to him. He is still surrounded, walled in, a prisoner. He always feels prisoner of himself, or of his father, or of his mother, or of his brothers, or of his acts. "The impossibility of forgetting the truth, that is indeed the first characteristic of anguish" ⁶ . But the truth is what we undergo, something that imposes itself on us and over which it is impossible to have control. “I can't do what I want. What I hate, I do. Jack ignores the path of grace. He doesn't understand anything about it, or rather he knows, he feels that the answer is deeper than this simple choice between grace and nature. He feels that there is something more tenuous than these two paths. These two paths are of this world. These two paths are a technique. Like any technique, they are not to be denigrated, but to be put in their place. What strikes this family or Job, the loss of a brother or a son, the loss of any good, is evil. Evil is a jewel. He is not of this world. So he comes from another world. But he intervenes in our world. He summons us and staggers us. There is the advice of family, friends of Mrs. O'Brien or friends of Job, but there is, and this is how in the world we begin to interpret the intervention of evil, the absence of God. Retribution is the presence of God, evil is his absence. So when the father is fired, his whole universe, his whole conception of the world collapses. He is miserable. " I am nothing. Look at this glory around us. The trees, the birds… I was unworthy. I messed up everything, without even seeing this glory. What an idiot. I have never been absent from work. I have always given to the church…” The retribution is of this world and the evil is not. Retribution and all its accessits are only technical. Like the modern world, technology can even become a source of anxiety by dint of being taken for an end in itself. A source of anguish and a headlong rush. Bernanos had clearly seen that technique came out of its role like a river from its course. Over time, it only got worse. But it is the man who encourages him, transported by the power he feels to tame the technique. Impression of quite relative power because the man is more often mastered by the technique ⁷ . This technique that leaves no room for inner life. Answer given in the film by Mrs O'Brien: “The only way to be happy is to love. Without love, life passes like a flash. »

Each conversion is a big bang. Job knows full well that he is right against his friends. Its creator whom he always loved and served, of which he was entitled to expect a remuneration and which gave it through a material life above any need punishes it in his entrails ⁸ . Job's book is also a story of election. "Ah! I would like to be strangled: death rather than my pain? Shouts Job (7, 15). And Mrs O'Brien claims similar words after learning the death of his son. So Job would have suffered for nothing. Mrs O'Brien too. So we would only be fetus of straw swept by God? A bit like in antiquity with these gods who had humans as they seemed and who were often more human than humans. Does evil have a meaning? "Is there some Fraud in the Skim of the Universe? As the priest says in the film during his homily ⁹ .

Terrence Malick followed by step by step the "Job book" by giving it the images of his American childhood. Mrs O'Brien puts the time of a film to understand, like Job, that evil, this evil which comes from God or that God has not refused to his creatures, has a meaning; By the centering of evil, he gives back to his creatures their essence: participate in good. It is impossible to hear this sentence without estimating evil. God pushed Job to the edge of madness by taking away from him everything he had to realize that he finds the faith of the origins. Job thought he believed before this event. There were illusions. He hallucinated his faith. With these trials, he saw face to face. At the heart of darkness, at the heart of evil, he reaches the heart of life. No other route would have been as edifying. "Tree of life" ends with the last words of Mrs O'Brien all submerged in a space-time procession which irreparably reminds of the communion of saints, she says: "I give it to you. I give you my son. She discovers the last solution to her sentence. Conversion.

Written and directed by Terrence Malick; director of photography, Emmanuel Lubezki; edited by Hank Corwin, Jay Rabinowitz, Daniel Rezende, Billy Weber and Mark Yoshikawa; music by Alexandre Desplat; produced by Jack Fisk; costumes by Jacqueline West; produced by Sarah Green, Bill Pohlad, Brad Pitt, Dede Gardner and Grant Hill; Fox Searchlight Pictures. Duration: 2 hours 18 minutes.

STARRING: Brad Pitt (Mr. O'Brien), Sean Penn (Jack), Jessica Chastain (Mrs. O'Brien), Fiona Shaw (Grandmother), Irene Bedard (Messenger), Jessica Fuselier (Guide), Hunter McCracken (Jack Young), Laramie Eppler (RL) and Tye Sheridan (Steve).