EXT. DESERT LANDSCAPE. A lone wanderer treks across the dust storm. He pauses, to take a sip of water, and to survey his surroundings. Suddenly, the ground begins to shake. Over the hill, we see figures start to emerge. Our hero struggles to make them out, and then fear comes across his face as he realises what they are. Space vampires. Legions of space vampires. So, yeah, “The Tree of Life” isn’t anything like that at all.
Jeffrey Wells at Hollywood Elsewhere was the first person to get his hands on the long-awaited script for Terrence Malick’s long-awaited opus, only the fifth film in his near-forty year career, and the first since “The New World” in 2005, posting a synopsis of the film at the end of last week. We’ve managed to get our hands on the same draft, the first, which weighs in at 126 pages and is dated June 25, 2007. Before we get into the meat of it, it’s worth noting, as ever, that it may have changed greatly, both during the writing process, and knowing Malick, in post-production, as everyone who was cut out of “The Thin Red Line” is well aware. Also, spoilers may follow.
In this form at least, “The Tree of Life” is both immediately recognizable as Malick’s work, and a major departure for him, both his most epic work and his most intimate. Despite the rumors of CGI dinosaurs and IMAX screenings, it’s possible that this’ll turn out to be the auteur’s least accessible work to date, free of the (admittedly slight) minor trappings of “Badlands” or “The Thin Red Line,” or the true-story factor of “The New World.” Not that this a bad thing at all, of course…
Ostensibly a small-scale family drama, set in Waco, Texas, in 1956, the script centers on the O’Briens (the parents are never given names, but will be portrayed by Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain), and their three sons, eleven-year-old Jack (the protagonist), R.L., 9, and Steve, 6. Initially meeting them at a moment of bliss, the timeframe moves swiftly on twelve years, with the family mourning the death of a family member. It’s initially disorientating, but it becomes clear why when the timeline moves on again, to Jack (to be played by Sean Penn), in a contemporary city; “it could be Chicago, New York, Houston, Paris, Mumbai, Los Angeles, or a composite of them all. We never see it whole — no skyline or defining monuments — fragments only — a frenzy of things and people on the move — a continuous flow of trains and cars — a new Babel.”
Malick’s eye to date has been almost exclusively rural, so we’re fascinated to see how he shoots a more urban environment like the one in which Jack lives. As it turns out, Jack is in the midst of a fairly major existential depression, seemingly brought on by that premature death; he says in voiceover “Where are you? How shall I find you again? I will go in search of you — through all the worlds.” The script is a very subjective experience — everything’s seen through the eyes, dreams or memories of Jack (although Penn is likely to get relatively little screen time).
Jack makes his way through this dreamscape-like city, finally reaching a tree, which he touches, which kicks off what’s likely to be the most talked-about segment of the film. Touching the tree causes “The universe to spring up from its source,” and creation to restart itself. From chaos, we see galaxies start to form from molecular clouds, and the Earth form, from ‘a bulb of gases,’ to liquid, to solid. “Rains fall for millenia,” and we start to see life on earth tentatively begin, from bacteria to plant life to fish to amphibians to, yes, dinosaurs. While they’ve been much-discussed in advance, the prehistoric beasts are essentially a footnote to Malick’s vision, taking up only half a page, although they prove to be key to one of the central themes — it’s the first time that we see “maternal love” among any creatures.
After an asteroid wipes out the dinosaurs, the mammals rise to prominence, and eventually evolve into humans. It’s at this point, after ten pages of watching, essentially, the history of life on earth, that Malick’s stage directions (which are beautifully written, almost novelistic) state “We have lost the eternal — within us and without. How did it first come to pass? How does it happen even now, today, in the life of each and all?”
It’s certainly one of the key themes as the script moves into its main section (Malick divides the piece into three parts, which are labeled as such), and we return to Waco, seeing a tall oak tree outside the O’Brien’s home. We glimpse the conception, growth and birth of the embryo that will become Jack O’Brien, born to loving parents — the child has a particularly close connection to his mother. As his brothers are born, there are hints of jealousy in their eldest child, but Jack seems to be a good boy, and the family a happy one; Mr. O’Brien plants a sweetgum tree to mark the birth of R.L, and it’s through the growth of this tree that the film returns to 1956, where the bulk of the story takes place. And it seems that the family are no longer as blissful as it first appeared.
The heart of the story is the relationship between Jack and his father. While never as exaggeratedly villainous or violent as other big screen bad parents like, most recently and notably, Mo’Nique in “Precious,” Mr. O’Brien can be equally monstrous in subtler ways. But at the same time, he’s capable of moments of great warmth and love, often within the same scene, and, if he pulls it off, it should be Brad Pitt’s best role to date. A former Navy man now stuck in an office job, Pitt’s character is a strict disciplinarian, often away for long stretches of time, but makes his children nervous when he is around, thanks to a humiliating, controlling, passive aggressive approach to parenting; as Malick puts it, “he has the unshakable belief that he must approve or modify everything the children do. He is full of petty and exasperating cautions.”
There’s clearly darkness in young Jack (there’s a lovely moment where he sees a prisoner in town, and feels a kind of kinship with him), and, as his father’s influence becomes more poisonous, Jack becomes more destructive, getting into fights and killing animals, and breaking his mother’s heart in the process. While Mrs. O’Brien should prove to be a good showcase for rising star Jessica Chastain, she’s rather less well-drawn than her husband — proving almost impossibly saintly, serving more as the focal point of an almost Oedipal struggle between father and son.
Malick’s concerns here are plentiful — father/son relationships, sibling rivalry, what it means to be a good man, and, as ever, the relationship between mankind and nature. The 1950s section feels like his most personal work to date, falling somewhere between an Arthur Miller play and, curiously, Spike Jonze’s take on “Where The Wild Things Are,” while the more fantastical sequences are indeed reminiscent of “2001,” as well as more abstract work like “Koyaanisqatsi” or “Microcosmos.”
Even in script form it’s a pretty remarkable piece of work, and that’s without Malick’s visuals, and indeed Alexandre Desplat’s score (which should be pretty key — Malick’s even written chord changes into the stage directions in some places). There’s some fat still in place — Pitt and Chastain’s characters have a near-identical conversation four or five times, which feels like over-egging the pudding — but again, we imagine that the finished film will be wildly different from this draft, one way or the other.
“The Tree of Life” was already by far our most anticipated film of 2010, and reading the excellent script does nothing to change that. While it remains to be seen whether it’ll connect with awards voters, and indeed the general public (the metaphysical aspects may be a little oblique for some, and may even prove too ambitious for even Malick to pull off), but this is an outstanding starting point, and one that only makes the wait over the next few months longer.