A Film Canon

Terrence Malick has always been interested in the moral certainty of 50s suburban melodrama - but, with The Tree Of Life, he pairs it with suburban melodrama for the first time, taking that genre's oscillation between the domestic and the cosmic to its unimaginable conclusion. In the process, he not only provides a kind of genesis, or myth of origins, for his own directorial style, positioning it as the end product of creation and evolution, but creates his most abstract, stylized film, the film towards which all his previous efforts yearn, and his most effective nexus between film, philosophy and Christianity. As such, the most dramatically stylized moments occur in the first half, which frames an extended montage sequence, depicting the history of the universe, with the reaction of a suburban couple to the news of their youngest son's death in World War II. One of the most extraordinary pieces of film-making ever composed, this attempts nothing less than to visualize the breath of God, the small voice or silence in the storm - or, alternatively, to discover the golden ratio, the rapturous, upwards spiral that connects and consummates the harmonious complexity of all things; the galaxy in the jellyfish, the surface of Jupiter in the sea anemone. With the aid of a highly mobile camera, frequent jump cuts and an echoed, chambered alternation between diegetic and non-diegetic sound, Malick creates a membrane-image, a bubbled surface without depth, a single, prehensile translucence that makes each shot a jewel, the equivalent of being born, or at least of touching the surface of some embryonic threshold. At its strongest, it's like holding a shell to your ear and hearing the ocean in its whorl, and would seem to invite an IMAX projection were it not for the fact that Malick seems equally as interested in elegance as expansiveness, in beauty as sublimity - a turn that distinguishes him from such abstract forbears as Baraka and Godfrey Reggio's qatsi trilogy, and is especially clear in the galactic imagery, which is surprisingly painterly, delicate and humble. By the same token, the depictions of suburbia in this opening section are strikingly deanthropocentric, as people become just another iteration of the biblical quotations, most of them drawn or extrapolated from Job, that whisperingly texture Malick's visual glissandos. In the second part of the film, which tells the story of the deceased soldier's childhood, and relationship with his older brother, the style is more reined in, and more recognisably continuous with Malick's earlier output. While it's still spectacular and moving, the sheer astonishment and relief of a Malick film in which humans are finally and sublimely elided - of seeing him achieve a Christian inhumanism, admit that he's directing for God - makes the return to an Oedipal family drama somewhat anticlimactic, while the last sequence is unfortunate, an attempt to search for an appropriately epic image on which to conclude, after the entire universe has been exhausted. Nevertheless, it's the most ambitious and spectacular science fiction film since 2001, making the 50s as strange as the most distant reaches of the galaxy - strange enough to dissociate them from any straightforward nostalgia, just as Malick's alternation between biblical and biological wonder resists any straightforward appropriation, as if David Attenborough were to propose an argument for intelligent design.