By Nancy Chuda Founder and Editor in Chief of LuxEco Living and Healthy Child Healthy World
Where do we go when we die? How can we find mercy, forgiveness and love?
There is no turning back the clock. Time does not wait for those who are waiting to find answers in their lives. But time does stand still for hours in Malick’s fifth feature, The Tree of Life starring Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain and Sean Penn. It premiered at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival where it won the Palme d’Or before being released in the United States.
A superbly conceived but somewhat stilted family drama rich in Christianity’s emotional tapestries and the upheavals and uncertainties of life, reveals Brad Pitt who plays father to three sons, one being Sean Penn, brilliantly portrayed in his youth by Hunter McCracken.
Penn grows up to discover the weight of the world. He wrestles with the death of his younger brother and his own haunting childhood having been tied to the constraints of modernity and his emotional architecture that holds him hostage to even more primal memories; wounds of abuse, abandonment and resentment towards a tyrannical father whose rage keeps him trapped in feelings of despair for his own insignificance and sense of failure. In this case, the evil and wrong doings bred into the eldest child, Penn, awakens a profound sibling psychology and questions the nature of good versus evil between brothers.
Life does not provide beautiful rainbows of hope from sickness, suffering and death. Instead, Malick’s Machiavellian determination was to craft a film about the ultimate salvation and to find God in all things beautiful and beyond. A stretch of his imagination and special effects becomes the real backdrop in this drama. While seated in a darkened theater we are treated to a Smithsonian utopia of natural occurrences some real and others surreal; lava emerging from volcanoes, galaxies spinning in space, sea creatures emerging from out of darkness, the breaking of dawn and a new day. All signs pointing to the continuity of life and death. Even a baby dinosaurs plea for life is meant to captivate if not consume non-creationists. A bit too far of a stretch for me.
In The Tree of Life, Malick’s interpretation, his own philosophy, is based on characters who are co-dependent on a savior and their need for salvation. And through this experience we are led to believe that the sins of our fathers, literally interpreted through Malick’s words and choice for musical composition, here is where Bach’s Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor warns of an omniscient trend- “to do unto others what they would have done unto you.”
We are left questioning what can’t ever be resolved. Why do the good die young? And in the end, are we all God’s children?
In fact, from a historical Christian perspective, we are. But what comes to life for those who do not believe in a savior is the sense that sin remains a true force in all human life as does good. Perhaps Malick’s greater interpretation and fine work in Days of Heaven reveals that heaven is here on earth and because of earth itself there are many proverbial trees for life.
True salvation love and forgiveness comes from finding compassion for having bear witness to life’s many obstacles. Sickness, suffering and death are the shared tribunals in all of our lives no matter what. God within or without, we each seek to find answers before awakening to a self for higher purpose and for humanity. The Tree of Life is none other than life itself.
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Nancy Chuda is a seasoned broadcast journalist, television writer/producer, talk show host and author. Her career spans over three decades having appeared on both national and cable television.
In 1971 she authored one of America’s first low-calorie cookbooks, How To Gorge George Without Fattening Fanny, published by Hawthorn Books. Appearing as a regular guest on Dinah’s Place, Dinah Shore’s ABC daytime talk show. And later on The Johnny Carson Show, The Today Show with Barbara Walters, Merv Griffin, Phil Donahue, and David Frost. In 1972, Nancy and ABC’s Good Morning America co-produced Michael Krause produced a cable program, The Low- Calorie Gallery, based on her best selling cook book. In 1975, hired by Warner-Amex as part of a creative team, she was responsible for hosting and producing content for Columbus Then and Now, a program, the invention of QUBE, an interactive television system which played a pivotal role in the history of American cable television. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUBE
In 1978 she developed a series for ABC’s Good Morning America based on an article which appeared in Mother Earth News magazine. The Integral Urban House, a case study project and model for a sound urban habitat sponsored by the Farallones Institute in Berkley California was the first example of green architecture ever to be televised.
In 1979, Nancy co-produced and hosted Sunnyside a Los Angeles based public affairs program viewed on the CBS affiliate station KNXT, From 1980-1984, she appeared on KABC’s Eyewitness News as entertainment reporter and film critic.
Her environmental advocacy began when her daughter was diagnosed with cancer. In 1990 she co-produced an Emmy nominated ABC Variety Special, An Evening With Friends For The Environment to benefit Mothers and Others for a Livable Planet one of the first national children’s environmental health advocacy groups in which she served as a volunteer.
Currently, she is the co-founder and President Emeritus of Healthy Child Healthy World, a non-profit organization established to honor the Chuda’s only child, Colette, who died in 1991 at the age of 5 from Wilm’s tumor a nonhereditary childhood cancer. She is also the co-founder of The Colette Chuda Environmental Fund, a donor-advised fund which supports major epidemiological research on children’s health.
Nancy has won numerous awards for her advocacy. In 1996, the California League of Conservation Voters Environmental Leadership Award, The Healthy Schools Heroes Award, presented to both her and her husband James Chuda by California Governor Gray Davis for their legislative efforts in securing The Healthy Schools Act which was signed into law in September, 2000. In 2003, Parent’s Magazine published an article Mom’s On A Mission and awarded Nancy for her environmental leadership for children’s environmental health.
She serves as an associate of the Director’s Council of Public Representatives of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and was appointed by President Clinton’s Health and Human Services Secretary, Donna Shalala, to serve as a member of the National Advisory Council for the National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) a position she held for four years.
In 2010, along with her husband James she founded LuxEcoLiving.
