“The Tree of Life” sweeps and swoons like a mirror-laden funhouse, the memories of Sean Penn’s Jack warped across a sea of reflective surfaces. Through the eyes of Malick, no perspective is impartial, no scrap of dialogue objective truth. What does it mean to filter our understanding of the world through metaphor, for a “Tree” to represent “Life”? For everything is filtered in this film — behind every window, every mirror, is something “beyond.” Mrs. O’Brien often appears to us this way, saturated with sunlight, obscured by her own reflection, cloaked in the gauzy veil of memory. Everything is seen through aperture, everything through a frame.
Deleuze wrote of time-images; “Tree of Life” trades in mirror-images, these (often quite literal) windows to what is unknowable, what is Beyond. For all that “Tree of Life” is heralded as a movie about “Life” (underscored by much of its imagery; the sweeping meditations on birth, on death), it is also a movie about Life’s opposite, its reflection. What is the opposite of Life, if not Death? We know life — we are living it — but by the same coin we cannot know what Life is not. What makes up the shadow? The reflection? What is shrouded by the veil?
Which brings us to the image of Jessica Chastain — a Snow White of sorts, entombed in her glass coffin. The translucent panes, veined through with slivers of refracted light, are teasingly exhibitionist: like a museum display, or a small beetle trapped inside a jar. Malick has at times resisted the labeling of “Tree of Life” as purely autobiographical; but still there is a sense of preservation in the film. This is the exercise: can you embalm a memory? Filmmaking, at its core, is the capture of ephemera, of taking light — that tricky, tricky thing — and committing it to celluloid. Pinning the delicately fluttering moth to the cork-board. Memories, too, are gossamer threads, fraying and fading with each passing second — can they be woven together? Can they endure?
For that is all storytelling is, says the film. That is all religion is, all myth is, all architecture is. To net something fleeting, to set it in stone.
