The Fifth Desk · Canonical Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Terrence Malick · a film · 2011 · about 139 minutes
Mode
Family drama set inside a cosmogony; memory, prayer and theodicy in one structure
Mythos
Job — the loss, the question put to God, the answer given as creation; the fall from the garden of childhood
Phase
A son’s death, then the world from its first light, a Waco childhood in the 1950s, a grown man’s day in Houston and a shore beyond time, cut together out of order
Presentation
Feature film in colour, without titles or intertitles; whispered voice-over addressed to God, the mother and the dead brother; original music by Alexandre Desplat among concert works
Register
From the forming of galaxies to a boy taking a slip from a neighbour’s drawer; prayer in a whisper, the camera at a child’s height
Scale
The universe, one family, one conscience
Governing Proposition
A family in Waco loses a son, and the film answers their grief as God answered Job, with the making of the world. Between a first light and a gathering on a shore, a boy learns from a hard father and a gentle mother the two ways of nature and grace, and finds them at war in himself. The wager of the film is that one law runs from the birth of the stars to a child’s first cruelty, and that it can be shown in whispers and fragments, as memory and as prayer.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film opens on a black card bearing God’s answer to Job from the whirlwind — in the King James text, “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?” (Job 38:4) — and the verse of the morning stars singing together (38:7). Then, before anything is shown, a wavering light in the dark. No title or intertitle follows, here or later. The film is cut without act breaks, and its divisions are made by the voice and by changes of scale. The verse it has chosen is what God says to a man who has lost his children: not an explanation, but the whole of creation.
A woman’s voice, whispered, says that there are two ways through life, the way of nature and the way of grace, and that one must choose between them. She is Mrs O’Brien, played by Jessica Chastain, and the film shows her girlhood on a farm in glimpses. Then the news. A telegram is delivered to her. Her husband, played by Brad Pitt, is told by telephone at an airfield, and his answer is lost under the engines. One of their sons, R.L., is dead. Grief fills the house, and the grandmother, played by Fiona Shaw, offers her counsel. The film begins with the death and only afterwards shows the boy who died, so that every scene of him is watched as a scene of the dead.
Their eldest son, Jack, is now a grown man, played by Sean Penn, in Houston among towers of glass. It is the anniversary. He lights a candle; he telephones his father to apologise; he rides an elevator through the building. These scenes are flat by design. Then the whispered voices turn from the mother and the dead brother to God, and put their questions to him. The film answers as the epigraph promised, with the making of the world.
Movement II
Under Zbigniew Preisner’s Lacrimosa, the questions are whispered over nebulae, and the creation runs: the forming Earth, volcanoes, the first cells, the sea, jellyfish. Much of it was made by photographing fluids, dyes and chemicals, with Douglas Trumbull as consultant, alongside digital work. The cut from a mother’s grief to the birth of the stars is the film’s argument. The death of one boy and the making of the world are held in one frame, and the film never says how they are related.
Life comes ashore. A plesiosaur lies wounded on a beach. At a riverbed a predator finds a wounded animal, places its foot on its head and presses, then lifts the foot and walks away. Nothing in the scene explains the mercy, and nothing needs to. Grace has appeared in nature before any person has, and the creation is joined to the moral argument rather than set beside it as spectacle. Then an asteroid falls, and the age of the creatures ends.
The making of a world becomes the making of a child. Jack is born. His infant foot is held in his father’s hand. R.L. is born, then Steve, and the family settles into a house on a street in Waco in the 1950s. The camera is wide and moves at a child’s height, finding the father large and the mother luminous. The questions put to God have been answered by the whole of creation, and then by a child: Job’s sequence, from loss through question to the answer.
Movement III
Mr O’Brien teaches his sons to fight and to mind their manners, and to answer him “Yes, sir.” Pitt plays him as tyrant and wounded man at once. He plays the organ in church and music on the record player at home. His harshness has a shape, and the film gives it slowly: he wanted to be a musician and did not become one, and his patents as an inventor have come to nothing. The law he lays down at table is the law of a man the world has not rewarded.
