After seeing "Tree of Life", I for a long time forbade myself to write about this film. Two forces clashed within me. Captivated by the poetry, by the state of bliss in which I was immersed, I was afraid of disturbing the surface of this work. I got so wrapped up in the mystery of this film that I couldn't understand the negative reactions and was unable to think critically ¹ . “Tree of Life” is based on a book of the Bible, “the Book of Job”. And this dark book speaks of life and of man's relationship to God. Which is present in many books of the Bible. But the Book of Job begins with a dialogue between God and Satan who play with man. The impression left by this inaugural dialogue is strange. Of course, the opening dialogue wouldn't be quite from the same era as the central narrative. It does not matter in fact, the impression left is represented during the course of the book. How can God make fun of his beloved creature? A hasty conclusion accounts for the implausibility of the situation. In truth, once the bark is removed, the Book of Job delivers the heart of the relationship between God and man. And “Tree of Life”, the film by Terrence Malick, has the same ambition.

What is life? The time sticks the expression: “individual freedom”, that is to say pleasure, to explain life. And the era knows many techniques to dissect life ² . Those who explain life by pleasure notably remove from life the before and the after. They withdraw from life, birth and death, and give themselves a clear conscience in the face of evil. These people are helpless. Misery awaits them. Let evil strike them, and incomprehension, emptiness, nothingness encompass them. Destroy them. But those have the excuse of not knowing, materialism has closed their hearts to God. What to think of a believer who relies on technology to reassure himself? What about believers who tirelessly take refuge behind a technique, the technique of thinking that they will be spared because their conduct authorizes it? To think that there is a logic to the world, a logic to God and to start from the principle that this logic is understandable by man is the technique of retribution which, like the technique of pleasure, is a means but not an end.

The Book of Job Revisited

“Tree of Life” is an imagery of the “Book of Job”. The beginning of the film, the first twenty minutes, shows a woman at two different ages in her life: at ten, a little girl waking up to the beauty of the world, reassured by her father's shoulder, communing with the nature, speaking from innocence to 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 reward is comfort, and suddenly, because it is always a matter of suddenness with evil, when she learns that she will never see never his son. A parent who is told that his child is dead, whether he is a believer or not, thinks at first that he will never see his child again. The pain felt is out of this world. Terrence Malik drags us through this pain. At the heart of this pain. When the mother receives the letter informing her that her son is dead, she has just recited a lesson in harmonious life learned at school: "The sisters told us that there were two paths in life: the path of nature and the way of grace. You have to choose which 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”, intones the way of an ordered life: “Grace does not seek its profit. She accepts being ignored, forgotten, unloved. She accepts insults and injuries. Nature seeks only its profit. Nature imposes its will. Likes to dominate, to do as it pleases. She finds reasons to suffer as 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, ends up remembering that bliss with these words, her own words: "I will be loyal to You… Whatever happens." Yes, but hey, it's easy to say those words before the event. It is easy to say these words before the evil. Before evil, everything is easy, since we are in the world, in our world with its easily identifiable attributes, and technology protects us. But life is not a fairy tale. In life, it is not possible to close your eyes, to tell yourself that this letter never arrived, to repeat to yourself that you have chosen the path of grace and that it never leads to misfortune. "I will be loyal to you…no matter what." When she says this sentence Mrs. O'Brien does not know that she is close to Peter saying to Christ: "Even if all succumb, at least not me!" […] Should I die with you, no, I will not deny you. (Mk, 14, 29-32). The first rupture, the essential rupture of the film intervenes with the death of the son. We feel the anger rising. Vis-à-vis relatives and friends with this flood of words having no meaning for those who touch the finger of evil ³ . "He's in God's hands now" (as if he hadn't always been). "In time, your grief will pass, even if it's hard to admit." (— I want to die, to be with him). “God sends flies to the wounds He should heal. (— What did you gain?). A human attribute connects all the epiphanies of evil in the world: injustice. Terrence Malick explains nothing. He does not analyze. He does not judge. He showed us the end of a world with pain striking the heart of a family. The anger that wells up as the first reaction to injustice. To shout his rage and his hatred of everything that is not this pain. Of all that does not understand or embrace this pain. Now, nothing can embrace evil except he who suffers it. In Malick's vision, it is time 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 have compared Terrence Malick to Herman Melville, but these journalists are lucky to be much freer than their French counterparts. Terrence Malick is one of those rare contemporary artists who does not offer the vision of their incarceration, the vision of a method that has locked itself in itself and seeks pity, 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 offshoot of that idea. The American director therefore decides to show us the moment of Creation. This hic et nunc moment when “the morning stars burst into songs of joy, and all the Sons of God shouted for joy”. The alpha. For fifteen minutes, through a symphony of images and music, Malick takes us from the beginning of the world to the origin of the O'Brien family. The alpha of a family as the alpha of the world. Terrence Malik decides to show everything. It's not an ambition, it's a theophany. Like the Book of Job. Terrence Malick films an immense kaleidoscope on childhood; he collects all these shavings of life and composes stained glass. Life is wonderful. The first son, Jack, is an Adam in his paradise. But very quickly the clouds gather. A second son is born. Jack is no longer alone. He feels like he's not loved as much anymore. He wants his mother all to himself, like before, before the event: the birth of his brother. Envy shows up 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 of a child. Jack is one of those children who do not find their place in the siblings, in the family, in life. This one always seems either too wide or too narrow. He finds it difficult to live. Jack and his brother walking with their mother in town will thus see misery: thugs captured by the police, disabled people, alcoholics. One of the children asks a natural question: "Can this happen to anyone?" And the mother, who is like an angel, but like an earthly angel, who therefore submits to the law of the world, will tell him to be silent. The desire arises. “Let's not attract the evil eye. And she doesn't answer. She has decided to follow the path of grace — we can say from the film that she follows perfectly, scrupulously, and with pleasure the path of grace, but she obeys earthly laws. It is situated in a philosophy of retribution. reassuring philosophy. Effective philosophy in the world as long as in this world the evil does not intervene.

