The Help (Tate Taylor, 2011)

The Help takes the obliviousness of Kathryn Stockett's 2009 hit novel and magnifies it to the level of the dangerously ignorant. The novel at least had the decency to include a modicum of ambiguity and the suggestion that Stockett could vaguely remember some of her 3rd-grade social studies lessons on the Civil Rights Era. The film, on the other hand, is erected out of pure fantasy, set in a plastic, pastel Jackson, Miss. that has all the authenticity of Lars von Trier's Dogville set. Stockett's novel dropped whiffs of the true reality of 1960s Jackson among her dialect-ridden, charmed view of social prejudice like talismans to ward off criticism, but childhood friend Tate Taylor has to condense 500 pages into two-and-a-half hours. Given the paper-thin characterization of the novel's figures, this means that the obliterated subplots and truncated, blunt dialogue serve to make the material even more farcical.

In fairness, Taylor does try to refashion Stockett's book around the African-American characters instead of a white guilt cipher. But this idea goes no farther than letting Aibileen Clark (Viola Davis), a maid who becomes the first to tell her stories of life serving whites, narrate the movie. Soon enough, focus is back on Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan (Emma Stone), a recent college grad and sort-of feminist who, despite no clear identity before leaving for school and a blindness to current events (at least in the book), decides to get the black perspective of Jackson life. In the novel, Skeeter is almost jaw-droppingly entitled and never criticized for it. Here, Taylor dispenses with nearly all of her story, which would be a significant improvement if he also cut down her screen time to match. But no, regardless of who had to go in to record ADR, this is still Skeeter's story.

Completely unaware of the risks of such an enterprise despite living in one of the hotbeds of the Civil Rights Movement, Skeeter puts the lives of maids in jeopardy just to please a scabrous New York Jewish elite editor—no commas because Taylor/Stockett seem to use each of these terms as if they all mean the same thing—named Elaine Stein (Mary Steenburgen, who somehow gives the most one-note performance in a film of unambiguous heroes and villains). For some reason, Stein is never shown sitting at her desk like a professional, instead lounging on the thing dangling her legs like a naughty secretary or brashly calling from a restaurant whilst devouring adoring younger men. Mocking the ivory tower insularity of the New England elites, both Stockett and Taylor have her flippantly telling Skeeter to hurry up and get the interviews she needs for a book "before this whole civil rights thing blows over."

The rest of the archetypes are spread out among dignified, frumpy sexless (yet child-inundated) maids and shrieking housewives who put a glossed look on racism so audiences don't have to be reminded that some of their parents (or even friends) used to beat and hang people for the color of their skin. This brigade of over-hairsprayed, overacting harridans is led by Hilly Holbrook, played by a Bryce Dallas Howard with such narrowed eyes there simply must be a gag reel of her walking into furniture by mistake. One never gets any clue as to why Skeeter was ever such close friends with her or Elizabeth (Ahna O'Reilly), a lab-grown Betty Draper cloned with amphibian DNA to fill the sequence gaps. But then, Skeeter herself is such a blank slate for the author's guilt and wish fulfillment that presumably anyone could find something to project in her.

As for the maids, Aibileen is the chief representative, but she is also joined by Minny, de-sassed from her ludicrous novel form into someone who might conceivably have lived past the age of 13 in a town where lip from a black woman could equal jail time at best. Stockett wrote the character with her actor friend Octavia Spencer in mind, and Spencer plays the role here. Her bug eyes are their own punchline, always bulging in anticipation of reprisal when she can't keep her mouth shut and regarding any and all white people with disbelief, as if unable to comprehend just how ridiculous they are. Minny is the most anachronistic element in this story, modeled after a modern, no-nonsense black woman, but now that Spencer can say the lines instead of Stockett writing in loose dialect, she nearly makes the thin comic relief of the character work. She shares some organic laughs with Aibileen that work far better than the more staged comic pieces, precisely because these smaller, more intimate moments feel like conceivable gallows humor between two people suffering through the same endless torment.

Nevertheless, Minny's neutering makes her extraneous, and the already unnecessary side-plot with her airheaded but sweet new boss, Celia Foote (Jessica Chastain), only more distracting. I would venture to guess that Stockett intended Celia's character to comment on how much poor whites shared with blacks in their ostracizing from the realm of "classy" whites, but her depiction as a kindhearted, racially blind piece of "white trash" is antithetical to the true, vile nature of racism among poor, which is almost always more vicious for the jealousy and resentment of being in the same financial bracket as minorities. Having said that, Chastain gives as good a performance as the two black leads with her equally limited role: virtually unrecognizable from her turn earlier this year as the embodiment of human spirit in The Tree of Life, Chastain speaks with a squeaky hiss that sounds as if the air for her words came not from her lungs but wind blowing through the empty space between her ears and out her mouth and nostrils. She couldn't be any further from her other breakout role this year, and the sheer range she's shown within releases spaced apart by mere months is, one hopes, a sign of stardom to come.

