Fix Your Screenplay with Brain Worms: The Tree of Life and Upstream Color

I really, really hate to criticize The Tree of Life. I really do.

As an evangelical Christian as well as a rabid fan of cinema, it's pretty rare that I get to see a movie that both 1) authentically communicates the Christian story and worldview and 2) doesn't suck. The Tree of Life (2011, directed by Terrence Malick) one such movie. The Exorcist is a second, and I can't think of a third. For that reason, I want to say that The Tree of Life is a peerless cinematic triumph, it should have gotten every Oscar, and everyone ought to own a copy and watch it twice a year.

But it's not perfect, and I can't pretend that it is. I love this movie but I know it's flawed. Primarily, this movie suffers from the fact that, between moments of poignant character interactions and wide, sweeping pan shots of staggering beauty, there are also extended sequences of gratuitous voiceovers coupled with the characters behaving in ways that I have never seen a human being act. People tell their children to love every leaf, flower, and ray of sunshine. They stare contemplatively at votive candles. They show astounding awareness of their own emotional motivations, and explain them spontaneously with the clarity of an essayist.

They are, if I may coin a phrase, suffering from acute Terrence Malick syndrome.

The Tree of Life is a highly allegorical movie and its aims are nothing short of cosmic. It meditates on the tragedies of one family and sets those tragedies in the context of the Christian story of the universe -- the beauty and brokenness that exist side-by-side in creation, which culminate in the redemption of the whole world and the end of pain and suffering. It's telling an archetypical, ancient story that literally spans from the beginning of the universe to the end of it, and the fact that Malick takes missteps in the execution is probably inevitable. The problem is that, in using grand, abstract words and images to tell the grand, abstract story of the universe, the individual characters (whom the story is ostensibly supposed to be about) become grand and abstract themselves. They lose their relatability as they increasingly become the voices and tools of the director. As the camera swoons and sweeps around them in the beatifically-shot Southern home, their dialogue resembles not the conversations between real people but the sound effects of Terrence Malick's worldview, underpinning the imagery. They aren't real, and they couldn't exist in the real world. If people -- especially women, like Jessica Chastain's character -- acted like they do in The Tree of Life (commune with nature, look beatific, teach life lessons, etc.), no one would be able to hold a job, raise children, or manage responsibilities.

She's sitting in the yard because her house was repossessed. 

A movie without real characters, I would argue, is a movie divorced from reality and is truly incomplete. What The Tree of Life needs are more scenes with brain parasites.

Now, before you all start lining up outside my door so I can fix your screenplays (really, Mr. Sorkin, this is getting embarrassing), allow me to back myself up with a movie that is ultimately better, and no less ambitious, than The Tree of Life: Upstream Color (2013, written and directed by Shane Carruth). The phenomenon that Upstream Color explores is no less grand and mysterious than the coexistence of beauty and evil that consumes The Tree of Life: how do we explain the process by which two people meet, connect, and love each other? Where does chemistry come from?

The answer, according to Upstream Color, is a strange parasitic organism that lives in orchid roots,

then worms, then people, then pigs, then back to orchid roots, and connects every being through which it creeps. When Kris (Amy Seimetz) and Jeff (Shane Carruth, doing triple duty with writing and directing credits) are both infected, the worm that has burrowed deep into both of their bodies links them inseparably.

As a narrative conceit, the parasitic worm of Upstream Color is genius. For one thing, it literalizes something that everyone who has ever fallen in love (and by "love" I'm including its romantic, friendly, and familial incarnations) can confirm. The worm links the psyches of those it infects so thoroughly that they trust each other before they have a reason to, love each other before it's rational, and feel each other's pain so deeply that suffering for one is equal suffering for the other. The idea of the parasite provides a way to explore aspects human relationships that everyone knows experientially to be true. On the other hand, the worm gives Carruth permission to use a style similar to Terrence Malick's, but with better reason. The characters act like no one you've ever met because they have a brain parasite that makes them act like lunatics. The voiceovers in Upstream Color are more appropriate because Kris and Jeff are so inextricably linked that they think each other's thoughts instead of talking. They take long, contemplative looks at beautiful scenery not because the director likes it, but because their consciousness has been so radically reconstructed that they can barely do anything else. And the swooning, hypnotic look of the cinematography isn't just pretty; it communicates the disconcerting fact that something powerful and foreign has taken hold of Jeff and Kris' senses.

A lot of people saw and liked The Tree of Life, and I don't think they're wrong. But Upstream Color takes the look and style of a Terrence Malick movie and puts it to work. A light dose of genre conventions (especially body horror -- there are some gnarly worm-under-skin moments) adds energy and dynamism to Upstream Color that Malick just can't pull off. It's as lovely, mysterious, and contemplative as The Tree of Life, but while The Tree of Life stumbles in and out of pretense, Upstream Color's cruises to soaring altitude and stays there. It pulls from many genres and breaks the boundaries of all of them. If you ever wondered what the love child of a David Cronenberg and Terrence Malick movie would look like, wonder no more, because it's astounding. And if you'll excuse me, I'm off to go watch Primer, because I want to know what else Carruth's been cooking.

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