From what I can gather, the movie is called The Tree of Life, and the poster advertising the movie shows the curious photo of an adult hand cradling the foot of an infant. Now when we’re not being scientists chronicling the rise and fall of every human with biological odes to our mortality, our imaginations are bewitched by the mystique attached to all of this. That is, here I am. A life. I am now alive, blessed with consciousness. I can foresee my own extinction which sometimes produces a present dread. As I make my way through the only life I have intimate, detailed contact with, puzzles arise. A relationship will suffer in some certain way. I’ll discover a peculiarity in my temperament which might alienate me from the balm and pleasure of social interaction.
All of these details can’t be underestimated and they’re one of the major components of our existential situation. To solve these incubi: that is the aim of life. No matter how labyrinthine events in our lives become, no matter how life’s complications fall on you like waves beating against the rock, this movie’s message seems to be something like this: that it will all make sense one day, that your life isn’t ordinary, that every event in your life means something cosmic, that one day we will understand. The verse that again and again popped into my head was the one that says every tear will be wiped away. Someone who just lost a loved one will read those words with impatience. But this movie looks like it could breath life into what this verse perhaps has always meant.
Set in the 50’s, it tells the tale of a man’s journey from childhood to adulthood, his beginning innocence and wonder, how the world disillusions and contaminates that, and the subsequent attempt of the adult to find meaning. It is a microcosm of every life’s journey, to find again the meaning we lost in our days of youth, to find lost in the tract-less forest of this life the Tree of Life that might once again be our salvation.
The feel of the film is almost reminiscent of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, because it basically is a voyage through the oceans of an individual’s consciousness. We begin seeing the world through the eyes of an eleven year old boy. The world begins simple, huge with wonder, with each parent presenting to the boy different ways of approaching life. The mother teaches the boy grace; the father, nature. By nature we compete, so put yourself first, claw to the top and make something of yourself. But grace is antithetical to this. Echoing the Buddha, the boy’s simple consciousness is wantonly provoked out of innocence by life’s suffering and death. The child is maturing and tasting the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The world loses the simple nature the child once saw in it and the black and white world he grew accustomed to branched out into a House of Leaves.
Heraclitus said:
"Everything changes and nothing remains still .... and ... you cannot step twice into the same stream."
This is basically the mindset foisted upon the protagonist to confuse his efforts at finding the eternal scheme of things amidst the ever sifting and restless ocean of time. He not just yearns to find an eternal scheme, but upon finding it he - at the same time - notices it is a scheme in which we are all an indispensable part. He begins to regress back to reclaim wonder, where nothing is ordinary and everything is a miracle, a spiritual odyssey that gives him the power to forgive the harshness of his father, a symbol for the kind of cathartic experience we all long for in the travails of our lives. And in an operatic way, the main message of the movie is that love is the greatest thing there is.
When it comes out, be sure not to miss it!!!!!!
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