Much talk has already circulated regarding the awards potential of Davis' performance, and it's true that she makes a startling presence. Confined by Stockett's conception of Aibileen as a loving maid who seemingly exists to raise and cheer up white babies, Davis nevertheless injects steel into the character. She's no more complex a character, but Davis' fearsome visage etches pain on this glorified Mammy figure. If anything, she conveys too much strength to be taken seriously as a humble, submissive domestic: there's more fire in her face than Spencer's. When one looks into those hardened eyes, however, one can also find humor and love, and if she has to play a maid who, in one way or another, always gives of herself to a white person, at least Davis makes that role almost believable on a human level.

I mention all these actresses because there are some genuinely solid performances here. While the Stepford women of Jackson shriek and scream and hiss, depicting racism as a matter of peer pressure instead of an endemic social ill, Spencer, Davis and Chastain elevate a film that doesn't deserve them. But not even they can distract from the shortcuts and stereotypes thrown at the screen for easy identification. Skeeter's mother, an imperious yet unchallenged force in the book, is here softened by Allison Janney. Taylor condenses the gradual progression of Charlotte's illness into a single line, and I must say that "My daughter's upset my cancerous ulcers!" is my favorite non-sequitur, crass exploitation of a terminal disease since "I got the results of the test back, I definitely have breast cancer." Skeeter too finds the shortest distance to her moral awakening, openly sniping Hilly from the start and eroding any plausibility of her supposedly close friendship with Jackson's resident witch. Skeeter's arc revolves around the mystery of what happened to her loving maid Constantine, who disappeared just before the young woman returned from college, and we're meant to track her moral development through this uncooked subplot that serves only to not-really drive a wedge between mother and daughter.

Constantine is the downfall of both the novel and the film. A repository for Stockett's idealized memories of her own maid, Demetrie, Constantine appears in flashbacks that reduce the woman to an utter fabrication, Aibileen without the tangibility. My mouth actually fell open in horror at seeing Cicely Tyson, an icon, simply appear to a teenage Skeeter, so rail-thin, shriveled and toothless that she resembled less a human being with her own life and story than a savior version of Baron Samedi. Constantine exists solely for beatification, despite how little say she gets in literary or cinematic form. All she does is buck up Skeeter, which Stockett interprets as true motherly love. Hilariously, she gave an interview in which she admitted that, when she spoke to white families that used to have a maid, they remembered the workers with fondness and love. But when it came to the maids, well, let's take a look: "When I spoke to black people it was surprising to see how removed they were emotionally from those they worked for. That was not always the case, but it was one of the dynamics that struck me. Sometimes it was a total disregard. It was just a job."

The interviewer, of course, didn't press this, but the question arises: did Demetrie truly love young Kathryn, who incidentally grew up in the '70s and '80s despite people passing this book off as autobiography? I would love to know if, at any moment, Stockett remotely entertained the possibility that the maid she has placed on a pedestal for raising her, for empathizing with her, really just viewed her as a job to make oppressive wages to feed her own children. I think that she did, in some dark recess of her mind, and the result is Constantine, a icon carved out of blessed wood that Stockett uses to chase such life-altering thoughts away like a broom to a raccoon. The resolution of Constantine's fate in the novel is overwrought, but it at least cast Skeeter's mother as a more accurate face of racism than the sparkle-bright young ladies of the Junior League, revealing how nearly three decades of service and invaluable contributions could not stop a white person from acting with cold impersonality. The film, however, recasts the revelation with regret on behalf of Charlotte, and she and Skeeter suffer no fallout or profound change for it. It's just there for another tearjerker in another film that makes so many intervallic leaps between cutesy comedy and shameless manipulation it feels like a bebopification of sentimentality.

And so, the film resolves itself for maximum audience pleasure: Hilly turns into a dozen crows that scatter into the winds, Muggles and wizards learn to live in harmony, and a baby named Barack raises his tiny, large-eared head in Hawaii and coos the word "Change." Stein, who exists to be a hard-ass to Skeeter (and an inconsistent one, first aware of the risks facing maids and then expecting more than a dozen interviews later), somehow lets Skeeter's book be released with the most hysterically dumb cover I've ever seen. The baby blue cover sports only a dove as its centerpiece, halfheartedly justified as being linked to the budding hippie movement. I just found it amusing that even the goddamned object on the book cover is white.

