Notice that Malick’s basic technique in Days of Heaven is to set up a very top down Biblical story while also setting up a very bottom up view of man deeply embedded in the natural world. This combination of Biblical with naturalistic is unique in modern film, but it was a hallmark of late 19th century authors like Thomas Hardy. The combination seems like it shouldn’t work because the Biblical and the natural feel like opposites. But in fact Malick shows that they are both grand systems that try to explain how human life works.
This background from Days of Heaven points up the key story technique Malick uses to combine Masterpiece with Memoir-True-Story in Tree of Life: he sets up an extreme contrast between vast story frames and incredibly short scenes.
A mainstream Hollywood movie usually focuses on a few characters in some generic present, and tells its story through 50-70 scenes that average 2 minutes apiece. Tree of Life places the characters within massive frames of nature and history, but tells its story in 200-300 scenes that are often without dialogue and no more than a few seconds long.
These frames include the creation of the universe, the evolution of life on earth, including dinosaurs, the Oedipal battle between fathers and sons, 1950s suburban America and ultra-modern, present-day city America.
Malick’s use of huge story frames isn’t without precedent. Most famously, in James Joyce’s story of a boy growing up in Catholic Ireland, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, hero Stephen Dedalus writes in his geography book: “Stephen Dedalus, Class of Elements, Clongowes Wood College, Sallins, County Kildare, Ireland, Europe, The World, The Universe.”
As in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, these story frames are not just categories by which Malick defines his characters. They are also systems, and they quietly but inexorably lock the hero of Tree of Life, along with his family, within a powerful slavery.
Of all the many frames in this story, the main one is the “storyteller,” oldest brother Jack as an adult, played by Sean Penn, who remembers his childhood upon hearing of his younger brother’s death. If we recall the discussion of genres and story shapes in the Anatomy of Story Masterclass, we can see why this storyteller technique is the second key to combining the Masterpiece genre with the Memoir-True Story in Tree of Life.
The desire line, the spine, in a Masterpiece story is always some version of “finding a deeper reality, contrasting time, perspective and system.” For Memoir-True Story, it’s “to find the meaning in one’s own life.” Using his brother’s death as a trigger, Jack recalls his boyhood and in the process tries to make some sense of the meaning of his own life. Because this is a memory story, Malick is free to play with the past in any order he chooses, and show time frames that vary from the evolution of the universe to a memory only a second long.
After setting up all these massive frames of time, space and character in the early part of the film, Malick then goes in the opposite direction, the sensual, to tell the main story. One effect of the 200-300 short scenes is that the viewer gains a sense of flow, process, and becoming at every level of life. Just as Van Gogh’s paintings of objects are simply packages of lines of force, the objects here, from bursting stars to desert rocks, have energy literally flowing through them.
The combination of sensual images with short scenes becomes a different kind of story language, a visual poem, and much of the film plays like a silent movie. This is Malick’s cinematic version of stream of consciousness, far more believable and emotionally real than most voice-over narrations that play over standard-length scenes of dialogue.
No matter how short most of these moments are, each is an event, an action which, when strung together in sequence, gives us the story of a boy growing up in America. The father is a harsh, sometimes physical disciplinarian while the mother is a gentle ethereal woman with infinite love for her three boys. Our hero is the oldest of the three, and he does some things to the middle brother, now dead, that show a jealousy, a nastiness, and make him feel guilt now that he remembers those actions as an adult.
Over the course of the story, the outside world, the killer systems, invade the boy’s life. The father loses his job in the factory, along with his belief in the American ethic of working hard to rise to the top. And the boy has to leave the house that he grew up in.
Unlike his father, Jack has grown up to be a successful man in business. But the modern skyscraper environment he lives in seems a major loss compared to that house of his childhood. That’s why he remembers. And that’s why he mourns, not just for his dead brother but for a community, a fleeting moment in the span of a human life when he was free and loved and full of potential.
