Father Barron 解《生命樹》

原載 "Chicago Tribune"，真是超級冇得頂的一篇解讀，十分鐘解晒齣戲最重要的東西（整個 structure、那令人割凳17分鐘、戲名）。之前我寫得很艱辛的《一爬》忽然變得很silly。不過我很高興自己慢慢嗒慢慢吞，struggle 出一個相似的解讀的過程。

細個唸英國文學時讀詩要做 pre-reading exercise，次次都係亂吹，九唔搭八，上堂讀明了之後往往感到很尷尬和無地自容（用今日的語言是「樣衰及𤓓爆」），也為教 Katherine Mansfield 教到流淚的老師難過。但終於，二十年後的今天，我讀明了一首詩！

而這篇相當獨一無二的解讀竟然有 transcript (please scroll down)。感動！



What could possibly tie together the following scenes: a flock of birds cavorting in breathtakingly harmonious patterns, the meeting of flowing lava and crashing waves, a larger dinosaur dominating a smaller one, a young boy throwing a baseball through a window just because he is forbidden to do so, a depressed middle-aged man sitting in a coldly modernistic office building, and a meteor crashing into the primordial earth?

If I am at all correct in my reading of Terrence Malick’s meditative film, “The Tree of Life,” in which those and many other seemingly disparate scenes occur, what ties them together is that they are all ingredient in the plan and purpose of God. I realize how pretentious that can sound, but this is a filmmaker (and a film) with very grand ambitions indeed.

The movie opens with a quotation from the book of Job: “where were you when I founded the earth…while the morning stars sang in chorus and all the sons of God shouted for joy” (Job 38: 4,7)?

These are some of the first lines of the magnificent speech that God delivers to Job, the righteous man who had been beset with every imaginable suffering and who had challenged God to explain himself.

Malick’s film opens with a couple (played by Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain), who have been informed that their 19 year old son has died and who are experiencing a Job-like confusion and indignation: how could God have done this to them and to their son?

God’s answer to Job is puzzling, for it does not directly address the matter at hand; instead, it unfolds as a grand tour of the cosmos, in all of its strangeness, beauty, and complexity, culminating with a detailed description of the virtues of Leviathan (probably a whale) and Behemoth (perhaps a hippopotamus).

Malick’s film mimics the speech of God in the measure that it takes us away from the suffering couple to a visually stunning sequence of scenes depicting dynamics within the cosmos, from the birth of stars and the splitting of cells to the demise of the dinosaurs and the ballet-like movements of a jellyfish swimming toward the surface of the ocean.

The author of the book of Job and Terrence Malick both are suggesting that the “answer” to this most painful and searching of questions is found through the widest possible broadening of one’s perspective, so as to see what God is up to everywhere in his creation.

On Malick’s telling, the universe—from its primordial beginnings to now—is marked by a play of two forces, nature and grace. Nature is strong, conflictual, hard-edged, and violent; whereas grace is gentle, loving, and forgiving. Both are constantly in play, constantly in tension with one another, and somehow both are part of God’s design.

One of the most striking images in the film--the meeting of lava and ocean wave that I mentioned above—is a particularly apt symbol of the way that nature and grace come together to produce something beautiful.

Having made his literally “cosmic” point, Malick sharpens his focus and returns in flashback to the young couple now just beginning their family. The father, played with convincing understatement by Pitt, is a decent man who loves his children, but he is, first and foremost, a disciplinarian, eager to make his boys tough and self-reliant. He is the embodiment of the principle of nature.

The mother, delicately evoked by Chastain, is the avatar of grace. She is playful with her children, exuberant, lively, sensitive, quick to forgive.

It would be quite wrong, I think, to read them simply as evil and good, respectively. Both parents awaken something positive and negative in their children; each calls out to the other for completion. The film concentrates on the eldest of the three boys, played brilliantly by Hunter McCracken, who comes painfully of age under the influence of both parents, but who remains especially marked by his father’s hard-edged discipline.

We first meet him as a depressed middle-aged man (played by Sean Penn), working in the highly-competitive field of architecture and operating within literally hard-edged glass towers. It seems clear that he had imbibed too much nature and not enough grace.

What I find particularly fascinating—and it brings us to the theological heart of the film—is that both nature and grace are grounded in God and are part of his providential design. The brutal and the gentle; the violent and the peaceful; the competitive and the cooperative come together in a way that produces the rough order that we see in the cosmos and in human affairs. Thomas Aquinas, very much influenced by the book of Job, said that God is a “wise provider” who permits certain evils in order to bring about a greater good in the totality of his creation, and I think Terrence Malick is making much the same point in “Tree of Life.”

