New Terrence Malick Movie: Tree of Life
Sean Penn, Brad Pitt and Fiona Shaw Star in New Blockbuster
Sep 18, 2008
Terrence Malick is currently shooting his fifth movie, Tree of Life, in Texas, and it is set for release in 2009; it stars Sean Penn, Brad Pitt and Fiona Shaw. As the film is being filmed near where Malick grew up it is thought it might be semi-autobiographical, as it is from an original screenplay Malick has been working on since 1978.
Terrence Malick's Life and Career
Malick is an American director who studied philosophy and worked in journalism before he turned to film. His first two films (Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1978)) are considered modern classics. He then disappeared around Europe for fifteen years before making The Thin Red Line (1998) and The New World (2005), which have also received generally good reviews.
All Malick's films are said to reflect his philosophical interest in existentialism. For example, Hwanhee Lee considers that: “Malick is not interested in trying to tell us ‘“how the world is,” or what happens to be true, but in “that it is,” the uncanny (and tragic and wondrous and humbling) fact of its very existence (which is to say, they are not trying to say something at all).”
The Thin Red Line and The New World both contrasted the beauty of native life and nature with the horrors of war. In The Thin Red Line, set in the Pacific during World War Two, two soldiers begin the film living amongst natives in an idyllic island setting before being taken to war.
Their company witnesses the horrors that are inevitable in battle, and this is often juxtaposed with shots of lush verdant nature, and the animals that inhabit it. The New World also contrasts the beauty of nature with the horror of war; this time set in the conflagration that took place after Native Americans and early British settlers clashed.
Lee describes the spiritual location of Days of Heaven as “a certain embodiment of the site of human passions and tragedies, overseen by the gods and the cosmos where everything, human or nonhuman, has its place.
Lee considers that if the film makes moral judgments of any kind they are not about justifying why there shouldn't be wars and destruction of nature but are about a certain (modern) understanding of nature that allows humans to see the natural environment as a monolithic, meaningless abstraction, where destruction is allowed to happen with impunity.”
Tree of Life Symbolism
The Tree of Life is of course an archetypal symbol for many world religions; both polytheistic and monotheistic; and with Malick’s propensity for using nature to fill his films with beauty, and contrast it with humanity’s more negative traits, then it seems likely that when the movie is released next year there will be a central role for the spirituality present at the heart of nature, and what it can do for the world we share.
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