The Tree of Life

Directed by Terrence Malick

(PG-13)

***

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Last weekend’s winner of the Palme d’Or at the Cannes film festival is “visionary cinema on an unashamedly huge scale,” said Peter Bradshaw in the London Guardian. Director Terrence Malick, best known for Badlands and Days of Heaven, starts his film with a glimpse of a disenchanted executive, Jack O’Brien (Sean Penn), who’s facing a moment of crisis. But soon Jack is carried back to “an ecstatically remembered 1950s boyhood” in Waco, Texas. Though Brad Pitt gives one of his best performances, as Jack’s “demanding, abrasive,” yet much-loved father, “this really isn’t his movie,” said Andrew O’Hehir in Salon.com. Malick wants to connect the life of this one Texas family of four to the life of the universe, so he brackets Jack’s childhood with mystical footage of outer space, dinosaurs, jellyfish, and embryos. And while there’s something “pretty much nuts” about the film’s attempt at cosmic insight, it’s also “a noble crazy.” The closing scene is simply preposterous, said Anthony Lane in The New Yorker. Yet if not everything holds together, “there is no mistaking Malick’s unfailing ability to grab at glories on the fly.”