The Tree of Life

There's a drama of rare beauty beyond the occasionally irritating abstractness of Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life. One would almost like to pare away the long, pretty special-effects shots of the Big Bang, life on Earth evolving, etc., and the hushed portentous voice-overs, through which characters address each other and God, leaving an elliptical, quietly powerful, and profound meditation on grief, family, and faith. Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain give iconic, yet nuanced, performances as 1950s small-town Texas parents whose opposing worldviews—in the parlance of the film, he follows the way of nature and she of grace—are manifest in their emotionally turbulent lives with their three sons. Jack (Hunter McCracken), the eldest, struggles to navigate his own way. His spiritual journey is the thematic core of the movie, but the scenes of him as a city-dwelling adult (Sean Penn) are never integrated coherently into the narrative. Malick has always had a way with young actors, and the scenes of Jack and his friends exploring their little world are perfectly realized. They have a wonderful vitality and an authentic sense of time and place. Malick's cosmic interludes, meanwhile, tend to frustrate rather than illuminate, but it's also possible that without them, the film wouldn't attain its tremendous cumulative power.