[9.6/10] “Theodicy” is the fancy term for the problem of evil -- why would an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving deity create a world where evil is allowed to exist? It’s one of the fundamental questions that Western theology grapples with, and it raises subsidiary questions that can be just as significant and thorny. Why choose to be good when it seems as though evil is not always punished and good is not always rewarded? What does the goodness or badness of our actions matter in the mind-boggling vastness of the universe and in the incomprehensible length of eons between its beginning and its end?

*The Tree of Life* addresses these questions head on, but does so through the filter of a young boy trying different moral stances on for size. Terrence Mallick delivers a sumptuous, naturalistic picture, that grounds some of the most pressing and intractable issues in moral philosophy in the day-to-day struggles and growth of a young man coming of age in Waco, Texas. As gorgeous at the cinematography of the film is, what stands out about the film is how it takes such a provincial, prosaic struggle to figure out how to be in the confines of your family and small town, and turns into a universal meditation on the struggle and questioning of what it means to be good.

The film centers on Jack, a prepubescent boy who’s part of a nuclear family and figuring out the way of the world. He has an angel and a devil on his shoulders, each in their own way pushing him to take a particular path. His mother (Jessica Chastain) is a devout woman, full of grace and forgiveness who tells Jack and his two brothers to love everyone. She is a bastion of empathy, one who’s constantly shown taking delight in the joys of her children, in playing with them, teaching them, bringing them through the world. She is the image of radiance, and the beacon that calls her sons to the path of kindness and caring.

On the other side sits Jack’s father (Brad Pitt), a harder man who teaches his sons that the good are taken advantage of. He teaches them strength, discipline, the notion that corners have to be cut, rules broken, spines stiffened in order to get ahead in this world and have a decent life. It would be so easy for Jack’s father to be a pure villain, and he certainly casts a shadow over his children in this film, but *The Tree of Life* makes things more complicated than that.

It makes Mr. O’Brien someone who feels stepped on by life. He had aspirations to be a great musician that were crushed and never to be realized. He struggles to write patents and secure a financial future for his wife and children and feels the fruits of his labor are stolen by men who shake hands and smile with the judge. He is harsh with his family, taking his frustrations out on them in unfair and unfortunate ways, but the film takes time to make him comprehensible, even as it paints him as a cross to be borne. He loves his children as much as Mrs. O’Brien does, demanding their affection but earnestly wanting it, wanting them to have a better life than he has, trying in so human a fashion to make them better at this race than he is.

In the valley between those two major figures, Jack questions how he should act, what he should be. His father does what he judges to be terrible things, hypocritical things, ungodly things, and yet he seems to exist unscathed and unchallenged. His mother, so kind and so decent and so loving, loses one of her sons when he’s only nineteen, asking her own questions about why an equally loving God would allow such a terrible thing to happen. It’s in this environment that Jack tests his boundaries, that he begins to wonder where the divine is, where justice could lie, in such a world, in such a life.

Mallick and legendary director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki trace the contours of both that world and that life, tying the two together. Unusually for a film so small in scope, *The Tree of Life* depicts the creation of the universe, the expanse of stars and galaxies stretching across millennia and light years of space. The film puts on a beautiful cosmic ballet, with swirling colors and swooshes of light and form that blur the line between breathtaking spacescapes and Renaissance art.

Lubezki’s camera follows the formation of the universe with the emergence of life on this lonely planet, from primordial ooze to undulating fish to dinosaurs capable of showing mercy and indifference. It’s then that the film follows Jack’s own growth, shown as momentous and lovingly as the creation of the whole world. The image of his little foot in his father’s hands graces the film’s poster, and Mallick uses a light touch as the curious little boy begins to experience the vastness and wonder of the world around him.

By connecting the cosmologically large with the tiniest and most ordinary of human lives, Mallick brings the two in sync, communicating the depth and breadth of the questions Jack is answering in an immense thunderous universe that makes any life, any choices, seem so small and insignificant, and yet metonym for what for those miniscule lives to be a part of so great a whole.

Confronted with the seeming injustice of the world, Jack forswears grace. He stops struggling to be good, to not give into his baser desires. He rebukes his mother; he breaks windows; he’s even cruel to a small amphibian with the misfortune to cross paths with young boys playing. He crosses each line and waits for divine retribution, to find the biblical bulwark for his bad behavior that never seems to come.

