Tree of Life revisited. Again.

In Terrence Malick’s  film The Tree of Life we learn of the death of a 19 year old boy, known as RL.   Most of the film in concerned with his elder brother, Jack, and the spiritual crisis he experiences on an anniversary of RL’s death.  But at the beginning of the film we are with his mother, and her immediate response to this tragedy.  She loves God,  and has been taught that ‘those who follow the way of Grace come to no harm.’   She believes that we have to choose between Grace and Nature,  nature ‘red in tooth and claw’.  But her teenage boy was full of Grace, and he has come to harm,  he is dead.

The mother questions God, but God makes no verbal reply.   Instead Malick offers us a visually spectacular 15 minute sequence telling of the creation of the Universe, the formation of planets and the emergence and evolution of life.    Some find this section of the film incomprehensible, or irrelevant.    Having seen and discussed this film many times I offer this, my response to it,  putting these words into the mouth of the Creator.

******

Your child has died.  This is tragic.  Because you love your child you scream and grieve and weep and rage and question.     

You question me, asking

Why?

Did I know?

Where was I?

What do you mean to me?

Let me answer you.

You conceived your child in love, carried him in hope, birthed him in joy and pain.    You were pregnant for nine months.    I waited nine billion years for life to be conceived on planet Earth.   And four billion years more before it could give birth to you, my children, made in my own image.    You too were conceived in love, carried in hope, birthed in joy and pain. 

Life itself is my Creation gift to you, and it takes time.   Just as your beloved child grew slowly, cell by cell within your womb, my universe also grew slowly.     I spoke and the Universe sprang into existence, and then particle by particle, photon by photon, atom by atom, element by element, grain by grain, it grew within my womb. 

My womb?     Where else?  There was and is nowhere outside me, beyond me, outwith me, so the only place my universe could be is within me.    That genesis created everything you see and know, and everything you cannot see and will never know.    

Gravity was in my left hand and randomness in my right,  and these tools brought order out of chaos,  and then life out of the inanimate.      I created my Universe to live and to bear life itself, and more – life that is in my own image, the image of love.     Giving, self-giving, compassionate, forgiving love.  Love that cares,  love that hurts and grieves.    Grieves because there is no creation without destruction and no life without death.   That is the story of this Universe.   

Every atom in your body was created in the furnace at the heart of some distant sun.    Hydrogen and helium, the only atoms in that first moment,  had to be remade there, fused together under unimaginable pressure to form oxygen, carbon,  nitrogen, iron, calcium and phosphorus,  potassium, sulfur, sodium, chlorine and magnesium.  You need all of these elements to simply be.    These suns burned for billions of years and then they had to die, burn out, explode and seed the interstellar space with these new atoms.    Atoms that gathered under gravity’s gentle push, gathered and clumped, formed dust clouds, then rocks, asteroids and planets.    

How many planets have to form before one can be a cradle for life?    The number would be meaningless to you, as would the trillions of minute actions and reactions needed for these earth-bound atoms to be combined and recombined, to mutate as randomness did its amazing work,  countering entropy by bringing order out of chaos, complexity out of simplicity, forming chemical compounds, amino acids, bacteria,  single and multi-celled beings;  all your ancestors.    Some think that evolution is not miraculous, but that is only because they want miracles to be instantaneous.    My Creation miracle took thirteen billion years, and turned hydrogen and light into love.   Is that not miraculous enough?

You were taught that you must choose between Grace and Nature.   That is a false dichotomy.    You thought that your child could escape the dangers of Nature by choosing Grace.    But Grace needs a natural form to inhabit.   Grace needs the cradle of Nature to find a home in.    And do not presume that you are the only living things capable of Grace.

You are compassionate. You feel the pain of others.  The suffering of others stirs deep feelings, often of anger, in your hearts.   Of course you want a world where there is no suffering.  Sometimes when you see suffering you call it evil and are angry with me.  

How can a loving God allow such suffering?      They blame me for allowing harmful as well as beneficent bacteria to evolve, or for allowing the movement of tectonic plates to cause earthquakes.   Some would like me to temporarily suspend the laws of gravity when falling objects hurt, or when falling hurts bodies.    Some people seem to want fire that does not burn, water that does not drown.      To eat without killing.   But do you think that if I could have created you, and your beloved children, without suffering and death being part of it, without Nature being as it is, without your Universe being as it is, I would not have done so?   