The Help, even in its semi-ambiguous novel form, cocoons open racism as a thing of the past. It doesn't say that racism is over, per se, but it clearly wants us to admire how far we've come. But when Jackson only recently found itself the subject of another high-profile case of race violence—in this case the murder of a black man by racist teens who shouted "White power!" as they beat him and ran over him in a truck—maybe we shouldn't be so aghast at how things "used" to be. But no, we are instead treated to the running joke of Minny's revenge against Hilly, a dastardly deed involving a pie and a mounting sense of dread, not in the reveal but in the dawning realization that this work really will sink so low for a laugh. Naturally, it works as a crowd-pleaser, but it is so insipidly dumb, Stockett writing herself out of the true conclusion to it (and the release of Skeeter's book itself) with the threat of mutually assured social destruction. But do you know how that story really ends? It doesn't end with Minny in prison where she can tell the world of Hilly: it ends with her being killed and her house firebombed. Those might not even be two separate actions. It ends with Aibileen not simply fired but completely stripped of what little she has and possibly the target of violence. It ends with Skeeter mostly likely being raped for being a race traitor and definitely with her family crippled economically. These are not pleasant endings, and I do not "want" to see them, at least in the sense that I would ever like to spend an evening seeing such sights. But if you're going to make a film about '60s Jackson, you should show the truth, not what will only unsettle audiences in the safest way possible.

So what, in the end, are we left with? A movie that hinges its biggest payoff on a flight of pure revisionist fantasy designed to make modern audiences feel good about themselves, complete with emotional moments that are, in almost every occurrence, tied to a black person helping a white. Whether it is Aibileen's insulting "You is kind, you is smart" speech to little Mae Mobley, the maids agreeing to speak after Hilly crosses the line (their assent delivered with a collective "mmm-hmm" that throbs through Aibileen's house like an A/C unit switching on), and finally the dénouement of the two supposedly lead black maids stopping everything to cheerlead Skeeter getting a job. This trivialization of the '60s has been defended for its nonsensical feel-good whimsy by those who feel validated for having a cry over these prop cutouts of suffering. But those looking for a genuinely inspiring story of overcoming hardships associated with the racial serfdom that persists today—a recent Pew Research Center release showed the median net worth of a white household at 20 times that of a black family—should read this account of a conversation the daughter of a maid had with the grown-up child of the family that employed her. It's heartbreaking, enraging, unexpectedly uplifting, defiantly confrontational, and it ends with a punchline that is not only earned but truly hilarious and vindicating. In other words, it's everything The Help isn't.

The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011)

[Edited 12/28/11]

"God is closer to me than others of my art."

-Ludwig van Beethoven

In 1733, Johann Sebastian Bach, born and raised a Lutheran, premiered two pieces of what would become his Mass in B minor, which he spent the remaining years of his life expanding and honing until the liturgy used for both major Christian denominations became a full-blown Roman Catholic Mass. Composed in chunks up to his final years, his Missa is disjunctive, consisting of clashing textures reflecting both the different kinds of inspiration that drove him in each writing block as well as the altered emotional state of the composer as he drifted into blindness and illness. Yet the result is one of the undisputed masterpieces of Western classical music, the apotheosis of nearly every musical style of its time in one grand, summarizing statement.

Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life may be the closest the cinema has to its own Mass in B minor: it's gargantuan, encompassing, messy and bold. It's also exquisitely beautiful and personal on a level seemingly impossible for something that feels so vast. Bach spent about two decades tweaking and expanding his mass; Malick has been collecting ideas and images for this for 30 years, and the inspirations behind it likely stretch back even further. The Missa comprises movements under four distinct sections, and The Tree of Life incorporates the themes and styles of the director's four previous features into a film that feels infinite and minute, unwieldy yet perversely whole.

The Tree of Life follows the O'Brien family, in nonlinear fashion from the formation of their nucleus in the '50s through the present day, with a brief stop-over in the Vietnam era (the opening of the film) when the mother (Jessica Chastain) received a telegram informing her of the death of one of her sons in combat. Most of the film centers on the adolescence of the protagonist, Jack (Sean Penn as a grown man, Hunter McCracken as a boy), as he grows up in a Waco suburb that must draw on some of Malick's memories growing up in the area. In that sense, he might have been planning the film, in one fashion or another, his entire life.

