If you wait long enough, a new Terrence Malick film comes around. “The Tree of Life,” Malick’s latest, is his fifth feature in thirty-eight years. His nearest rival, in the slow-burner stakes, is Thomas Pynchon, whose first five novels took thirty-four years to appear. Both men have fallen victim to our prejudice. We simply cannot believe that a creative artist might, out of respectable diffidence, fight shy of fame. We therefore assume that a man like Malick is playing a devilish game of anti-publicity, in order to stoke our curiosity; no less perilous, however, is our assumption that merely because a movie, or a novel, was pondered, and kept secret, for a lengthy period it must tower above its more precipitate peers. Not so. Don’t forget Edgar G. Ulmer’s coruscating “Detour” (1945), which was shot in six days.
The most startling thing in “The Tree of Life” is the sight of Sean Penn waking up and going to work in a skyscraper. Nothing rum about that, but, if my calculations are correct, Penn’s character, Jack, is the first person in any Malick movie to be living in the present day. “Badlands” (1973) is set in the nineteen-fifties; “Days of Heaven” (1978) unfolds in the early twentieth century, showing soldiers heading off to the First World War; “The Thin Red Line” (1998) takes place before and during the Battle of Guadalcanal; and “The New World” (2005) summons us to the age of Pocahontas. It is no sin to veer away from your own time—indeed, to stick doggedly to it can smack of historical vanity—but the suspicion lingers that Malick finds something distasteful in our current mores. Jack is employed in architecture or design (we see him browsing briefly through plans); more than that we cannot say, because the dialogue is either mumbled or faded out, and what draws Malick’s gaze is not the grind of an office meeting but Jack’s downcast glances out of high windows and the flashes of transcendence that are vouchsafed by patterns of glass and steel. Michael Mann, you could argue, is no less obsessed with the physical spaces that we inhabit, yet to experience “The Tree of Life” is less like watching a Mann movie than like reading Emerson’s “The Over-Soul.”
Before long, Malick retreats into the past—to be specific, into the Texas of the nineteen-fifties. The film was shot largely in the town of Smithville, although we see a truck with the words “City of Waco” on its side. That is almost the only traffic; children play, unthreatened, on tranquil streets, under skies of perpetual balm. Among the kids is Jack (now played by the excellent Hunter McCracken), a boy growing up with his younger brothers, R.L. (Laramie Eppler) and Steve (Tye Sheridan), under the wing of their parents, Mr. O’Brien (Brad Pitt) and his wife (Jessica Chastain). Neither of the parents earns a first name, and, like many of Malick’s dramatis personae, they feel at once solid and ungraspable. The mother, with her Pre-Raphaelite copper hair, is little short of an angel—at one point, she dances on air, like Winona Ryder at the end of “Beetlejuice”—and somehow, though the O’Briens are not well off, she never wears the same dress twice. The father works at a local factory, but Malick chooses, again, not to bother us with details. Of more concern to him is what O’Brien could have done: he plays the piano at home and the organ in church, and he puts on Brahms’s Fourth Symphony during supper. We are left with a sorrowful sense of wrong turnings taken, never to be retraced.
Sorrow issues in wrath, and “The Tree of Life” wakes up as we realize that O’Brien is venting his frustrations on the family. To begin with, severity and affection intertwine: “Do you love your father?” he asks Jack. “Yes, sir,” the boy replies. But tempers are lost, offenders are shut in closets for daring to talk back, and we get a frightening scene in which the sons are taught, or commanded, to swing a punch at the patriarch. “Hit me,” O’Brien says, baring his jaw. That, for once, is the most salient feature of Pitt’s anatomy. We have grown so fond of his doleful eyes, and the wide crack of his grin, that it’s quite something to find the actor leading with his chin, jutting it stubbornly toward a world that has fallen short of his great expectations. Add the heaviness of his tread and the thick rims of his spectacles, and you get his manliest performance to date, with the last flickers of pretty boy snuffed out.
