Tree of Life (2011)
Director: Terrence Malick

 On a retreat last spring, Libby and I participated in an exercise called family sculptures.  This involved using the other participants at the retreat to stand in as family members in order to illustrate our family dynamic around age 10.  After setting up the sculpture, participants spend time asking questions and coming as a community to a better understanding of the sculptor.  This is a difficult exercise, and if performed honestly, can bear both pain and fruit for one's spiritual development.

The middle part of Tree of Life strikes me as a similar exercise for the director.  The crux of the story involves the relationship of a child entering adolescence, his parents, and the inter-relationship of that family dynamic with the character's adult understanding of God and the universe.  I cannot think of another movie that so honestly deals with this topic.  It plays out like memories projected on a screen.  Snippets of beauty, pain, life, and death, all dealing with nature and grace.

Mallick gives it a more cosmic and universal scope by confusing but intriguing capstones giving the creation and ending of the world.  All in all, it makes for a film that can be a difficult and rewarding source of meditation.

Movie Notes: Days of Heaven

Days of Heaven (1978)
Director: Terrence Malick

This is a beautiful, languorous movie full of golden light, bucolic wheat stretching into the horizon and the twilight heart of man.  I think that it's trying to say something about how these are all inter-related, but I have to admit I do not understand it.  I think to a degree it is a non-rational film, full of evocative moments and images that appeal to our emotions and appetites before it connects to our intellect.

The plot, which is undoubtedly important, if not the most important part of the movie, involves a man and his woman -- pretending to be brother and sister -- fleeing the city after he accidentally kills a foreman in an act of rage.  Sound familiar?  Later, the farm owner where they're working the harvest under these false pretenses will fall in love with the woman.  Before the end, there will be a plague locusts, the land will be cleansed by fire, and there will be more death.  Malick's film making is essentially from a Christian place, whatever he believes.

The thing everyone talks about from this movie is the imagery.  It's undeniably lovely.  There are scenes that powerfully evoke the feeling of a summer evening, and there are herons, and there are biplanes floating as if by magic off of the ground.  It seems like Malick is searching to sample those moments of life that flit by unless we stop and take a breath and look around and notice them.  If you have the patience to do that, you'll have the patience for this movie, and I think you'd enjoy it.