I also have to live, like you,  with the necessary randomness that makes life possible and unpredictable.    Randomness and gravity, my necessary creative tools,  mean that life is fraught with  danger.   Maybe that danger makes it precious.   Would I not have spared myself the waiting, the dying, the grieving, if I could?   

If you look at Nature and hate it, and me, if you blame me and fear me, reject me for the death and loss and destruction you see in the world,  then before you condemn me, consider this.   It has taken your kind half a million years to learn how to take atoms apart.    How long do you think it would take you to put them back together, to create them, to create enough to make your own Universe,  and to breath life and love into your creation?    How long would it take you to make a Universe in your own image, because you despise this one, made in mine?

Your husband is an inventor, proud of the patents for his devices.   I am proud of my devices too.    Your eldest son is an architect.  He knows that form has to follow function.     Function dictates form.      Otherwise building fall apart.     I am the architect of the Universe, and it also has a function.    Love is that function; to love and to be loved.  

This Universe has become aware, and has learnt to love.   It took thirteen thousand million years for you to learn this, in your tiny corner, but in all that time my Universe has not fallen apart.    It is well made.    And just as your child grew from its conception as a single cell, with no interference from you, save sustenance, my Universe grew from a single moment, just one event, and grew to what it is, with no interference from me, save sustenance.  As it is, it was from the beginning.

Oh yes, I know some believe I could create this Universe and all living things in days, not billions of years,  and  make you out of mud in an instant.   They wonder why I did not make a Universe in which there was no suffering.   Maybe I could have done so.   It would be a different Universe.   And in such a Universe would you be truly human?   Would you have your capacity for costly love, for compassion, for Grace.   Would you be made in my image?   Would you be so intimately connected to the whole of creation?      And could I be truly incarnate?    At One with you?   

Your beloved son has died, and you grieve.  How many of my beloved have I seen die?     If you believe that I love, then you know that I grieve for your boy too, and for every living thing.     You live today in the shadow of his death.   Because I gave you the capacity to choose love and Grace I had to also give you the capacity to turn away from them.   So I too live in the shadow of death.   The death of the Cross, of the Holocaust, of Hiroshima, of the Gulags and the Killing Fields.    I live in the darkness cast by the fear that lives in the heart of every child, every woman, every man subjected to abuse, to violence, to hatred.     These are not my actions, but yours.

You grieve for what you value.     So add this to the value of your boy.  In him his elder  brother, Jack, found me.   Found the love and trust and forgiveness and Grace – and the creativity – that are my image.   For RL, his brother, your child and mine, lived and lives in love.   All who live in love live in me.  And I live in them.    In all eternity.    

Because you love your child you grieve and weep and rage and question, asking

Why?  

Because there is no other way.

Did I know?  

Yes.

Where was I?  

With you.  Within you.

What do you mean to me?  

Everything.

The Girl On The Train is well worth a seat.

A number of critics have been negative about the movie The Girl On The Train.  I am not at all sure why.    It may be an advantage that I have not read the book,  so I did not miss anything from it nor disapprove of the relocation from London to New York State.      And of course it is more difficult to develop three main female characters in a film than in a book, especially when they share the narration.   

I do admit that at first I had a little difficulty distinguishing between the two young blondes, played by Haley  Bennett and Rebecca Ferguson (who made it more difficult by abandoned her naturally russet  Ferguson-clan  hair colouring to match Bennett's blondiness).     There are also frequent time shifts,  going back months, weeks or days, but they were not difficult to follow.   Mark Kermode pointed out that the cinematographer, Charlotte Brus Christensen, used different filming techniques to help us locate when we are in any particular sequence, and even though I did not consciously notice that,  it may well have helped.   I did notice the clever use of handheld camera sequences to give us the unsteady pov of the only remaining narrator in the movie,  Rachel, an alcoholic.   

She is played by Emily Blunt, retaining her English accent to add to her character’s alienation.   For me knowing she was the lead player was a major reason to see the film. I have admired her considerable breadth in The Adjustment Bureau, Looper, Live Die Repeat and Sicario.   She also showed her comedy chops in the (entirely unnecessary)  English version of the brilliant French Wild Target, (Cible emouvante).   This is her most unglamorous  and - she says - difficult role to date.    I was not disappointed.     Justin Theroux  (of the clan Theroux)  is fine as one of the men, the other being the Welshman Luke Evans.     Allison Janney’s character as a cop is underdeveloped, but hey, when did we last have a movie with three women in the leads?  OK, The Help.

