The way of suffering love: Terrence Malick's "The Tree of Life"
from the "Evangelization & Culture" journal
This essay first appeared in issue 15 (Spring 2023) of the Evangelization & Culture journal, available with a Word on Fire Institute subscription, on the theme of Suffering.
A year before he died, Roger Ebert included Terrence Malick’s magnum opus The Tree of Life on his list of the ten greatest films of all time. “I believe it’s an important film,” he wrote, “and will only increase in stature over the years.”1 His initial review even called it “a form of prayer.”2 Seeing The Tree of Life on the big screen was, in my own life, a kind of ignition moment: its beauty and depth inspired me to write and share my first piece of writing online in July of 2011. The four hundred words were clunky, but the message was essentially the same as Ebert’s: this is an important movie, and you should see it.
The scope of The Tree of Life is admittedly ambitious: it includes a twenty-minute creation sequence that rivals Kubrick’s 2001 for the most epic visuals ever put to screen. Its themes are as big as its vision: the philosopher-turned-filmmaker ponders creation and resurrection, life and death, God and man. And its structure, as is Malick’s wont, is loose and poetic: the impressionistic narrative cuts suddenly between past and present, reality and fantasy, snatches of outer dialogue and whispered inner voiceovers. In short, there is a whole lot going on, and a whole lot could be said about it all.3 But the heart of The Tree of Life, and the true source of its greatness, is really very simple: it is a story of suffering love.
The theme of suffering emerges immediately with the film’s epigraph, taken from the book of Job, a story of a righteous man of God experiencing terrible and apparently meaningless suffering. The lines come from God’s response to Job out of the whirlwind: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? . . . When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” (Job 38:4, 7). The first sound we hear after these words is John Tavener’s Orthodox-inspired “Funeral Canticle.”
The English lyrics—a translation of St. John of Damascus—are difficult to make out, but lead us in the same direction:
What earthly sweetness remaineth unmixed with grief?
What glory standeth immutable on earth?
All things are but shadows most feeble
But most deluding dreams
Yet one moment only
And death shall supplant then all . . .
Together, this ancient story and mournful song open us to the central drama of the film. We meet the O’Brien family—a husband, wife, and their three sons—and learn that the middle son, R.L., died unexpectedly at the age of nineteen in the 1960s, an event based on Malick’s own life. The rest of the film follows the family both before and after this tragedy. We see times of lighthearted happiness, but they all orbit around this great wound.
Malick also explores the suffering we inflict on each other, and ourselves, by our own hands—the mystery of iniquity, of self-servitude mingling with self-hatred. In one powerful scene, the mourning O’Brien father (played by Brad Pitt) reflects on how—and why—he was needlessly tough with R.L. “One night he punched himself in the face for no reason,” he says, absently. “He would sit next to me at the piano and I’d criticize the way he’d turn the pages. I made him feel shame. My shame. Poor boy. Poor boy.” In another, the eldest son Jack dares R.L. to put his finger over the muzzle of a BB gun, then fires. They later reconcile, but there remains a kind of rupture of trust between them. These are brief, small moments, but R.L.’s sufferings, now frozen in the past, mirror the suffering of having lost him, each accentuating the other.
But pain is not just something we inflict on each other; it is also something the world naturally inflicts on all of us. This, too, is a preoccupation of The Tree of Life. In the creation sequence, one dinosaur presses down on the helpless head of another as it lies dying—a kind of evolutionary preview of the lust to dominate. In a later scene, two of the boys walk by a man with cerebral palsy and stare back at him with a kind of compassionate confusion. In another, a young boy drowns at a local swimming pool. “Where were you?” the young Jack asks of God. “You let a boy die. You let anything happen.”
Time and again, the O’Brien boys see a world marked, on both the human and natural levels, by a strange destructiveness. This becomes even more pronounced in the extended version of the film. The young Jack visits a friend’s house, a home heavy with neglect and abuse. Almost immediately after this scene, the town is struck by a vicious tornado. Once again, the human and the natural worlds converge on the same terrible problem of suffering.