Perhaps just a word in closing about the title. In the third chapter of Genesis, we hear that Adam and Eve, after having eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, were expelled from the Garden of Eden and denied access to the Tree of Life.

What prevented them from participating in life, in other words, was the attempt to gain a knowledge of the play of good and evil that belongs to God alone. Grasping at perfect knowledge, they fell.

A basic message of the Bible is that, in the play of good and evil, in the tension between nature and grace, God is up to something beautiful, though we are unable to grasp it totally. The way to life, therefore, is a path of surrender and acceptance. I think that “Tree of Life” is communicating this same difficult but vital lesson.

一爬《生命樹》：On the Discovery Channel-ish 17 minutes

未看戲的，先看戲吧，尤其這一部，我看還是不要聽任何人說話，先闖入戲院，出來才討論吧。不打算看的話，也就無謂道聽塗說。不過，也有一篇很有意思的文章，並沒有談及《生命樹》的內容的，所以打算去看​而未看的，都可以讀：

• 《生命樹》的影評機遇（家明）

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自問戲劇鑑賞能力很低，記性又差。從戲院出來，通常都是一片空白，往往連劇情主線都未必噏得番出來，所以從沒有看完一齣電影會寫東西。因此（據說是）杜魯福說的：「每​人都有兩份職業，一是他正在做的，一是影評人。」於我並不適用。

但看了《生命樹》覺得好勁。而我認為這並不是一齣艱澀的戲​（對我來說，所謂難的是紅白藍兩生花那種），只是你真的要​很用心去看，而熟聖悉經／約伯應該會很有幫助。這齣戲很controversial，也有很多人在談論，我也google過十篇八篇本地、台灣、英美的影評，比較好／同意的有這一篇：

• 《生命樹》超越電影超越生命（登徒）

登徒這篇評論的文題和一些形容詞好像誇咗尐，但他的觀察和脈絡的掌握對我「再爬」生命樹將會很有幫助。

《生命樹》固然是一部很豐富的電影，有很多細節值得細味、回味，也會令喜愛它的觀眾覺得唔討論唔舒服。但當很多包括專業影評人寫了很多字之後，我還想寫，最想有人跟我討論的主要是一點：關於被戲稱為 "Discovery Channel" 的十七分鐘。

對於被某些觀眾鬧爆甚至離場示威的這十七分鐘﹣﹣畫面包括星球運轉火山爆發細菌粒子水母峽谷大海甚至恐龍﹣﹣暫時我還沒有看到一個有說服力的解讀。不少評論（好像登徒）認為是在「永恒的世界中放置一個小家庭怱怱數十年，將天地宇宙和塵世人生並置」之類。我覺得，是解得通的。

但我最直接的理解（沒經大腦的）就是這是上帝對片中所有關於信仰和生命的問題的回答。

因為，影片開首引用約伯記38章4-7節來為全劇定了調：

"Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation?
Tell me, if you understand.
Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!
Who stretched a measuring line across it?
On what were its footings set,
or who laid its cornerstone -
while the morning starts sang together
and all the angels shouted for joy?"

這是在義人約伯冚家受了很多苦好委屈好唔明好唔甘心，又和三位口水老友記辯論了一大餐，足足搞了卅八章之後，上帝出場親自回應（in a way 係大佢）的頭幾句。上帝一發言就講了四章，然後，在第 42 章約伯回答上帝說：「以往我風聞有你，如今我親眼見你。」（Gur 咗！）。

因此，我看這段 Discovery Channel 不是要拍出一個創世傳教故事，而是好像第 38-41 章把（彰顯上帝的）創造放在你面前，我 (Jack) 就服了。沉默無語，只有敬畏。沒有十七分鐘這麼長，又怎夠份量呢。

另，如果那是 Discovery Channel，也大槪應該配上像 Discovery Channel 那種背景音樂吧，為何要用嘭嘭聲很重手的 classical，包括一首不斷重複 lacrimosa ("tearful") 的安魂曲呢。（再爬時我會再留心他用了甚麼其他音樂，我只是對 Lacrimosa 十分深刻，因為非常 climatic，而雖然當時我不知道這首是甚麼歌，那刻覺得很悲壯）。

• 點唱時間：我今晚連續聽了無數次的 Lacrimosa（Elzbieta Towarnicka 唱）；原來本來是 Zbigniew Preisner 寫給好拍檔奇斯洛夫斯基用的，可惜 KK 早走了，這個 album 就變成了紀念 KK 的 "Requiem for My Friend"。

咦，如果這是一個回答，跟 nature vs grace 又有沒有關係呢？（媽媽說："There are two ways that you can choose to live your life: by Nature of by Grace."）我覺得那十七分鐘既是 nature 又是 grace 喎。

嘩我只係想講一樣嘢都寫得咁艱辛又覺詞不達意，原來有尐嘢真係要用電影語言去表達！Salute to Terrence Malick!