It is fitting that such a work, an impressionistic phantasmagoria drawing on the director's own memories of growing up in Texas, should require anyone wishing to speak about it to reveal something of his own life. For me, it is also necessary, as I recognized so much of myself in the young, confused Jack I occasionally could not bear to look at the screen for seeing my own reflection.

Take the way Jack and the old of his kid brothers regard a man with cerebral palsy hobbling across the street or a child with permanent hair loss and scarring from being trapped in a house fire: they look wild-eyed and intrusive, staring after the afflicted in disbelief. But there's no malice in those looks, only the shock of the unknown to a child unexposed to someone different. That brought back painful memories of 8th grade, in which I was walking to class one day and a younger girl in front of me whipped 'round suddenly and revealed deep, disfiguring scarring from burns. I'd never seen this before, and the shock of it made me literally skid to a halt, and I don't even want to think what the look on my face must have been. I swear I was not mocking or condescendingly piteous, just taken aback, but the look of familiarity in her expression, of having seen whatever my face was time and again, made me so ashamed I walked with my head down for the next two years, to the point that people asked me all the time if something was wrong. I couldn't bear to be seen by her (and it was hard to hide as a fat redhead at least half a head taller than nearly everyone around me); worse, I couldn't face the look of recognition on her face if she did. When I saw the palsied man almost struggle not to look back and see the looks already burned in his memory from repetition or the burned child just try to be normal as the impressionistic camera shows just how much the other boys focused solely on his injury, I felt like looking down at the ground once more.

Likewise, a scene of Jack tricking his brother into placing his finger on the end of a loaded BB gun barrel, with predictable results, made me think of a similar (though accidental) incident from my own childhood, in which I carelessly fired what I thought was an empty BB gun at a friend's sister. I only bruised her arm, but I felt such a wave of revulsion that I lost all my boyish enthusiasm for guns of any sort, and the scene here made my face flush hot with recognition and disgust.

These are the finely observed minutiae that make the film so potently tangible despite its ambitions. The film's middle section stays with the family, and we see how they evolve emotionally through the quick glances of floating memory. A frog tied to a toy rocket, a loving gesture from a complicated father, the cute girl in class brushing back her hair to reveal a nape you'd give all the money in the world to caress despite being to young and clueless to even know what a caress is or how to adequately "perform" one, it all swirls in a stream of consciousness. Malick has always used juxtaposition and montage to dig into his emotional and philosophical ideas, but this film, featuring a camera that never ceases its movement and constant cuts, almost feels like one long montage. It makes for a Joycean (and Faulknerian, as the characters muse on their place in the universe in a way that seems an extrapolation from Faulkner's meditations on the South) collection of scattered yet indelible images evocative of a time and place that is not my own but resonates with almost alarming specificity.

From the ever-shifting images comes a fair-handed, deeply human view of a family with an existence instead of a narrative. Through Malick's probing, floating lens, we see how Jack's upbringing shapes him and how the forces at work on him are not as simple as they appear. Chastain's mother is nurturing and gentle to the point of being elven, and her beauty and care clearly lays the foundation for Jack's initial dealings with lust. Meanwhile, Pitt's father is stern to the point that he borders on abusive, and on occasion he crosses that line, bringing out Jack's penchant for anger and violence. But neither the mother nor the father serves as an empty embodiment of maternal care and patriarchal terror, and their complexity sheds light on the other juxtapositions of the film, preventing The Tree of Life from simply being an exercise in dualism or dialectics.

Though she gives strength to her children, Mrs. O'Brien has little of her own, and Jack eventually comes to resent the same innocence and grace that made him love her when he realizes it paralyzes her. Pitt, in what may be his finest performance, portrays the unnamed dad (what kid remembers his parents by their first names, anyway?) as a man who does not know how to love his kids not because he is a masculine man but because his adoration of them is so overwhelming he can find no suitable outlet. Unfortunately, his misplaced self-loathing—he berates himself for wasting time trying to be a musician as he tries to make it as an entrepreneur and become rich—does find expression, and the three boys come to fear their father's temper and his controlling nature.


