There is little sense in trying to describe the film’s plot; Malick’s artistry is his rejection of convention. If you have seen the one-sheet poster, which is simply a geometrical mosaic of dozens of still images from the film, then you have some sense of what it is like. Malick and his team of editors have assembled a story out of fleeting moments in time that in ways both profound and mundane connect the trials and tribulations of one American family into the depth of the cosmos, revealing them to be both essential to the meaning of the universe (whatever that may be--Malick is not arrogant enough to suggest that he somehow knows) and an infinitesimal blip in the space-time continuum. The film’s imagery will be immediately familiar to those who have seen Malick’s other films--shafts of light penetrating a ceiling of tree limbs, long grasses waving in the breeze or underwater, characters diminished in the enormity of nature around them, often captured with roving camera moves that seem to be both prescient and completely in the moment--but that familiarity works as another strand in the film’s fundamental essence, bringing together so many elements of Malick’s previous films into an evocative masterwork. For the first time in decades, he has achieved the height of his artistry in fully meshing the emotional and the aesthetic; they tug you in the same direction, rather than against each other.

The majority of the story takes place in Waco, Texas, which is where Malick spent much of his childhood, in the 1950s. His on-screen adolescent surrogate is Jack (Hunter McCracken), who is the oldest of three brothers. They live in a picturesque neighborhood that is defined by wide streets, huge trees, and low-lying ranch houses that always seem to be open, even when the doors are closed. Jack’s parents, who are appropriately known only as Mr. and Mrs. O’Brien (Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain), are fundamental opposites: Whereas he is a strong-willed disciplinarian, she is tender-hearted and forgiving. His stern intensity and her angelic acceptance are each projections of their love, and Malick presents them without explicit judgment. While each parenting approach has its merits, each has a tendency to stray into excess, with Mr. O’Brien’s discipline sometimes boiling over into simple violence while Mrs. O’Brien’s gentleness threatens to lapse into a complete lack of control. Malick’s real focus, though, is on childhood (which is why we never hear the parents’ first names), and the film’s most transcendent moments are the ones in which he and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, who also shot The New World, imbue the antics of childhood with a spiritual dimension (the best being the neighborhood kids running behind and playing in the clouds of DDT smoke being spread to control mosquitoes; the film successfully turns toxic exposure into a poetic evocation of childhood abandon).

While the majority of The Tree of Life takes place in the ’50s, there are also scenes set in the present day, where we meet Jack as an adult (played by Sean Penn) whose career as an architect reflects his father’s work as an engineer (he is both a product of and a rebellion against his father’s discipline). Interwoven throughout the film are scenes that take place at the forming of the universe and possibly its ultimate destruction. One sequence late in the film may be taking place in the afterlife, and the manner in which Malick connects it with the seemingly trivial details of everyday life and the overwhelming enormity of the universe in which those trivial details take place forms the film’s spiritual core. Other filmmakers would be tempted to satirize small-town life in the Eisenhower era or politicize its gender dynamics, but Malick is content, especially at this later stage in his career, to let the events speak for themselves, a move that is as deeply and profoundly daring as it is moving.

Copyright ©2011 James Kendrick

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