But then he pushes further, trying to goad his brother into fights, taunts him into jamming his finger into lamp sockets, and test the limits of his baser impulses. Finally he has his brother put his finger over a B.B. gun, pulls the trigger, and hurts his sibling. It’s then that Jack feels remorse for his actions and reaches a turning point. He seeks forgiveness. He seeks offers himself up as repentance. He understands the existence of other lives and others’ pain and the personal cost of extracting it from innocent people.

The film is opaque about whether Jack finds his connection to the divine again, but he feels the pull of goodness from his simply acts of empathy. From loving his mom, from understanding his dad, from placing a hand on the shoulder of a burned fellow boy whom he recoiled from previously. That is his answer to the problem of evil, to the indifference of the world. There is goodness for goodness sake, whether or not he can feel the imprimatur of God, and Jack embraces it.

He grows up to be a man in a great glass tower (Sean Penn), seemingly the success his father wanted him to be, but again feels the pull of that. The film contrasts the constructed beauty of downtown Dallas with the gorgeous naturalism of the countryside. Trees grow, outside the O’Brien home to mark the time from the children’s youth to their adulthood, in the spaces between the concrete in the city, serving as a reminder of where Jack came from. Even in this tamed world, there is life that pokes through, that cannot be repressed or forgotten.

The film’s end is impressionistic, but it suggests Heaven, it suggests reward, that for all Jack’s uncertainty and the doubt his parents express over the course of the film, they and all whom they love are to be reunited. Whether it’s meant to be real or just in Jack’s head or some combination of the two, there is catharsis in all this wondering, all this doubting, all this struggle leading to a place of reunion and love. Whatever they flaws and falters, Jack feels that, receives that, the chance to renew his affections with the people he cares about. It’s a powerful finish to a powerful film.

There is next-to-no exposition in *The Tree of Life*. There is barely a plot, more a series of moments built around a theme, piece of this life sewn together to make a greater whole. It is not a movie in the way we think of movies, depicting the beginning of time before delving into the mundane but meaningful lives of its subjects and drifting back again into the majesty of the great unknown and beyond. But that is also its source of power, creating something affecting and visceral from the truth of it, whether that truth emerges from the sweep of the cosmos or the embrace between mother and child. It is an everything movie, one that reaches from the beginning to the end, that speaks about one thing and yet speaks to all things. It is beauty. It is grace. Captured on celluloid, but transcending the mores of form and convention and the grammar of film, it is life.

I saw what might have been the most unique movie since "Blue Velvet". At times I both hated it and loved it.

Imagine if someone tasked you to make a movie about life. Not life itself but the essence of life. Where would you possibly begin?

We nearly turned off the movie about 30 minutes in. There was a small plot twist and then ten minutes of beautiful trippiness. The problem is that it seemed like it was going to go on for the rest of the film. That part of the film was difficult because at that point I had not figured out how to watch the film. I know that sounds rather vague but I don't want to give away too much. Once I understood what was going on I completely get the scene and why it was necessary (hint: it is absolutely beautiful on a big screen).

In short the film should not be taken literally. There are many interesting and beautiful scenes and dialog but the whole is soooo much greater than the individual parts. The film, moreso than any other film I've ever scene, is meant to be an experience. I read through the various reviews on rottentomatoes.com and reviewers either loved it or hated it. In a weird kind of way I completely understood what the bad reviews were saying. I can't say that it is among my favorite (there is a difference between "best" and "favorite") movies of all time or that I would watch it again any time soon but I was completely engrossed from start to finish.

If I were to change one thing it would have been the religious aspect to the film. I understand that it is part of the human experience (for some reason we feel the need to invent gods) but one scene kind of made me cringe. I know, I know... I am biased.

I know that this seems kind of scattered but it is extremely difficult to quantify the film. As an aside, this was a beautiful film to watch so you'd be doing yourself a favor if you watch it on a quality setup.

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Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life is an attempt to inject some cosmic wonder into the most mundane American story.

In the 1950s, two parents bring up three boys in an American white middle-class, small-town existence. The mother (Jessica Chastain) radiates love and warmth, while the father (Brad Pitt) feels the obligation to be cold and distant in order to prepare his sons for the cruel world that awaits them. As we are informed at the beginning of the film, sometime during this mid-century upbringing, one of the boys would eventually die. We are also shown flashfowards to the present day, when the eldest son Jack, now a successful architect working in New York City, reflects on the death of his brother decades ago. There is very little conventional spoken dialogue in this family drama. The story is told through voiceovers on top of a rich series of images, these monologues representing the inner thoughts, doubts and fears of the characters.