Mrs O’Brien is held almost wholly in look and gesture. She cannot protect her sons from their father, and the film does not make her simply grace, any more than it makes him simply nature. When he goes away on business the house is freed: the boys run, the mother plays with them, and the camera moves with them. Then his car turns into the drive, and the house is his again. Hunter McCracken, a first-time child actor, plays young Jack; Laramie Eppler plays R.L., and Tye Sheridan plays Steve.
The childhood is told as memory, not as story. Scenes begin late and break off. The cutting runs on movement and gesture, so that years pass inside a sequence. Jack takes both parents into himself, the father’s law and the mother’s gentleness, and the film shows the war between them becoming his own. The family occupies the centre of the film, and it is held with a density few films reach: a yard, a kitchen table, a street of houses, brothers.
Movement IV
The summer is a summer of falling. A boy drowns at the swimming pool and is carried out, and Jack whispers his reproach to God. A boy has a burned head. Prisoners pass in the street. Knowledge of suffering arrives in the town in pieces, and the boy begins to hold God to account for it.
Jack enters a neighbour’s house, takes a woman’s slip from a drawer and floats it away down the river. He ties a frog to a rocket. With a BB gun he shoots his brother’s finger, and afterwards asks his forgiveness. When his father lies under the car on the jack, Jack prays that he will die. To God he says: “Why should I be good if you aren’t?” The childhood has become Eden and its loss: the knowledge of good and evil in the neighbour’s house, Cain and Abel in the shot at a brother.
Then the father falls. The plant closes, and the family must leave the house. Among the packed boxes Mr O’Brien confesses to his son the music he did not pursue and the glory around him that he failed to see. The truck pulls away, and the boys look back at the tree in the yard. The expulsion from the garden is a family moving house.
Movement V
The adult Jack rides the elevator again and walks out into a desert. A door frame stands alone in the open. Images of the end of the Earth and the Sun pass. The frame that held the grown man in glass towers now holds him in empty ground, and the film moves from the end of one life’s story to the end of the world without saying which it is showing.
On a tidal flat the living and the dead gather and walk across the wet sand. Under the Agnus Dei of Berlioz’s Requiem, Mrs O’Brien gives up her son. Here the film does what it has avoided everywhere else: it shows what cannot be observed. The shore evokes a resurrection by image rather than building one, and some of its pictures state the height they mean to reach. It is the place where the film is least sure.
A field of sunflowers. Jack leaves the building. The light from the opening returns. Nothing has been explained: not the boy’s death, not the relation of the stars to the kitchen table, not whose vision the shore is. What has been shown is how a conscience is made in a child between two parents, and the claim that the law of that making, nature against grace, is the law the film found at the riverbed and in the forming of the world. The question was Job’s. The answer, again, is the whole of creation.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure. The large parts pass the subtractive test. The creation is required: the epigraph is God’s answer to Job, and the creation is that answer staged, so without it the questions whispered to God have nothing to meet them. The death is required before the childhood, so that every scene of R.L. is watched as a scene of the dead. Inside the parts the test finds give, and the film’s own history shows it: the longer version issued in 2018 adds matter of the same kind and remains the same film. A fragment of the boys at play could be exchanged for another without loss, and adult Jack’s scenes are the clearest permitted matter. That is what holds the axis lowest. Length itself is not charged.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The disclosure can be stated: how a conscience is made. A boy takes both parents into himself, and the war between them becomes his own. The film shows the fall happening in a child — the slip floated down the river, the BB gun turned on his brother’s finger, the prayer that his father die under the car — and then the boy’s challenge to God: “Why should I be good if you aren’t?” It tests its scheme: the mother cannot protect her sons; the father’s harshness is the shape of his failure; grace appears in nature before people do, at the riverbed. Held at 8.6: the scheme of nature and grace is inherited devotional teaching, announced rather than discovered, and the theodicy closes on a consolation, a mood rather than a meaning.