“The Tree of Life”
I saw Terrence Malick’s film last evening, spurred in part by Geoffrey O’Brien’s review in The New York Review of Books. O’Brien writes:
The film’s portentous epigraph is the grandest question of all, God’s challenge to Job—”Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?”—the ultimate instance of answering a question with a question. Malick has never shied from grandiosity, and in The Tree of Life more than ever before he risks the humorless and overblown. Into what might in other hands have been the small-scale, melancholy tale—too elliptical even to be called a tale—of the not unusually eventful childhood of a boy in Texas, his two brothers, and his father and mother, he has managed to incorporate the creation of the universe, the origins of life on earth, the age of dinosaurs, and the prospect of future dissolution, with musical accompaniment by the powerful tonalities of Berlioz’s Requiem Mass. But he has made an audacious and magnificent film.
Then, celebrating the feast of Saint Bonaventure this morning, I recalled that Bonaventure has a short work of spiritual theology, entitled: “The Tree of Life.” Towards its conclusion he writes:
No one reaches the state of beatitude except through a final union with Him who is the foundation and origin of goods both natural and supernatural, both bodily and spiritual, both temporal and eternal. He it is who says of himself: “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End!” As all things are brought forth through the Word eternally uttered, so through the Word made flesh all things are restored, impelled, brought to fulfillment.
I have no idea, of course, whether Malick knows the writings of Bonaventure, though O’Brien reports that he studied philosophy at Harvard and has translated Heidegger. So it’s certainly possible.
In any case, am I right in hearing, during the film’s compelling final scene, the refrain from the “Agnus Dei” of the Berlioz “Requiem:” “Dona eis requiem sempiternam?”
The hymn Etz Chaim is sung in synagogues while the Torah is being returned to the Ark.
(I’m sure New Yorkers know this already.)
Yes, the final scene DID bear the strains of “Agnus Dei” of the Berlioz “Requiem:” “Dona eis requiem sempiternam.” I was with 3 others, none of whom would have recognized it — but I did! I brought it to their attentions and got a glassy-eyed stare back. Oh, well.
Thanks, James; how did you and your friends respond to the film?
Michael Moreland, at “Mirror of Justice,” identifies some “Augustinian” themes in the film:
http://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2011/06/augustine-and-the-tree-of-life.html
One is an atheist, one is a VERY liberal former Presbyterian and the other is a Unitarian wannabe.
They all thought it to be very “spiritual” but we never got any further than that.
We all thoroughly enjoyed it and I have carried on a conversation about it with respect to reviews that I have found about it after we say the movie.
No one disliked it. We disagreed on some of what happened. Subsequently we all have recommended it to others.
Moreland assets that the family was Catholic. Based upon the look of the church, I think they were either Episcopalian or VERY high Lutheran.
Jimmy Mac, The family name was O’Brien so I go it Catholic. By Wikipedia..Malick’s father was…”to his father Emil Malick, a geologist and son of an Assyrian Christian Lebanese[8] immigrant,[9]
Not many of those in Waco so Catholic is the venue.
As posted before. Tielhard de Chardin would have worked this movie. ‘Divine Milieu. the Movie’
To me the give away was the fact that the church appeared to have no stations of the cross. That’s a bit much, even for Texas!
My evidence, such as it is (open to interpretation, though others have made the same claim), that the family is meant to be portrayed as Catholic:
1. The mother’s character says near the opening that “the nuns taught us there were two ways through life: the way of nature and the way of grace.”
2. O’Brien is an Irish name, and there have been Irish-Catholics in that part of Texas back to the nineteenth century.
3. They light a votive candle in the church–not unheard of in Episcopalian or Lutheran churches, but ubiquitous in Catholic churches.
It was clearly an Episcopal church as evidenced by the words and vesture of the Bishop during the Confirmation scene. I should know having been confirmed in that church.