一爬《生命樹》，我很簡單地覺得它在表達一個人從懂性到中年大半生對上帝及人生的尋問，以及當中深深影響他的家人和事，而最後在一個類似天家的地方跟家人和自復和。沉重但 peaceful。近唔近傍呢？

又點解叫做《生命樹》呢？再爬，再諗。諗到的話，再續。

同細路仔《打擂台》

事情是咁的。我公司的義工隊久不久帶觧魚行學校的細路去街，衝出大角咀深水埗，增廣見聞。

2010-11學年最後的一次活動本來定於六月初，想帶他們過海、坐電車、行維園（好明顯別有用心）、入戲院。入戲院固然本身是一種新鮮的經驗，我也很想一箭雙雕地帶他們看一齣好電影。一直又以為／希冀《打擂台》會再浩浩蕩蕩地公映，點知無。而我們的日期亦多番拖延至七月初。

於是我們打算租同事大黑的 clubhouse 的私人影院看《打擂台》。誰知活動前幾天才得知這次參加的同學由小三至五不等，即時冒汗。恐怕他們有些不欣賞的話，就會毫不畀面地走來走去撩人講嘢搞搞震最終看不成戲瀨晒嘢。於是心想，不如開隻 Toy Story 3 罷了。反正 Toy Story 3 又好睇意識又正面又是卡通片。

但我不想當他們是細路仔（一定要看卡通片），而且，Toy Story 3 成屋玩具那種很中產的背景未免跟他們的處境很有距離。而我相信，我們小時候也看不少大人戲或大人書，不完全明白也可以喜歡，應該 OK 的。別放一齣 Kieslowski 就好。反正鮮魚行的細路比同齡兒童成熟，加上由於不少是新移民，其實會比外邊同級兒童還大一點。

於是想了幾天，決定搏一搏，我要他們看一齣優秀的港產片、一齣香港電影金像獎得獎影片，要他們歡樂，也要他們感染到戲裡戲外「要打，就一定要贏」的鬥志。

首先，多謝「碧海藍天」的私人影院座位剛剛夠，而且完全黑媽媽，音效也不賴，除了不用憑票入場和沒有爆谷可樂和其他觀眾，真是完全戲院 feel。

班細路真係估佢唔到咁掂！

一開場，就完全被吸咗入去，基本上係粒聲唔出，又或者乜都笑一餐，包括由於有位師兄叫陳飛揚，他們一見到劇中的飛揚就笑都停唔到，好過癮。偶爾有比較難明的，例如師傅張床空了代表死了，會有人口翕翕問，又會有人口翕翕答。唯一沒甚反應的是夜總會一幕，沒反應也是好事。他們也觀察入微，記得蠟鴨係由冰鮮雞「飾演」，又記得個「勁」字出現過在很多地方，包括「涼瓜排骨飯」隔籬！

看完了戲，有粒好細粒的細路有啲唔好意思細細聲咁問：「點解佢地最後喺度笑嘅？」小妹妹問了最重要的問題，好有慧根呀！

然後我的嘉賓豬滴滴姐姐帶啲細路討論了一會，問他們阿淳係贏定輸，有一粒大粒啲嘅細路好堅定咁企係度話：「贏。因為佢盡咗力，冇辜負到師父嘅期望。」我差點就流淚了！

十分滿分的話，我們做了個民調，細路平均畀 8.5 分。個別特別興奮的，說今個學年最喜歡今次的活動。

然後我也補充了一些幕後花絮，例如 MC Jin 不會讀中文但一早背熟和練好了自己和對手的稿，入場不用拿劇本，那份努力和珍惜機會做到最好的精神很值得我們學習。

我：「師傅話邊度係擂台呀？」
細路：「邊度都係擂台！」

細路，你地記得師傅話邊度都係擂台。你地人生都有好多擂台，啱啱過咗一個大考，未來仲有好多關。記住，我地要打，一定要贏！

節目完。

反高潮的是，我後來問老師和其他義工同事覺得怎樣。老師說 OK 我便放心了，因為知道劇中有粗口，學校未必受；至於同事，有些很欣賞。唯獨一個，他雙眼向上翻了 45 度說：「我唔睇港產片嘅！」我想串佢同𢱕佢。不過算罷了，費時嘥氣。