As this naturalistic story plays out, the second strain, the Biblical, the spiritual, comes through in the scenes as well. First by the fact that these aren’t just brothers in their actions. Our hero is Cain to his brother’s Abel, even if he didn’t finally kill him. Then there are the voices of the heavenly choir that play throughout. There’s the use of voice-over where we hear the beliefs of Mother and Father. And of course there’s the communal ending.
In Jack’s mind, they are all together again at the seashore, walking through the water as requiem music plays and the ethereal choir sings. Father carries the dead son. And Mother says, to death, to the universe, to God, to something, “I give him to you. I give you my son.”
I wish I could say I loved this incredibly ambitious film. But I didn’t. My response to it was similar to what I’ve discovered about Citizen Kane: everyone respects it as one of the great films of all time, but I don’t know a single soul who loves it.
If you want to take a shot at writing a masterpiece of your own, it’s instructive to see why this occurs. Story frames, whether of time, point of view, or system, are fundamental to advanced storytelling. They are what allow the audience to see deeper and to see bigger than they can with their own eyes.
But there is a great danger. The more frames you place on a story, the more you literally back the audience away and drain emotion from the experience. It’s like placing a window frame around a window frame around a window frame around a character. You can see intellectually what the person is doing, but finally you just can’t feel it.
Comments
claire j.lehr
12 Feb 2012, 14:59
The world was created with pain and with
joy yet according to Job,to be alive is to expect pain as well as joy.
No matter,one must march to his own drummer or he will bring the cruelty of
his lack of fulfillment to his loved ones-if he,with his narcissistic
need,is capable of unselfish love.
Did not require so many naturalistic scenes of creation:I got it.
During the film.as a psychotherapist,I wondered if Sean Penn"s brother:s
death
occurred before or after
this film.Pitt's performance was dead because the dad was dead.(right on)
Recently as a senior,I am deadly and almost daily reminded of continuing
depression of my friends who have lost a child ----it never goes away.
Father here was self-indulgent in his
pain.
Paul Clingan
28 Jan 2012, 09:37
Hey Oliver F:
The script to THE TREE OF LIFE can be found online. It's an amazing, rich,
complex script in which the author (Terrence Malick) seems totally
unrestrained by supposed scriptwriting conventions. It's a novelistic
reading experience, but full of emotion.
Believe it.
It's out there.
It is written.
Tom K
25 Jan 2012, 10:01
I also loved the film. To me, it shows the power of filmmaking that is
crafted carefully (yet intuitively) through multiple channels: story,
imagery, dialogue, sound, acting.
On first viewing, I was deeply moved by the film, but it was difficult to
put a finger on a specific emotion. I would call it an 'art-film' in the
best sense of the word; one that is multi-layered and brings with it a
variety of meanings, a work that reveals new depth with more viewings.
However, it's not an art film that is purely experimental, abstract to the
point of not having meaning or deconstructing meaning.
I felt I knew what Malick was speaking of from the very beginning; he
doesn't hide his themes or point-of-view at all. His characters come right
out and speak them: the way of grace and the way of nature. So I don't
understand the confusion.
Thanks, John, for breaking it down in terms of structure. When I watch a
film for the first time I just go with the flow and don't analyze until
subsequent viewings.
I wrote a blog post with more of my thoughts here;
://mindsoulstory.wordpress.com/2011/12/13/the-tree-of-lifes-invitation-to-g
race/
Great film.
James Miklaszewski
19 Jan 2012, 17:34
The movie "Tree of Life" Discussion, Questions, Answers, Debate... Anyone?
Here's my take:
It's actually pretty amazing that in this day and age, a film could be so
different, yet so graceful.
This film as a piece of art, defies convention and refuses to be neatly
defined into a little genre box, which I think is the point. It's like
Malick took a magnifying glass to the human brain and tried to dissect the
human experience, a small blip in time, the electrical impulses stored in
your gray matter as memories and thoughts.
It reminds me of the famous philosophical question: "If a tree falls in a
forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" I would
argue, only if a brain (or machine) is there to process it. Maybe this is
what Malick is getting at. Except the tree is not a real tree, it's the
TREE OF LIFE! haha... sorry.
Okay, back to serious time.