As it happens the Director, Tate Taylor, adapted and directed The Help.   I have not seen that, but here he does a good job.    Erin Cressida Wilson worked with  the novel’s  author Pauline Hawkins on the screenplay, which works fine for me.    Danny Elfman wrote the score, which contributed to the tension without being intrusive. But the star of the show is Emily Blunt.     It was worth seeing just for her.   It may not be Gone Girl, but it is worth seeing anyway. 

Anthropoid.

Two years ago I read Sam Taylor’s translation from the French of Laurent Binot’s remarkable novel HHhH.   In fact it is a book within a book.  Binot tells  how he came to write, and did write,  the story of the attempt by two SOE trained Czech soldiers to assassinate Reinhardt Heydrich in Prague.  Heydrich was the  Chief of the Nazi Secret Service and third ranking officer after Hitler and Himmler, and made ‘Protector’ of Bohemia and Moravia in June 1942.   This region now comprises the Czech republic.

Hitler had claimed this region as part of the so called ‘Greater Germany’ and had been allowed to march in and take over. Heydrich was appointed to crush any and all resistance, and this he did with the efficiency and ruthlessness  he had shown at the Wannsee Conference,  designing the ‘Final Solution’ to the ‘Jewish Problem’ along with his second in command, Adolph Eichmann.    Mass shootings of Jews had proven to be inefficient and even SS soldiers found them had to carry out.  Gassing people with exhaust fumes in trucks was no more efficient.  So at the Wannsee meeting the final solution of using extermination camps was devised.

 

The two soldiers who undertook the mission to kill Heydrich were Josef Gabcik, a Slovak, and Jan Kubis, a Czech. 

The mission itself is not supported by all of those in the Czech resistance movement, who knew that, successful or not, there would be massive retribution visited on their people.   But the mission was authorized by the Czech Government in exile in London and by the US and British Governments via the Special Operation Executive.

Kenneth Branagh made a film about Heydrich and the Wannsee Conference, Conspiracy, in 2001, and back  in 1943 Fritz Lang filmed a Berthold Brecht script, Hangmen Also die! that ‘imagined’ the mission, but was not fact based.

Now we have Anthropoid (the actual code-name of the attempt), written and directed by the Brit Sean Ellis, who also took charge of the cinematography.   Cillian Murphy and Jamie Dornan play the assassins, supported by a host of European actors we may not have seen on screen before,  including Charlotte Le Bon and Anna Geislerova as their supposed and maybe, eventually, actual girlfriends,  and with our familiar Toby Jones as the local head of the Resistance. 

I suspect that many if not most of the people seeing this will already know the story, or at least about the fates of Heydrick,  Gabcik and Kubis,   but there is still a palpable tension right from the start.   Who do you trust in a place riddled with collaborators, traitors – or potential traitors?    The music helps engender and maintain this tension.   The film is shot in a grainy Super 16 mm format, and often in muted colours,  making Prague often look drab in daylight and beautiful in misty mornings and evenings.   The cast of actors mainly unknown in Anglophone countries adds to the feel of authenticity. 

The two leads are convincing, showing the fear that always underlies true courage.   ‘Being brave is not being fearless’ my father told me once.  He was a British paratrooper fighting at the Battle of Arnhem and knew that bravery is about being afraid of something and doing it anyway.    I thought the film was careful not to make it’s heroes ‘Heroes’, not its heroines ‘Heroines.’   They were ordinary people in extra-ordinary situations who did extra-ordinary things with great courage.    The level of acting throughout the movie is consistently high.

The assassination attempt is well re-constructed, but it is not the climax of the film.   After the attack the two assassins joined seven other men who had parachuted in on difference SOE missions as they took refuge in the crypt of Orthodox Church of Saint Charles Borromeu in Prague, later called  St Cyril and Methodius Cathedral.     Their location was betrayed and seven hundred SS guards attacked them.   The ensuing battle is the real climax.

