Ambitious and wildly experimental, Terrence Malick’s often glorious, sometimes exasperating “The Tree of Life” tackles Big Questions that likely haven’t even occurred to Michael Bay and the other purveyors of this season’s expensive, brain-dead entertainments.
While it’s entirely possible to dismiss this philosophizing head trip of a movie as pretentious, tedious and often inscrutable New Age hooey, as a minority of critics did at the Cannes Film Festival (where it went on to take the top prize), you may be doing so at your own peril.
Based on my own two viewings, “The Tree of Life” is likely to inspire more after-screening debate over its meaning than all of the summer’s other movies combined. It’s overflowing with powerful images that will stay with me a long time, even if I still can’t explain some of them.
To me, one eye-popping 18-minute sequence alone is worth the price of admission.
Partly inspired by photography from the Hubble Space Telescope and co-supervised by Douglas Trumbull (the legendary special-effects genius behind “2001: A Space Odyssey”), this part of the movie elaborately and beautifully depicts the beginnings of the universe and life on Earth, up to the age of dinosaurs. It’s accompanied, like the rest, by a soaring Alexandre Desplat score that heavily samples classical composers.
Malick, the enigmatic writer-director of just four movies since 1978, leaves it to the viewer to figure out how this awe-inspiring sequence relates to the fractured, more intimate story that takes up the other two hours of “The Tree of Life.”
Calling it a story may be a stretch for what we see: a series of spectacularly beautiful, if fragmentary, recollections by an anguished architect (Sean Penn) of his elegiac, gradually more stressful childhood in Waco, Texas, in the 1950s.
There are barely any actual conversations in these scenes, some of which last only seconds.
Dialogue tends to be mumbled. There are whispered, barely audible (in some cases deliberately inaudible) voice-over prayers and lamentations, mostly triggered by the long-ago, off-screen death of one of Penn’s brothers in the opening scene.
The film is dominated by Brad Pitt, in perhaps his most impressive performance, as an inventor who alternates between treating his three sons with carefully controlled love and military-style discipline — especially the oldest (excellently played by newcomer Hunter McCracken), who grows up to be Penn.
A crew-cutted martinet so formal that he works on his car in tailored gabardine slacks, Pitt’s character is posited by Malick to represent unforgiving nature.
Grace, or spirituality, is embodied by his more free-spirited wife, who gives love more freely and is luminously portrayed by newcomer Jessica Chastain in a star-making role.
“That’s where God lives,” she says, pointing to the sky. Later, she is seen floating in the air and reposing in a glass casket, Snow White-style. There is a simmering tension between her and Pitt that on a single occasion escalates into a scary physical confrontation.
Working with five editors, Malick shapes these images just enough to suggest a growing distance between young McCracken and the father, a failed musician and increasingly frustrated entrepreneur. Dad clearly favors the doomed middle son (Laramie Eppler), who in turn is taunted by his older brother.
The scenes of the boys at play (Tye Sheridan portrays the youngest) are quite magical and, for this baby boomer, capture the era’s innocence perhaps better than any movie I can recollect. Danger lurks everywhere as the youngsters play in an abandoned house and cavort in a cloud of DDT, an insecticide that was later banned in this country.
Some may feel like they’re being forced to watch somebody else’s old home movies, albeit the most beautiful ones they’ve ever seen (big props to cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki and production designer Jack Fisk). I’m not sure Malick, who reportedly drew on his own Texas childhood, really needed two hours of these scenes to make his point, whatever it may be.
Prepare to spend at least 15 minutes, or about twice its length, speculating afterward about the final sequence, in which Penn (who has less than 10 minutes in the entire film) traipses through the desert. It’s not exactly a spoiler to report he finds himself wandering with lost souls (including the family of his youth) on a beach.
The Rapture? The afterlife? A cathartic breakthrough in Penn’s psychotherapy? Overreaching by the director?
Malick doesn’t talk about his movies, but I’d like to think this former philosophy instructor at MIT would tell you there are no wrong answers.
Any movie that so resolutely refuses to explain its mysteries — it opens with a quote from God to Job and is serious to the point of being humorless — is obviously not intended for everybody. It also requires a certain tolerance for aphorisms such as, “Unless you love, your life will flash by.”
For all its flaws, “The Tree of Life” is a stunning exception to the rule that you can safely check your brain at the popcorn counter until after Labor Day. That’s enough to place it among the year’s best movies, or at least most-talked-about ones.