What is a deal-breaker in a movie for you?  This is a good question to ask yourself before you go see The Tree of Life.  If it's 'story' in the traditional sense of exposition, rising action, catharsis, falling action and conclusion, then consider this deal broken.  Fortunately, my mother (much like Chastain in this film) awoke in me an appreciation of Malick's quiet visions when she first sat me down to watch 'Days of Heaven'.  The Tree of Life has even less plot than that, but I pose that it is well worth seeing, you just have to know what you're in for.

Terrence Malick is a seasoned art-film director from Texas.  He's one of the best loved and/or most yawned at filmmaker today.  He manages to rope serious star power into his films which gives him wider exposure than the run-of-the mill mindf*** director.  In fact, 'mindf***' is entirely the wrong term for Malick.  'Mind Picnic' is more apt.  They are beautifully colored, striking visual spectacles with a trajectory toward the sublime.  He's a (real) Heidegger scholar whose philosophy comes first in his films and plot movement comes second.  Watching a Terrence Malick film is like floating on a lazy river.  I always enjoy the ride, but it's not for everyone.

His first (and probably best) film, Badlands is an anomaly.  It's a focused story with ethereal sensibilities, and it's the most traditional film he's made.  Between 1974 and 2005, Malick made 3 films, each period pieces, that I consider to be roughly the same film:  Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line and The New World.  The latter two are most alike.  Characters are caught between earth and sky, heaven and hell, two worlds, two differing ways of life collide and those in between are left with a strong hankering for God.  Though I think his films have gotten worse as they go along (I'm a strong advocate for Badlands and Days of Heaven and less enthusiastic about The Thin Red Line and The New World), it's Malick's method that is admirable and requires a bit of sophomoric elucidation.

Malick makes existential epics.  Unlike many historical epics he examines human beings as creatures in the landscape.  We see the characters but also their humanity.  Malick films humans almost as if they were animals, so when they act like people, the result is all the more curious.  Malick's camera is a benevolent sprite that hovers around but does not pretend to fully understand human creatures.  There are always a lot of shots of people walking around carelessly, twirling and reveling in life.  They're such senseless, pretty, horrible animals.  Good and evil are portrayed as gentleness and violence, and interior motivations are left shadowed and hinted at.   Malick's films are an alien's-eye-view of humanity, placing these strange and volatile creatures with all their longings at the central point of historical events.

The Tree of Life is Malick's first film that isn't trapped by a certain time period or sequence of events.  In his past films he used true events, or true-to-life events to pattern an understood narrative that the audience, in a way, already knew, so he wouldn't have to spend too much time telling it.  In The Tree of Life, there is no understood story to mold Malick's trademark pontificating into any kind of recognizable shape.  Instead, he's sews together images that already exist in our cultural consciousness, life in small town America, The Big Bang and the birth of life.   There is nothing inherently unrelatable about The Tree of Life, but it's a slippery slope of images rather than a concrete progression.  It's surprising how the scenes flow into each other so easily that one can go from the beginning of organic life to a family's travails in 1950s Texas to Elysium in a seamless whole.  It's a noble feat to link the commonest concerns of American life with a great dance of life, death and mercy that's been going on since the beginning of time.

Much of the naysaying about this movie is mostly generated by its winning the Palm D'or at Cannes.  It's funny that they banned Lars Von Trier from the competition.  His "Melancholia" seems a lot more like their cup of tea (from the trailer it looks like it should be called The Tree of Death).  Comparisons are drawn to 2001:  A Space Odyssey and The Great Santini, in hopes of crushing Malick's new picture under the greatness of these past classics, but it's missing the point something awful.  Watch The Tree of Life in the same state of mind as you would watch Fantasia (if that state exists for you).  Know that it's far out of step with much of the arthouse world because of its inherent positivity and religious bent.  Malick is outlining the character of God like a mother and that's going to be a very different film with a very different tone than much of anything that has gone before or is being done now.  Show me a better movie that strikes at Malick's same positive themes of beauty and love  as instructive objects (not social conditioning and sex) and I'll listen, but it's important to remember that not everybody is as gutter-bound (read: urban) as Federico Fellini.  It comes down to who Malick is and the state of his soul.  Does hate for The Tree of Life come from any real problem with the film or that we don't know what to do with the spirit of it?  A similarly ponderous film meant to expose the structure of systemic evil and explore the commonality between violence and sex would surely be received with unreserved praise.  Love and beauty and God are unfamiliar themes these days.  I would strongly argue that there are precious few thoughtful directors with enough joy left in them to make anything even similar to The Tree of Life.  The art film world should allow room for a guy who grew up in Texas, looking up at the sky and considering the birds.