And afterwards?    The Biblical injunction ‘an eye for an eye’ is not just a license for retaliation.  It is a limit to the exact scale of retaliation.  Only an eye for an eye, no more.   Of course this was not a limitation the Nazis respected.     A false lead took them to the village of Lidice,  outside Prague, and it was  destroyed.   All of its 1500 inhabitants were killed, it buildings razed and bulldozed, its orchards burnt and its fields salted.

Many more people died in Prague.

This raises the question  referred to earlier; ‘was this assassination justified, knowing that there would be terrible repercussions?’     The people who would die in retaliation had no choice, no vote in the decision making.   The German’s rule in the region would not become lighter, nor its methods more humane.  In fact the opposite.    It is true, however, that this action, showing the determination of the Czech people, and its aftermath, the brutality of their oppressors, did bring the Allied powers to formally support the Czechs and Slovaks in their struggle. 

Of course wars are declared without a referendum, and sometimes without united civilian support.   No one voted to destroy Dresden, Hiroshima or Nagasaki.   And whether or not we agree with those actions  we may have to accept that in an evil situation – and war is always an evil situation – there are no ‘pure’ options.  If there are only two evils available then the lesser is the one to choose.  It helps if we know what it is.  But sometimes we can only make our best guess and somehow learn to live with the consequences.    

 

Even the ethics of assassination are complex.  We may remember that during the war Dietrich Bonheoffer, a leading German Protestant Minister and theologian,  came to the conclusion that it was necessary to assassinate Hitler to  avoid a greater evil, and joined the Stauffenburg conspiracy.   He was hanged on Hitler’s direct orders in April 1944.    

The greater tragedy of course is that Heydrich’s extermination plans were already in place.  In the following fourteen months after this attack over two millions Jews and nearly fifty thousand Romanies were killed in in the camps at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka set up by him.  

I recommend this though-provoking film. 

Deepwater Horizon.

Deepwater Horizon  balances its technical proficiency and explosive power with a genuine concern for the dignity of the real people who survived, and those who did not survive,  this terrible and avoidable tragedy.   

In April 2010 the semi-submersible exploratory drilling rig Deepwater Horizon,  rented by BP and operating 40 miles off the Louisiana coast, caught fire.   There were 126 people onboard.   During the next few hours Eleven people died.  Many were seriously injured.  In the weeks – months- that followed millions of gallons of crude oil poured into the Gulf of Mexico, a major ecological and community disaster.    Years of litigation followed, with BP eventually paying out over $13 billion to individuals, businesses and the State.    In November 2012 BP pleaded guilty to 11 counts of manslaughter,  two misdemeanors, and a felony count of lying to Congress.    In 2014 U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier ruled BP was guilty of gross negligence and willful misconduct and had acted with “conscious disregard of known risks.” His ruling stated that BP "employees took risks that led to the largest environmental disaster in U.S. history,” that the company was “reckless,” and determined that several crucial BP decisions were “primarily driven by a desire to save time and money, rather than ensuring that the well was secure.”

Many of the compensation agreement made by BP included gagging clauses and  so the script for this movie had to be largely put together by Matthew Carnham and Matthew Sand  from the public record of legal hearings and a major New York Times article written by David Rohle and Stephanie Saul, with every word run past battalions of lawyers paid by the film’s producers and by BP.   The producers also ran into difficulty finding anyone to provide the essential transport services they needed to film out at sea, or to lend them a rig to film on.  In the end they had to build their own rig.

If the film is not clear about the actual causes of the disaster it is because nobody really knows.    Something went badly wrong, allowing an explosive ‘gusher’ of oil and methane gas to rise up the Marine Riser  from the sea bed to the floating rig five kilometres above and then ignite when these hydrocarbons were sucked into the diesel generators onboard, causing a series of devastating explosions.  The rig sank the next day but the gusher burned for 87 days.   

It is clear however that undue pressure was put on the sub-contracted engineers by the BP Executives on the rig - Donald Vidrine and Robert Kaluza - to complete the drill even though the results of essential safety drills were ambiguous.    The work was behind schedule, and delay costs money.    Even before the explosion it was being called the Well from Hell.