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Height stands near the ceiling, frequency is high, and the elevation is warm: the creation, under Preisner’s Lacrimosa, with the whispered questions over the forming galaxies; the predator placing its foot on the wounded animal’s head and then walking away; the infant’s foot held in the father’s hand, and the mother turning in the air above the lawn; the drowned boy carried from the pool and Jack’s whispered reproach to God; the father’s confession among the packed boxes; the shore, under the Agnus Dei of Berlioz’s Requiem. What holds it down is the frame. Adult Jack’s Houston scenes are flat by design, and the shore is the least sure of the summits: the door frame in the desert and the walk across the flats state elevation rather than reach it.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Myth built, and two structures carry weight. The first is Job. The epigraph is God’s question from the whirlwind, and the film is Job’s sequence: the loss, the question put to God, the answer given as the whole of creation, the restoration. The second is the fall. The childhood is Eden and its loss: the garden of the yard, the knowledge of good and evil in the neighbour’s house, Cain and Abel in the BB gun, the expulsion as the truck pulls away and the boys look back at the tree. The particulars stay hard: a 1950s Texas street, a father’s table manners, a burned boy’s head. Held at 9.1 by the shore, which evokes resurrection by image rather than building it.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The inheritance is the American family drama and the star vehicle. The departures: a cosmogony set inside a family melodrama; a narration that is prayer, whispered and addressed to God; a story told as memory, out of order and in fragments, its scenes unfinished; an ending with no event, only a gathering. The stake was real: a star picture from a studio’s specialty arm, which by report drew boos as well as applause at Cannes. Held below the top by its precedents. Tarkovsky’s Mirror (1975) had already made a childhood out of fragmentary memory, and its mother also rises into the air. 2001 had already put the cosmos on screen, through the same Douglas Trumbull. Malick’s own Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line had made the whispered voice-over his manner.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. Told in order, the childhood would be a period drama about a strict father. The fragment is the form of memory: scenes begin late and break off, and the camera moves at a child’s height. The cut from the family’s grief to the birth of the stars is the argument itself: the death of one boy and the making of the world are held in one frame, and the film never says how they are related. The whisper is the form of prayer, addressing God without declaring him. Held at 9.0: the adult frame is a container, its glass towers stating isolation rather than enacting it, and a longer version of the same shape shows the form loose at the joints.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Evidence over promise, and there are fifteen years of it. The film has drawn sustained philosophical and theological writing, beside its maker’s early work in philosophy: Malick translated Heidegger’s The Essence of Reasons, published in 1969. The open questions are the film’s own: whose voices speak, and to whom; what the shore is — a heaven, Jack’s vision, or the mother’s surrender seen from inside; what the creation and the family are to each other; why the predator spares its prey, and whether that is grace in nature or a reading put on nature. The unordered fragments reward return formally too. Held at 8.7 by the span, since fifteen years is a short demonstration, and because the meaning is announced in the opening minutes, so some of what returns is the same answer.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Released in 2011, so force and reach are scored together. The film showed that a picture with stars and studio distribution could hold the cosmos and a single family in one structure, with prayer for narration, and it fixed a grammar of roving wide-angle camera, natural light, broken scenes and whispered voice-over. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Lubezki carried the manner into Gravity (2013), Birdman (2014) and The Revenant (2015), winning three consecutive Academy Awards for cinematography; the look and the whisper are reported to have passed into advertising and music video, often as surface; and a cosmic frame for domestic grief became available to later films, David Lowery’s A Ghost Story (2017) among them. Fifteen years cannot yet show how much of that reach will pass as a style.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Scored partly as forecast, from what the work is built to bear, since fifteen years cannot demonstrate survival. What is shown is steady: continued exhibition, a critical edition, and a second, longer version issued in 2018 because the film was still wanted. The forecast rests on the subjects, which are permanent: the death of a child, a father and a son, the question put to God. The surface is mostly safe: the childhood is set in a past already, and the creation’s practical photography of fluids and dyes should age as well as the models of 2001 have. The costs are two. The digital dinosaurs are the most perishable images in the film, fixed to the effects of their year, and adult Jack’s glass towers belong to the architecture of 2010.