By presenting this as a nonlinear story, using the evolution of the
universe as framework, it feels as though "Tree of Life" is trying to
exemplify how the human brain processes life. As most Hollywood films try
to appeal to your pleasure center, this film is trying to make a statement
about the human condition that you honestly could not achieve while
following the Hero's Journey, or some other formula. Just like many indy
films, this is also a reason why it is so polarizing among viewers: a few
love it while most hate it.
If you simply can't enjoy this movie because it's different, or it seems
awkward, or it doesn't fit into your idea as to how a film should be
constructed and/or enjoyed, then maybe you should reconsider the fact that
film is indeed, a piece of art, and that art should be a unique experience
for every one of us. It's a way to transcend, enlighten, and educate, not
just for pure entertainment. It seems as if this film was not constructed
to do the obligatory dance of answering the five questions: who, what,
where, when, and why, but rather more appropriately and fitting to the
subject matter, it does not try to answer anything, in fact I would argue
this film asks one big question and arguably the most important question of
those five W's regarding the human condition: Why are we here?
O.F.
04 Jan 2012, 03:05
I think Malick belongs to the kind of filmmakers I can only label as
"self-indulgent". If you are patient, "spiritual", "intellectual" or rather
"masochistic" enough to follow these guys on their convoluted paths -
godspeed.
"Tree of Live" to me is just another proof that the universal laws of
storytelling are always with us and cannot be defeated, no matter how hard
Malick tries to work against or neglect them. You just want to make sense
out of things. You just want to connect dots. You want suspense. You want
emotion, you want catharsis and you need some sort of meaning or message.
In short: as an audience you think and feel - otherwise you would be either
bored or dead. Hence the expression: bored to death. That was my feeling
watching this film.
Meaning and message must be understood during the watching of the film -
not afterwards, explained by high-brow critics and scholars. I am also
German, and I can assure you: the audience was not amused. I did not ask
everybody, but I could not miss the sighs of boredom, the snoring and the
ass-shifting in seats. I think the only reason this film got so much
attention was the presence of superstar Mr. Pitt who delivered a very poor
performance by the way. Stiffing the lower lip is not acting.
Jason Wayne
27 Dec 2011, 20:16
I think the Tree of Life is a part of a different kind of art film genre
structure where dramatic story telling is sacrificed for a collage of
voiceover, music, images, and scenes, similar to many David Lynch films.
I can see that there is an audience is such films, but as for myself I do
not enjoy them.
But again I've never cared for stories where the point is for me to figure
out what the author is saying. I'd rather watch a story where I know what
the author is saying, and just discuss how well he said it and argued his
point.
Random images to me are not good argument, they may be complex, they may be
poetic, and if you're trying to hide your story's meaning in a puzzle
they're effective, but if you're trying to prove your story's meaning
they're mostly worthless.
Dennis Fischer
27 Dec 2011, 05:48
Dear John,
here is your "single soul": I love that film. I felt its magic from the
beginning to the end. I was almost shocked at the film's greatness. As a
writer and screenwriter I expected to analyze the story structure while
sitting in the theater, but I didn't. Not just one second.
"The Tree of Life" is a masterpeice because of its greatness and maybe
because of its disputability. Most certainly it is one of the most
courageous film projects of our time.
I really felt that this is the film I waited for so many years. Maybe as a
European (German) I am more used to watch "difficult" story structures,
maybe not.
Thanks a lot for the article.
Oliver F.
27 Dec 2011, 00:59
I don´t even believe that there was anything like a script for this film. I
rather submit that it was completely improvised from start to end. a rather
bitter commentary by sean penn gave hints to this assumption. and we all
know how malick´s films work in general. I kind of liked "The New World",
and I adore "Days of Heaven". But this film here in my opinion is very
flawed. It defies all the principles of dramatic storytelling. Nice try.
But I had the feeling, during watching the film in a theater, that
everybody was constantly waiting for "something to happen", which of course
never did. It´s like sex without intercourse, if you excuse my lingo. You
could also call it a waste of time.
Michael Green
26 Dec 2011, 12:26
Great analysis! Very well written!
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