The Tree of Life

Terrence Malick’s meditation on life, death and the whole damn thing is the kind of movie we rarely see in North America: a work of art, without apologies or compromise. A Rhodes scholar at Oxford, Malick studied philosophy before becoming a filmmaker. Tree of Life is nakedly autobiographical. Like Terrence, Sean Penn’s character Jack is born in the early 1940s and grows up in Texas, but he’s rocked in early adulthood by the suicide of a younger brother. Decades later, he’s still struggling with the fallout from this spiritual crisis, and trying to reconcile his love for his mother, his anger towards his father.

There’s more to it than that. Malick wants to marry the personal with the universal, the micro and the macro, to evoke not only his own past, but the miracle of life itself. Astonishingly beautiful in passages, filmed in natural light by DP Emmanuel Lubezki and scored by Alexandre Desplat, Tree of Life won the Palme d’Or at Cannes.

Profound, idiosyncratic, complex, sincere and magical; a confirmation that cinema can aspire to art.

Ian Nathan, Empire

The result actually plays like a divine pronouncement, cosmic in scope and oracular in tone, a cinematic sermon on the mount that shows its creator in exquisite form.

Rick Groen, Globe and Mail

Some of the most psychologically insightful and ecstatic filmmaking imaginable.

Mick Lasalle, San Francisco Chronicle

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