It is crucial, however, to note that Pitt never comes off merely as an abusive stereotype. As with Jack, he feels so real that one feels as if we are intruding upon their lives. Mr. O'Brien reminded me of the father in Terence Davies' Distant Voices, Still Lives, though not nearly as tyrannical. Both have instances of monstrosity, and the effect they have on their children is harmful, but both exhibit moments of unfiltered love for the children they unintentionally addle. Mr. O'Brien wants his sons' love so badly he demands they kiss him on the cheek and hug him whenever he comes home, thus removing the love from the situation entirely. But Malick introduces him in the pre-Big Bang sequence doubling over in grief when he learns of his son's death, showing how deep his affection and care runs before peeling back the dark side of that devotion and desire to see his children succeed where he failed. Jack too never becomes the little fascist he occasionally seems, fleeting gestures like abruptly hugging his father for comfort or laying a hand on the shoulder of the burned boy showing his own capacity for kindness.

What's amazing about The Tree of Life is that Malick can paint such a fractured yet emotionally cohesive portrait of a family while always making clear that they are not the true focus of the film. Before we truly get to know them, the director breaks up the action with an extended view of the creation of the entire universe. It's a bold, disjunctive move that will alienate many (and has already), yet it is the clearest and fullest visualization of Malick's desire to link humankind to nature. But the montage is stunning, using CGI only when absolutely necessary and relying on experimental techniques and nature footage elsewhere to paint the birth and growth of existence. A common complaint registered about the film is that it feels like a nature documentary, but not even something as accomplished as Planet Earth features shots as overwhelming as the ones Malick assembles, and certainly not with the same suggestive properties.

To go back to the beginning, Malick's film might also tie into Bach's Mass in its open religious content. Opening with a quote from the Book of Job, The Tree of Life announces its spirituality from the start, and its Catholic imagery and whispered ruminations on God do not shy away from taking an explicitly religious (not just vaguely spiritual) approach to life. At the same time, I can't imagine church groups booking block-tickets, as its depiction of the universe, and of God, is too complex to fit in any neatly packaged interpretation of any theism. Its view of creation follows the scientific explanation, opening with the flare of the Big Bang and evolving over billions of years as gas coalesces into stars and planets emerge from the cooling inferno. Life slowly accumulates in the swirling ocean and solidifying magma of Earth, makes its way to land and keeps shifting until the present day.

The film's view of God is even more complex, as it cannot fall back on science. The O'Brien family muses over God, questions His existence and motives when evil befalls them and wonders if they will meet him in death. Malick, on the other hand, presents God in an unorthodox fashion. Rather than an observer and manipulator of the universe, God is the universe, forged in the same kiln that spewed out the rest of creation. There is no heaven nor hell, nor any particular need of faith, only a connected nerve system of space-time given life by the memories it contains.

But those who mistake Malick's vision as a Christian one neglect its original ideas: what need have we for a savior, an avatar of the Lord sent for sacrifice, when everyone is the personification of God? That view goes beyond mainstream religion, and Malick's God is too much of an all-encompassing force to be a specific entity. The film itself embodies God: it's omniscient and omnipresent, yet it dwells within each of its characters until the multiple voiceover narrations common to Malick's oeuvre at last begin to overlap in a conflicting yet unified whole.

Despite the flourish of the first part and the grandiose meditations on the nature of God and the universe, the film's epic sweep always ties back into the humans amidst the bombast. Jack's tumultuous, budding emotions of desire and rage find a visual counterpoint in the suppurating lava and roiling seas of Earth's own violent, confused emergence into being and maturity. The scenes of Jack as a toddler are all filmed from extreme low angles, those of a child's point of view. As the camera tilts up to view the mother or a flight of stairs that seems insurmountable to an infant, everything looms in ways at once intimidating and beckoning. A child always has the purest view of God, because a child already must look up at everything and everyone. At times, I felt that sense of childlike wonder: one of the shots of galaxies growing from the primordial soup mixed milky whites and rippling browns to the point I thought "It looks like melted ice cream!" with such overwhelming, single-minded euphoria I quickly looked around to make sure I hadn't genuinely shouted it.

The beach where the adult Jack spends most of his on-screen time itself feels like one of the still-evolving and forming areas seen in the planet's creation, a prehistoric collection of stone and sand that exists seemingly outside time even as it is clearly the product of it. Malick sets the ending in this area in a sequence that calls to mind heaven but refutes that immediately as many of those gathered are not dead. Instead, the beach, a place with past, present and futuristic connotations, becomes a sort of meeting-place for all souls, a place where all ailments are healed and all transgressions are forgiven, not by God but by those assembled. It's a visualized epiphany, a moment of understanding of and access to the memory bank of all the things that have existed or will exist, where all is one.


