Brad Pitt's "Tree of Life" at Cannes Film Festival

SALON
By Andrew O'Hehir

FRANCE - Brad Pitt was explaining to the assembled press corps why Terrence Malick was not here in person for the premiere of "The Tree of Life," his long-awaited and long-delayed new film that Malick (the director of five films in 38 years, clearly intends as a spiritual masterpiece.

Even by this idiosyncratic filmmaker's standards "The Tree of Life" tells nothing close to a conventional story, and during the dense barrage of images and sounds that fill the first half-hour or so you may wonder whether it has a story at all. Malick might respond to that question with a question of his own; he was once a doctoral candidate in philosophy at Oxford, after all.

Does the Bible tell a story? Do the Upanishads? Does the 13 billion-year history of creation -- large or small C, as you prefer -- tell a story? Because those are relevant touchstones or reference points for "The Tree of Life," a massively ambitious work of allegorical and almost experimental cinema that seeks to recapture the lived experience of a 1950s family, after the fashion of a Texas Proust, and connect it to the life of the universe, the nature and/or existence of God, the evolution of life on earth and even the microscopic chemistry and biology of life. [link]