What is Malick’s answer to this great question? It is not that suffering is ultimately meaningless, nor is it that the best we can hope for is offsetting it with moments of joy and kindness. Rather, it is that suffering is enveloped by the love and wisdom of God. Malick’s answer is not a theological, rational one—as important as that is—but rather a holistic one that engages both heart and mind.
In a way, the whole story is this answer, but we see it emerge in three key moments stretching across the film. The first is the creation sequence. The O’Brien mother is contemplating the loss of her son, and her soul cries out, “Lord. Why? Where were you? Answer me.” As the sequence unfolds, we hear Zbigniew Preisner’s “Lacrimosa,” taken from the mournful “Dies Irae” from the traditional Latin Requiem Mass.
The second is an extended homily on the book of Job delivered in the O’Brien’s church. At one point, the preacher asks, “Is there nothing which is deathless? Nothing, which does not pass away?” Here Malick cuts briefly to a stained-glass image of the suffering Christ—his shoulders robed in purple, his head crowned with thorns, and his hands bound together in self-offering. Finally, there is a mysterious vision of the O’Briens reuniting in the new creation, set to Berlioz’s “Agnus Dei,” again from the Requiem Mass.
The extended version of this scene—which features a hand rising from the earth and other figures rising from death—leaves little doubt that this is not mere metaphor: it is a portrait of a future resurrection.
These three scenes converge on a single great insight: that sin, suffering, and death do not get the last word. They are part of a greater masterpiece, one that God—as Creator, Redeemer, and Recreator—is crafting. At the heart of that masterpiece is Jesus, Love incarnate, who suffers with us, opening up a way of suffering stronger than death. The way of the cross changes the whole meaning of human life, and even life itself. At both its macro and micro levels, The Tree of Life thus echoes the poetry of Joseph Mary Plunkett:
I see his blood upon the rose
And in the stars the glory of his eyes,
His body gleams amid eternal snows,
His tears fall from the skies.I see his face in every flower;
The thunder and the singing of the birds
Are but his voice—and carven by his power
Rocks are his written words.All pathways by his feet are worn,
His strong heart stirs the ever-beating sea,
His crown of thorns is twined with every thorn,
His cross is every tree.4
Malick’s grand vision draws our gaze upward to this reality—for some, too far up for its own good. But in the end, The Tree of Life is really just a resounding affirmation of the extraordinary mystery of an ordinary Christian life.
One such life was that of my grandmother, a faithful Catholic and great-great-grandmother who passed away peacefully at ninety-nine toward the end of 2022. Like the O’Brien mother, she knew how to laugh, dance, and play. She also knew sorrow and suffering. But most importantly, she knew Jesus. Her last decades unfurled in quiet prayer and proclamation on her quiet street. As the weeks went on, and her time grew short, she stopped reading, watching television, or even talking on the phone. Instead, she would gaze for hours in silence at the crucifix hanging on her living room wall.
The cross of Christ: our ultimate answer to suffering, our only hope, our tree of life.
Roger Ebert, “The greatest films of all time,” April 26, 2012, https://www.rogerebert.com/roger-ebert/the-greatest-films-of-all-time.
Roger Ebert, “A prayer beneath the Tree of Life,” May 17, 2011, https://www.rogerebert.com/roger-ebert/a-prayer-beneath-the-tree-of-life.
For my earlier analysis, see “‘The Tree of Life’: A Cinematic Masterpiece 10 Years Later,” Word on Fire, May 27, 2021, https://www.wordonfire.org/articles/the-tree-of-life-a-cinematic-masterpiece-10-years-later/; “A Cinematic Tour of the Problem of Evil,” Word on Fire, February 16, 2017, https://www.wordonfire.org/articles/a-cinematic-tour-of-the-problem-of-evil-2-2/.
Joseph Mary Plunkett, “I See His Blood upon the Rose,” Bartleby, https://www.bartleby.com/236/342.html.