It is not surprising therefor that the film only does what it can do.  This it does brilliantly, concentrating on the personal disaster and the responses of the men – and one woman – on board rather than examine the complex legal arguments.    When Mark Walhberg came on board (literally) as star and co-producer he took the part of Mike Williams, the Chief Electrical Technician Engineer on the rig.    Kate Hudson plays William’s wife, Felicia, waking him on the morning he is due to leave for his weeks long shift on the rig.   There is a scene where their  young daughter shares what she is going to tell her class about ‘what my Daddy does’, which she says is ‘stopping the dinosaurs below the sea bed from escaping.’      This is a simple and effective metaphor for the dangerous operation conducted by the Deepwater Horizon.

From the start we know that we are heading towards a major disaster.    We may not know how it will happen, but the build up of tension is palpable, aided by Steve Jablonsky’s superb sound design.   He has scored many horror movies, and this is a different kind of horror movie.   The cinematographer, Enrique Chedick shot 28 Days Later, and 127 Hours,  so he knows about building tension and shooting in cramped circumstances.       We see many shots of the drill column  reaching from the rig to the concrete cap five kilometers below,   the cap meant to hold back the enormous pressure of the ‘dinosaurs’ pushing from below.    The column shudders, bolts pop, the concrete heaves and the pressure dials on the rig rise into the red zone.    On the rig another pressure battle is taking place between the engineers and the execs.    No one wants to make the decision to stop the drill, at a cost of millions of dollars.  And the readouts are ambiguous.   The one man on board who has the authority to hit the red button and stop the drill happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.   The courts, however,  decided that the pressure exerted by the company was criminal.   Do you notice how many times I have to use the word pressure’?  This film is all about pressure, and how systems and people respond to pressure.

I do wonder what film Paul Greengrass would have made.  He oversaw the reconstruction of the actual conversations on board Flight 93 as it flew towards it’s destruction in Pennsylvania on 9/11, and those in the flight control offices.   Of course he also made Captain Phillips. 

But Director Peter Ross has done good work here.   There is not time enough to  build the characters of the rig’s staff, even of those who died, but he does show how ordinary men and women respond to extreme circumstances, often with extreme courage, doing whatever they can to save the live of others even at the risk of – or cost of  - their own.   The ongoing explosions are well handled, and even though we have Mike Williams as our central heroic figure the other main players get their chances to shine.   He is joined by Kurt Russell as Jimmy Harrell, the Offshore Installation Manager for TransOcean, the firm that owned the rig.  He exudes the kind of rugged reliability that a man in charge of such an outfit needs to win the trust of the people in his care.   John Malkovitch as BP’s Vidrine maybe enjoys playing the villain too much. Gina Rodrigues is the woman who ‘steers’ the rig,  keeping it in place 5 kilometers above the drill site.   She has to be rescued by Williams at the end, panicking at the prospect of jumping into the burning sea, but is not otherwise a stereotyped screamer.    

Wahlberg does what he does and does it well, and I was pleased to see how that the film shows how after Mike Williams’ amazing composure and courage as he battled to save lives on the rig he collapsed in total shock soon after.   PTSD seems to have kicked in, and may never have left.    When asked if the film accurately shows the  destructive power of the blow-out  Williams himself has said that nothing ever could.    He has never set foot on a boat since that day.

As I was watching this movie I sometimes wondered about its morality.   Was it exploiting a recent tragedy?  Why wasn’t it clearly damning the executive decisions, driven by the ruthless greed that is the companies highest value?   

But in the end I decided that it was doing all it could.   It honours those who deserve honouring and damns those who do not, even if that can only be at the local level.    The BP execs who directly contributed to the disaster were on the rig themselves.   Their decisions put them in danger too.   They could have been among the 11 that died.   I think there are questions about the way the crew put up with a history of poor maintenance and equipment failure on the rig, but of course the real villains live much higher up the food chain, so high that they are virtually unreachable, unimpeachable.   None of them went to prison even after BP pleaded guilty to eleven manslaughter charges.  

We can call this ‘structural evil’ , when organizations themselves embody greed and do not care about the cost to others, even when it costs lives.    It would be so nice to think that this has nothing to do with ourselves, but it does.  And we are all part of it.     At the start of the film,  as the men of the new shift fly out to the rig,  we glimpse something of the enormous infrastructure the oil industry depends on even at such a local level.    The oil industry spends trillions looking for, refining and transporting oil.  And who pays for it all?   Who wants it to exist?  We do.