The story centers around a family with three boys in the 1950s. The eldest son witnesses the loss of innocence.
This is visionary cinema on an unashamedly huge scale: cinema that's thinking big. Malick makes an awful lot of other film-makers look timid and negligible by comparison.
Love The Tree of Life or loathe it, it is impossible to fault Malick's ambition and not to admire a man who is making big, personal, non-genre films at a time when many filmmakers are playing it safe. Long may he continue.
Unwinding a jump-cutting meta-narrative with a huge classic soundtrack and almost no dialogue, The Tree of Life isn’t the mess or the masterpiece that people were predicting. It’s something else: cosmic, cryptic, frustrating, frustrated, awesome, intimate and, really, the sort of film that cinema can’t do without.
It may be frustratingly elliptical but ultimately there is clarity in the simple, even banal final observation that ‘the only way to be happy is to love’. Amen to that.
There is simply nothing like it out there: profound, idiosyncratic, complex, sincere and magical; a confirmation that cinema can aspire to art.
The Tree of Life won't resonate with everyone, but viewers approaching it with an open mind and a curious spirit may feel it touching their soul in a way that few films can.
Yes, it's flawed - including keening voiceovers that don't know when to shut up - but The Tree of Life is both a visually enthralling and a thrillingly ambitious attempt to grasp at a very big picture.
To infinity and beyond... Terrence Malick’s spiritual odyssey is baffling, unique and overspilling with wonder. Don’t wait for the DVD.
You might not always understand or agree with him, but you will be fascinated to see what he’s going to come up with next.
One for the history books.
It is of a piece with Malick's rapt tribute to nature and the universe, to the strange grandeur of being alive. Nobody else could have made it. Few would even dare to try.
Malick seems to be trying to crystallise - in his own abstract way - a running theme in his work that dates back to Days of Heaven: that however significant or insignificant our lives turn out to be, our continued existence is a miracle in itself. If that makes The Tree of Life sound woolly and pretentious - and it is - it also makes it strangely satisfying.
For his admirers, Malick’s films are churches that cast their audiences as worshippers in search of higher truths; The Tree of Life invites only sniggering in the pews.
The film may look good but it is staggeringly pretentious.
This film may not be for everyone, but it makes other movies and other movie-makers look timid and feeble. I am an evangelist for it.
Malick would be better off writing poetry than spending millions on something so esoteric.
Terrence Malick's Palme d'Or-winning The Tree of Life begins more like a prayer than a movie. It demands hush and attention but it also craves reverence; it certainly requires calm, a work that needs to be watched, not just recollected, in tranquillity.
The Tree of Life doesn't just offer a God's-eye-view of the universe, it aspires to be the film that the deity would make if He wielded a movie camera. But I doubt that even God would have got this crazy, exalted movie financed – for that, you really have to be Terrence Malick.
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