Tree of Life

My wife and I went to see Tree of Life last night. Sean Penn, Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain, et alia did a bang up job.

Let me tell you, it was quite an experience!

I don't want to go on too long about what I saw its meaning to be, or try to summarize the narrative. I will share a few thoughts that have not yet been touched by the no-doubt myriad commentaries already littering the Net.

Graceful Theology
It was thoroughly imbued with theological meaning. The opening quote from Job 38:4,7 framed the whole movie as a struggle with the problem of good and evil, of meaning and purpose, against the backdrop of God's providential care of all life. God created the terrifyingly vast universe, and is to be perceived in the beautiful, the tragic and the seemingly meaningless events of life.

One gets a sense that the film is an extended meditation on the tensions inherent in monotheism, that allows the main characters to wrestle with this God who presides over a universe with inscrutable wisdom.

Will and Grace
It was also a story about the dialectical tensions of 'nature and grace.'

There was a remarkable quote whispered by the wife/mother (Mrs. O'Brien) at the beginning of the movie:

The nuns taught us there were two ways through life - the way of nature and the way of grace. You have to choose which one you'll follow. Grace doesn't try to please itself. Accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. Accepts insults and injuries. Nature only wants to please itself. Get others to please it too. Likes to lord it over them. To have its own way. It finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world is shining around it...The nuns taught us that no one who loves the way of grace ever comes to a bad end.

She closes this ponderous discourse, evidently addressing 'grace', I will be true to you. Whatever comes.

An almost Marian phrase.

Harmony
The movie unfolds as a narrative of grace and nature struggling mightily to harmonize, to find their balance and symmetry. Ultimately it is a story of grace's unlikely, tragic triumph.

This tumultuous struggle was shown in the violent and strangely beautiful beginnings of creation, at the inception and evolution of life on earth, and above all in a marriage/family that stood at the epicenter of the film's nature-grace drama.

Disorienting
The sense of time in the movie was definitely non-linear, with past, present and future constantly interchanging. While this often made the storyline difficult to follow, it gave the movie a liturgical character where past, present and future intermingle, where time and eternity intersect. And as with salvation history, the apparent randomness of the ordering of events traced out a single story of great and rich depth.

The sense of space also followed time's disruptions, as the camera's eye traversed oceans and deserts, cities and galaxies, microbes and dinosaurs, trees and dining rooms, while always rhythmically returning to a fiery point of 'living light' that was (presumably) God. All of these spacial treks were ambled in erratic sequences. Here I found powerfully evoked the liturgy's power - via art, architecture, sacramentalized matter - to transform space and call into unity the whole cosmos at-once into a material symphony of God's creative-redemptive providence.

Near the end of the movie, at a key moment of 'redemption' for the main character, the chanting of the Agnus Dei, followed by a litanic Amen sealed that liturgic sense for me.

The movie felt more like a work of iconography. It was disorienting, but, for me, in a strangely prayerful way it opened my imagination to something new and transcendent. In fact, today as I was reading a text on liturgical theology, I found myself flooded with insights that linked the movie to the text.

Ite, Missa est
I highly recommend seeing it. It's the kind of movie that continues to yield new insights after you have seen it. At least for people with overly active theological imaginations like myself.

Not all will agree, but...

With so much kitsch smeared on the screens of movie theaters these days, it's nice to know that those same screens can still bear the weight and beauty of masterful art.