But Malick adds something on top of this, one of the most controversial turns in Hollywood filmmaking in recent years. Early on we are treated to a depiction of the creation of the universe and of life on Earth, from the initial clouds of gas right after the Big Bang to small nebulae, then big galaxies like our own Milky Way, the Earth as an inchoate ball of lava, life arising in tidepools, and then into the era of the dinosaurs. These special effects were created by Douglas Trumbull, best known for the cosmic visuals of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The titles of the film quote from the Book of Job: "Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth, when the morning stars sang together?"

I get what Malick is trying to do here, that is, to show that the trials and tribulations of an individual human life are part of some vast unknown plan. Nonetheless, while I can understand this on an intellectual level, the film does not seem to reconcile the two layers into a single coherent plot. The film is indeed a visual feast on a first viewing (a high-definition release watched on a projector is nearly as stunning as 2001), but the The Tree of Life is much harder to sit through on a repeat viewing when one knows that it doesn't quite hang together. Furthermore, as thought-provoking as the story of the boys' 1950s upbringing is, the last part with its scenes of petty delinquency goes on forever and should have been cut. Finally, the ending which I won't spoil here is a total trope, not at all a fresh take on the meaning of life.

At a time when Hollywood is widely regarded as stagnant, I can appreciate a director like Malick who seeks to do something unexpected, but I find The Tree of Life to be rather a noble failure.

**Visually grandiose and made with true technical and artistic mastery, it is a film with difficult and indigestible themes, which will scare the audience with its slowness and tiring atmosphere.**

There are films that are made for some audiences and not for most people, the general public. This film is one of them: being what it is, it doesn't even try to capture our sympathy or attention. The film did very well on the festivals circuit and even won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, in addition to being acclaimed by critics and intellectuals. However, it was not understood by almost anyone but them, it seems extremely cryptic in its message and script, and it was not able to please the mass audience: the proof is in the fact that it received three Oscar nominations without, however, winning any, and not even have been considered by the Globes or BAFTA.

The film revolves around a middle-class Texan family between the present and the 1950s, and focuses particularly on the figure of Jack, the couple's son. The film shows how he lives his childhood, the unequal relationship he has with his parents (a more tolerant and good mother, and a more authoritarian and disillusioned father) and the way both, each in their own way, they try to prepare and educate him. In between, we observe the way they react to the death of one of the youngest members of the family. The film seeks to relate all this to the search for a meaning for human life, showing us images of the planet's history, and others that refer us to various spiritual and metaphysical meanings. We even got access to the characters' prayers and thoughts.

All of this is very beautiful and interesting, and I even liked the characters because they are believable, genuine, well-built, with a rich psychology and manage to capture the audience's sympathy. The problem is that this audience may not even be able to handle the first half hour of film! When cinema deals with philosophical and spiritual themes, it tends to make very meditative and slow films, which drag on and seem heavier than would be desirable. And this movie didn't even try to get away from that and make something minimally palatable. And as if that wasn't enough, director Terrence Malick decides to use a non-linear narrative that confuses us even more!

Overall, the cast did a very good job, within what was asked of him: Brad Pitt is a strong actor, who draws fans to the cinema by himself. He seems quite mature and aged in some scenes, but I think the character demanded that from him, as if visually conveying how old and world-weary the character felt. Sean Penn is just as good at what he does, even if the actor doesn't seem aware of what he's actually doing! Young Hunter McCracken, at this point, managed to untangle himself just as well and with more of a sense of direction and focus. Jessica Chastain, for her part, is stunning, and the visual beauty and costumes were particularly sympathetic to her.

On a technical level, the film really deserves to be named as one of the most significant of the year 2011, given its visual and aesthetic quality. The cinematography is some of the best and most beautifully executed I've seen in a long time, and that's all the more remarkable considering that director Malick tried to restrict the use of CGI and adopt other more conventional visuals to achieve the same results. We saw something similar in scenes from “The Fountain”, a film that came to my mind several times while watching this film, either because of the elaborate visuals or the spiritual and metaphysical theme. I also liked the sets, costumes and props, which were able to accurately recreate the atmosphere of the American middle class of the 1950s. The music and sound effects also do a very good job.

A movie that wants to mean more than what is actually telling.

Taking a lot of things borrowed from 2001, it doesn't even come close to have such a deep an interesting meaning.