The Tree of Life (PG). Director: Terrence Malick. Starring: Sean Penn, Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain, Hunter McCracken, Laramie Eppler. 138 minutes
The relationship between brothers is not like any other. Growing up, brothers, especially if they were born close together, can be at once the best of friends, and the fiercest of adversaries. I have two brothers, and to this day I can identify the ways in which my character has been shaped by my relationships with them.
There are many layers to Terence Malick's remarkable new film The Tree of Life. As noted by reviewers such as American Jesuit James Martin, the film is first and foremost a meditation, and like any act of meditation, it will speak to each individual in a unique voice. To me, it contains one of the most touching and authentic portrayals of childhood brotherly love that I have seen on screen.
This is a film with esoteric aspirations. In his review Martin poignantly describes watching it as like 'living inside a prayer'; this is apt, for, like Malick's earlier work, notably the sublime war film The Thin Red Line, it contains, in place of voiceover narration, the whispered, questioning prayers of its characters.
These tumble across the film's mundane, 1950s American suburban setting, but follow us also, literally, into space, and into the far reaches of the earth's history; to the very corners of the universe and of time, which Malick shows us in a way that sets his characters' tiny lives in the context of a vast continuum of existence.
Not that this makes these lives seem inconsequential. On the contrary, the stylised images of roiling, looming space, accompanied by evocative classical music, attempt to recreate on film nothing less than the formation of the world, with the characters' existence shown explicitly to be the end result of this creative event.
Yet despite such metaphysical considerations, the film's most striking feature is how it portrays ordinariness with such truth and beauty that it is rendered extraordinary.
The core of the film is a portrayal of the childhood of pre-adolescent Jack (McCracken), who grows up in the suburb of Waco, Texas in the 1950s. He has two younger brothers, an adoring, affectionate mother (Chastain), and strict disciplinarian father (Pitt).
Jack is nurtured by his mother, yet comes to relate more closely to his emotionally distant father, after he takes the first tentative steps across the threshold of experience (sin, sexuality), and learns