A thoughtful and engaging essay on “Tree of Life” from a Jewish perspective. Liel Liebowitz explores the conflict between nature and grace, going all the way back to Augustine and Pelagius. More interestingly, he observes that cinema is a “profoundly Jewish art form. On celluloid film and in Jewish spirituality, there’s no room for grace: One is always the hero of one’s own story, and one must always redeem oneself.”

More:

Herein lies Malick’s true genius: As The Tree of Life ends and we file out of the theater, we are left—if our legs and our minds aren’t too numb from all those gasses and Cretaceous creatures milling about—contemplating not only creation but also creators. On the former front, Malick is a committed Catholic, and he bravely surrenders his characters to higher powers. On the latter front, he is far more radical. His quote from Job isn’t accidental. Read it before you’ve seen the movie, and it’s a Catholic exhortation on man’s eternal dependence on God’s good grace. Read if after, and it’s almost a Jewish teaching, shedding light not on man’s wretchedness but on God’s: Just as man cannot know the creator, the creator can never really share man’s earthly delights and is condemned to eternity in a lonely celestial prison cell.

From The Guardian, an interview with Brad Pitt, and Michael Newton’s review.

It is a very rare talent to be able to show with equal power both the free places for which we yearn and the compromise and wickedness that makes their freedom impossible to achieve. At his best, Malick lets us share his humane, unironic and compassionate vision. He presents life as caught between a fragile innocence and an encroaching darkness.

I saw Terence Malick’s The Tree of Life this afternoon. I can’t remember the last time I was moved so much by a film. It is cinema that demands our attention and the attention of our mind and heart as well as our ears and eyes. There isn’t much plot; it’s more an evocation of 1950s childhood, with all of its nostalgia from carefree play and boys flirting with disaster, alongside the pain–the drowning death of friend in a pool, a stern, bordering on abusive father, the realities of racism.

Interspersed with that story is another one, beginning with the film’s epigraph from Job 38–the beginning of God’s answer to Job’s carefully laid out case against God–“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” and a voice-over from the ethereal Jessica Chastain (who plays the mother in the family with three rambunctious boys), highlighting the difference between nature and grace. Malick asks the question of the meaning of existence and suffering, and answers it with a spectacular depiction of creation that ends with the birth of one of those boys in Waco, and his father grasping his newborn son’s tiny foot.

We encounter one of those sons now middle-aged himself, living in antiseptic, modern apartments and working in office towers. Perhaps the sequences of childhood are a flashback, or an unconsciously selected memory of the past. We hear the boy wishing his father’s death. We also hear him lash out at his father, “How do you expect me to be good, when you aren’t good?”

There’s a heaven sequence and it seems to take place on a beach (Contact, anyone?) and there are some overwrought or odd sequences, but overall, at the end of the film I felt I had encountered something profound, or at least someone grasping beyond themselves and their craft, seeking to make sense of the world, for himself and for us.

As the credits rolled, a piano played Arthur Sullivan’s tune to the ancient Christian Easter hymn, “Welcome Happy Morning.” The English translation of the first verse reads:

“Welcome, happy morning!” age to age shall say:
“Hell today is vanquished, Heav’n is won today!”
Lo! the dead is living, God forevermore!
Him, their true Creator, all His works adore!

Others worth reading on the film:

James Martin, SJ on America Magazine’s In All Things blog: http://www.americamagazine.org/blog/entry.cfm?entry_id=4282

Also from America:John Anderson’s review.

Geoffrey O’Brien in the New York Review of Books:

And Roger Ebert’s review.

But while I would not rush to read a verbal summation by Malick of his philosophical views, I would burn with irresistible curiosity to see the film of any text he might care to adapt, whether it were Spinoza’s Ethics or the phone book. He does his thinking by means of cinema in its full range of possibilities, and that is at any time a rare spectacle.