The Tree of Life Review

Malick sets a 1950s Texas childhood beside the formation of the universe and dares you to call the comparison unearned. Emmanuel Lubezki shoots almost everything on the move at wide angle in available light, low to the ground where the children are, and the effect is memory rather than scene: a curtain, a hand on a screen door, a mother lifted off the lawn. The creation sequence, built largely from Douglas Trumbull's practical effects, is the most audacious detour in modern American film, and it works because Malick returns from it to the smallest possible domestic cruelty, a father correcting a boy's grip at the dinner table.

Brad Pitt has never been better than as the O'Brien patriarch, a man whose disappointment leaks out as discipline, and Hunter McCracken plays the oldest son with an unnervingly adult resentment. The whispered voiceover and the beach coda will lose viewers, and the present-day Sean Penn thread is the weakest tissue in the film. But the argument about nature and grace is dramatized rather than announced, and few pictures have looked at a family this closely from this far away.