The Tree Of Life


   When he's making his own films, Terence Malick always hews to his own view of narrative structure.   Long takes, long silences and stream-of-consciousness voiceovers are standard.  So are big themes.  


   The natural world, and our place in it,  is one of his favorite haunts in films like The Thin Red Line, The New World, Days of Heaven and now The Tree of Life.   With admirable chutzpah,  Malick sets out to draw a dramatic circle around the whole of the known universe.   It could work.  Malick did something similar in The Thin Red Line quite successfully.   In The Tree of Life the result is an amazingly literal, bloated and ham-fisted ode to existence.  The photography is gorgeous, a given with Malick,  but only so much awe can be sucked from watching the birth of supernovas set to a crescendo of  gregorian chant.


    Brad Pitt is fine as a middle class Texas patriarch and the child actors are equally good.  Sean Penn is given very little to do other than mope his way through massive glassed-in high rises, a clearly more successful son of Pitt's underachiever.  It's meant to read as a slice of life, with the joys and sorrows of family life echoed by the changing tide of nature.    But when characters are heard asking existential questions of God while we watch majestic, and eventually tedious, images of natural splendor,  it's iphone time.  I didn't boo, but if I'd been in the Cannes audience I might have.