The Tree of Life

Love it or not-love it — and for many, that “merciful dinosaur” scene was the dividing line — Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life (winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes) was the film that cinephiles were talking (and talking and talking) about last year. The non-prolific Malick, maker of but a handful of remarkable features (including Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line), is one of cinema’s great poets; whether you found Tree of Life fascinating but deeply flawed — or, like us, were completely and utterly transported by the sheer cosmic, Kubrickian audacity of injecting the creation of the universe and the 5-billion-year history of Earth and evolution into the tale of a middle-class family dealing with grief in 1950s Texas — a new film by Malick is nothing less than a Major Cinematic Event. Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain, and Sean Penn star in the film’s familial drama, rendered in the lush, lyrical, impressionistic Malick style of ravishing visuals and poetic voice-overs. Special effects wizard Douglas Trumbull, whose work distinguished Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey — perhaps the only other major feature film with comparable celestial ambition, scale, and vision — came out of retirement to help Malick capture, in stunning, non-CGI fashion, the origins of absolutely everything. All hail Terrence Malick for daring to ponder (and visualize) the hardest, vastest, most daunting questions — and for creating a film of such awesome, affirmative, haunting beauty. Colour, 35mm. 139 mins.