The uselessness of technique against evil

“Tree of Life” is set in the 1950s in Waco, Texas. Childhood always unfolds 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, questions torment childhood: “Who am I? ". “What am I to do in this world? ". The relationship with God goes through questions. Questioning is the foundation. By following the relationship between the father and his son, we discover that when asked questions, certainties are essential; true or false certainties, but certainties strengthen; they are the resting place of character. The policy of retribution is a certainty often used by adults with children. It helps explain the unexplainable. It tends above all to channel the inexplicable, to make it reasonable. To explain is to master. When Job is smitten by God, when he loses everything he has, his family, his possessions, his health, three friends come to visit him and lecture him one after the other. The three friends come to explain to him what he does not know about himself and his life. They come to tell him that he did wrong, that he doesn't 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 blind ignorance makes him believe that he is a virgin of any crime. Have we never met those friends who know better than we do what is happening to us? How many discussions with friends lead nowhere like this? When incomprehension reigns supreme and unchallenged, when we know intimately that the event which occurs inaugurates a new adventure and that these friends strike truths from 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?” like Heidegger or Leibniz, but: “Why evil in the world?” From childhood the world is fragmented and questions flow. “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 answers are loved. The answers express a power. Time is reversed in relation to childhood. In the adult world those who ask too many questions especially in view of a misfortune that happens to them act like curses. Any form of curse or events, anything that can be interpreted as such, creates envy. Job's three friends frequent him and lecture him and above all do not listen to his questions, otherwise they would enter into his intimacy. And they do not enter into this intimacy, because they are afraid, they are dying of fear, because they too would risk, in their turn, the same punishment as their friend. They isolate themselves from Job by talking with him, by closing in on their certainties and by being deaf to their friend's anguish. Their answers are there to compartmentalize the discussion because Job is plagued. Job suffers from deep anguish. He drags this anxiety from the beginning of the story. His anxiety turns out to be legitimate. Job knows that God is punishing 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 anguish stems 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. »

Every conversion is a big bang. Job knows full well that he is right against his friends. His creator, whom he has always adored and served, from whom he had the right to expect retribution and who gave it to him through a material life above all need, punished him in his entrails ⁸ . The Book of Job is also a story of election. “Oh! I would like to be strangled: death rather than my pains? shouts Job (7:15). And Mrs O'Brien silently makes similar comments after learning of her son's death. Then Job would have suffered for nothing. Mrs. O'Brien too. Then we would only be wisps of straw swept away by God? A bit like in antiquity with these gods who disposed of humans as they saw fit and who were often more human than humans. Does evil have any 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 the “Book of Job” step by step, giving him the images of his American childhood. Mrs. O'Brien takes the time of a film to understand, like Job, that evil, this evil which comes from God or which God has not refused to his creatures, has a meaning; by mixing with evil, he restores to his creatures their essence: to participate in the good. It is impossible to hear this sentence without estimating the evil. God pushed Job to the brink of madness by taking away everything he had so that he would become aware, so that he could find the faith of his origins. Job thought he believed before this event. He had illusions. He hallucinated his faith. With these trials, he saw face to face. At the heart of darkness, at the very heart of evil, he reaches the heart of life. No other journey would have been so edifying. “Tree of Life” ends with the last words of Mrs. O'Brien while immersed in a spatio-temporal procession that is irrevocably reminiscent of the Communion of Saints, she says: “I give it to You. I give You my son. She discovers the ultimate solution to her pain. 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).