Some might find this movie a joyless exercise, though I found moments of humor. Malick displays a light reflexivity at times: he subtly prepares the audience for what's coming with a conversation Jack has with a co-worker about the man's failed relationship. Relating what he said to the woman, the man says, "Story's been told." Jack asks, "What are you gonna do?" "Experiment," replies the man, shortly before the film launches into its creation reverie. Later, Mr. O'Brien defines the term "subjective" for his son. There's also a bit of tense comedy in a scene of Jack trying to lift a piece of meatloaf on one of those flat knives without touching it, as if he anticipates a beating from his father if a finger reaches out to stabilize the meat. But the loaf slips and Jack does steady it with a finger, only for a darkly amusing anticlimax. Malick also telegraphs the shift in Mr. O'Brien from stern but loving to truly frightening with a blast of organ music, played by Mr. O'Brien, no less. And this is a literal reaction to those who found no joy in the movie; if the imagery didn't elicit some kind of response, well, godspeed.

Others might take issue with its religious content and mistakenly identify it as some kind of sermon. As a staunch atheist, I found this to be perhaps the first film to rate with classical music as a truly inspiring demonstration of God through art. I've sometimes joked that I feel sorry for God; he used to have Michelangelo and Bach to praise him, and now he has Kirk Cameron and Christian Rock. These people try to make works about the self-evident nature of God, but frankly they fail because they are mediocre. When one listens to something as beautiful and timeless as Haydn's Creation or Beethoven's 9th, one can almost feel a guiding force because God and art intertwine. As religious as those aforementioned compositions are, they are not preaching documents but expressions of belief and inspiration, and The Tree of Life is such a work. It isn't out to convert you; it's simply one man's personal expression of how he views the universe, and because he does not seek to speak for others, others can come naturally to it.

To those who would call the film "pretentious," to hell with you. It's one of the least useful words in the English language, and whether you like the film or not, none of the term's connotations (for it is as vague as it is insipid) apply to this movie. I cannot say that I have ever seen a more personal film, at least not one with Hollywood A-listers and a sizable production budget. It's also exceedingly humble, reaching for the stars but making sure to relate its own insignificance in the void it watches. Detractors have already made the film some kind of battleground for reasonable, critical people and "the apologists and fanboys," but I'll be damned if I'm going to apologize for this film. It would be like apologizing for my own life, especially considering how much of it I see in its frames.

The Tree of Life represents the apotheosis of Malick's personal and removed style: there's a view that Malick casts humans as insignificant because he does not give them preferential treatment. This is one of the same points upon which religious people like to attack science. The more we learn about the sheer size and timeframe of the universe, the more humanity is made to look like a flake of dead skin annoyingly hanging on the flesh by a single, hardened cell. I always found it strange that such a line comes up in so many debates on religion vs. secularization, as I think science and theism are linked in that respect: the scientist believes man is but a dust speck in the huge (but finite) reaches of space-time, yet we are the only creatures we've discovered who can even begin to find our place in the void, while the religious believe in a being they cannot fathom who monitors us as if studying an ant farm, yet whose interest in us necessarily elevates humanity to a higher position among all other living things.

If that weren't enough to show how demonstrating our relative scale is not a condescension, incorporating a detailed snapshot of family life among the higher thoughts of the film once and for all puts to rest any notion of Malick's indifference to humanity. He places us as but one small part of nature, yes, but he also suggests that all of nature is God, and, therefore, so are we. As an adult, Jack works as an architect among giant skyscrapers, but his own revulsion of his surroundings does not match the tone of the shots, which remind the audience that the steel and glass monoliths do not cover up nature but reflect it on their surfaces. Malick's films previously argued that the destruction of mankind was a part of nature and not against it, but he goes further here. That the last physical shot of the film is of a bridge shows how Malick has progressed to the point of accepting the man-made world as a part of nature, cementing the idea that everything is connected (and there's no better man-made object to demonstrate connection than a bridge).

So, Bach was a Lutheran finding the meeting point of Protestantism and Catholicism, and Malick is the philosopher finding the nexus of Judeo-Christian religion, pantheistic spirituality and scientific fact. And just as Bach found a conflicting yet unified thread to unite all of Christianity through his art, so too does Malick present a believable, incorporating vision of humanity's placement in the universe. One of the theories of the shape of the universe is that it resembles a saddle, a curved-U with two wings fanning out. That means, from a certain point of view, the universe itself resembles a pair of outstretched arms, questioning and beckoning the void. And if the universe is God, that raises a new question: to whom does God pray?