Gorgeous and ambitious, pretentious and baffling, tightly controlled yet free-flowing, “The Tree of Life” is unlike anything you’ve ever seen before. And yet it’s very much the culmination of everything Terrence Malick has done until now – all four features he’s made over the past four decades.
All his thematic and aesthetic signatures are there from earlier films like “Badlands” and “The Thin Red Line”: the dreamlike yet precise details, an obsession with both the metaphysical and the emotional, an ability to create suspense within a languid mood.
It is simultaneously mesmerizing and maddening as it encompasses nothing less than the nature of existence itself. As writer director, Malick ranges far and wide, from intimate moments with a growing family in 1950s Texas to the dawn of time – complete with awesome images of the cosmos and, yes, those dinosaurs you’ve surely heard about – and back again.
“The Tree of Life” is deeply spiritual, but Malick isn’t one to preach. Instead, he gives you the sense that he’s genuinely asking questions to which the answers may be unknowable – he’s putting them out there for himself, and for us all. Of course, we’ll never know his intentions: Malick is notoriously elusive, which is admirable from an artistic perspective but probably frustrating for those who’d like to know what the hell he means by all this.
But if you’re open to letting the imagery wash over you, to allowing yourself to get sucked into the film’s rhythms and fluidly undulating tones, you’ll be wowed. And even if you’re not a spiritual person yourself, given to the kind of seeking that frequently marks the characters’ voiceovers in “The Tree of Life,” you’re unlikely to find the film’s religious themes alienating.