When the father goes away on a long trip, the boys relax into near-Oedipal bliss, tended by a mother whose principles, as she intones them, are almost comically drained of sternness: “Love everyone. Love every leaf, every ray of light.” Not that there is any comedy here, and Nabokov’s knowing remark that only one letter divides the comic from the cosmic would touch no chord in Malick. Instead, he conjures a singular blend of the prim and the pantheistic, and “The Tree of Life” remains not just a joke-free zone but nervous of bodies that misbehave. No sex intrudes, although there is an extraordinary sequence in which the first promise of sex flushes Jack’s brow, like a fever, as he raids a neighbor’s bedroom and rifles through her lingerie. Yet, even here, when he holds her nightgown up to the light, like a celestial robe, then steals it and floats it downriver, you want to bow to the beauty of the images and, at the same time, to take the director aside and say, “Terry, I hate to break it to you, but that’s not all that pubescent boys like to do.”
This seraphic strain is present even in “Badlands,” Malick’s first—and still, by some distance, his best—feature film, in which a youthful tearaway (Martin Sheen) doesn’t hesitate to shoot men in the back, yet remains erotically aloof, even though his girlfriend (Sissy Spacek) is with him on the lam. We see her buttoning her dress, but that’s it, and the whole tale is bent upon the flatlining of desires; we hear it in her unperturbed voice-overs, which established a tradition that has swelled with every Malick film, and that now hits a solipsistic high. Almost all the folks in “The Tree of Life” devote more time to murmurs, cries, and whispers, confided to us from the prison of their own heads, than to conversing with their fellow-humans, and, while the result will sound to some like a prayer, others may find it increasingly lonely and locked, and may themselves pray for Ben Hecht or Billy Wilder to rise from the dead and attack Malick’s script with a quiver of poisonous wisecracks. “Brother” and “Mother” are the first things that we hear, followed, not long after, by a plea: “What are we to you?”
This is uttered by the mother, although it could equally have come from the lips of Job (who is quoted in the film’s epigraph) or a lamenting Jeremiah. The question is addressed not to the audience but—it is safe to say—to God. We then get his considered reply, and this is the branch of “The Tree of Life” that sticks out. We see glimmers of unfathomable light, vast interstellar conflagrations, drifting throngs of stars, planets in their formless infancy, sun and moon occluded by dark storms, energizing jolts of lightning, gulping primordial pools, early plants, early creatures, slow-dancing jellyfish, hammerhead sharks, a dinosaur lounging on the shore, an embryo’s eye, and, last but not least, a child being born—to a white-clad mother who neither sweats nor shouts—in postwar suburban Texas. Now, you can call this entire passage overblown, or diversionary, but what it is not is incoherent or mad. It strikes me as a straightforward account of creation, Malick’s Genesis, ending in the Eden of Jack’s childhood; everything else in the film dramatizes the loss of that prelapsarian grace and the rare, Proustian instants at which it is remembered afresh.
“If we cannot educate ourselves to his purposes, then clearly his work will look like nonsense.” That is Malick, writing of Heidegger, and introducing his own translation of Heidegger’s “The Essence of Reasons,” in 1969. He refers to the philosopher’s “peculiar language,” and “The Tree of Life” is no less odd, yet its purposes are clear: it is a grief-powered movie, triggered by the revelation, near the start, that Jack’s brother R.L. died at the age of nineteen. The complaint that is floated, if never spoken, by the O’Briens in their loss, as by any mourner, is “Why forge everything, from the big bang onward, if it’s all going to conclude with this—the far greater cataclysm, to me, of a loved one’s dying? What, O Lord, was the point?” (There are reports, unconfirmed by Malick, that his brother committed suicide in the nineteen-sixties.) So does the film burst the bounds of that emotion? Is it just too much? It certainly doesn’t know how to end; after two hours, I could have done without Sean Penn, dressed in Armani, kneeling on a beach, while the other characters mooch around like unwanted extras from “Zabriskie Point.” Afflatus has an unhappy habit, as Malick has proved before, of subsiding into a monotone. Tucked away inside the grandeur, though, and enlivened by jump cuts, is a sharp, not unharrowing story of a father and son, and, amid one’s exasperation, there is no mistaking Malick’s unfailing ability to grab at glories on the fly. When news of R.L.’s death arrives, the world reels and capsizes, yet even then we see the shadows of children—capering upside down, on the sunlit asphalt, like ghosts of what should have been. ♦