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight throughout: Emmanuel Lubezki’s photography in natural light, the low sun through the trees, the moving wide-angle frame; Jack Fisk’s house and street, a period world that never looks dressed; the performances — Brad Pitt’s father, tyrant and wounded man at once, Jessica Chastain’s mother, held almost wholly in look and gesture, and Hunter McCracken, a first-time child actor, carrying the centre of the film; the cutting of the childhood on movement and gesture, so that years pass inside a sequence; the music set against the image as structure, above all the Lacrimosa under the creation. The costs are visible: the dinosaurs are the one weak passage of craft. Sean Penn is given almost nothing to play, and the adult frame is cut diffusely where the childhood is exact.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the birth of a galaxy and a boy stealing a slip from a neighbour’s drawer. One law governs both. The film declares it in the opening minutes, nature and grace, and holds it everywhere it looks: the predator spares its prey; the boy chooses cruelty, then asks his brother’s forgiveness. The whisper and the moving camera are constant from the nebulae to the kitchen table, and the range is as wide as cinema has attempted. The cost is the frame. The adult scenes obey a thinner law, and the shore obeys the law of consolation rather than the law of observation the rest of the film has kept. The images of the end of the Earth are joined to the shore by sequence rather than by necessity.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Many orders are held in one structure. The cosmos and deep time: the origin of matter, the forming Earth, the extinction. The natural order: the sea, the creatures, the tree, the river. The sacred: the address to God that runs through the whole. The family, at the centre. Childhood and conscience: the making of a moral self. Labour: the father’s work at the plant, his patents and his ruin. Death and grief, the son’s and the drowned boy’s. Society, in the prisoners and a small Southern town; modern life, in the corporate city. They are integrated, not listed: the cut from grief to the stars makes the cosmos the family’s setting. Held weakly are society and history: the 1950s South appears in glimpses, its race and class at the margin.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.8 / 10 — Final Average
Canonical Placement: Tier IV — Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.3, The Sublime at 9.2 and The Archetypal Deep at 9.1. A command of the medium that bears weight from the light through the trees to the cutting of the childhood, elevation that is warm and returns from the creation to the father’s confession, and a myth built twice over, as Job’s sequence and as the fall.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.8 — the large parts are required, but inside them fragments of the childhood could be exchanged without loss, the adult frame is permitted rather than compelled, and a longer version of the same shape adds matter of the same kind. Next, The Bottomless Well and Pressure on Tradition at 8.7. They share a cause: a manner open to addition and to imitation.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.0, The Made at 9.3, The Inner Law at 8.9, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Archetypal Deep at 9.1, The Swerve at 8.8, The Imperishable at 8.8, Pressure on Tradition at 8.7 and The Unconcealment at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, the last by a tenth. The Universal Minimum is met — of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 7.8, against 7.5 — and The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.8. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of The Tree of Life as released in 2011, the version shown in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Palme d’Or, and in cinemas, from the epigraph to the returning light: written and directed by Terrence Malick for River Road Entertainment and Plan B Entertainment, photographed by Emmanuel Lubezki, designed by Jack Fisk, with original music by Alexandre Desplat, and distributed in the United States by Fox Searchlight Pictures. No print, script or recording was consulted. The extended version issued in 2018 is a second work and is not judged; its existence is cited as evidence, and nothing from its added material is imported. Voyage of Time (2016) is not part of the work, and the director’s life is not used to explain it. The epigraph is quoted from the King James text of Job, Project Gutenberg e-text #8018, for its words and sense, not as a transcription of the card. Dialogue is quoted only where its words are certain; the rest of the voice-over is described. The running time is the commonly given figure. Figures that could not be verified, among them the length of the creation and of the 2018 version, the number of editors, the full list of music, the budget and the dates of shooting, are not given.