The Tree of Life

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.

Terrence Malick's <i>The Tree of Life</i> 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...

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 th...