"Tree of Life" is a Masterpiece

Terrence Malick’s latest film, the intensely serious-minded visual tone poem The Tree of Life, is one of the more unique movie experiences I’ve had in my life.

Like its antecedents 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Fountain, Malick’s motion picture -- which opens today at the Frank Banko Alehouse Cinema in Bethlehem and Allentown's 19th Street Theatre - offers a smorgasbord of revelatory imagery in the service of some very profound mythic storytelling.

Much of this may not sit well with your average filmgoer. Even admirers to Malick’s previous work -- Badlands, Days of Heaven , The Thin Red Line and The New World -- may find themselves tested by his latest excursion into cinematic poetry.

It's his most unconventional film, with the story of a family growing up in 1950s Texas played out against the creation of the universe.

Though the film appears unstructured, it is in fact carefully organized into four movements or acts (both terms apply).

Each act is heralded by a repeated image of an interstellar gas cloud which might represent creation itself.

Following a quote from the Book of Job at the top of the film, the first act truly seems to be random and without form (perhaps a deliberate pun by the director), as a series of arresting images of space, nature and characters who will all become familiar to us later, are presented with no clue to how they may be connected.

The second act concerns a startling and extended set piece showing the creation of the universe from big bang to dinosaurs.

Act three returns viewers to the 1950s and the O’Brians, a middle-American nuclear family which forms the dramatic center to the story.

Here, a crewcut Brad Pitt is the stern, but loving father to his three boys, while the willowy, freckled and red-haired Jessica Chastain embodies the ethereal mother figure.

Interspersed within this fifties milieu are modern-day scenes with a dour Sean Penn as Jack, the grown, eldest O’Brian child.

As in his previous films, Malick presents the story here through a series of disconnected scenes punctuated with spiritually reflective voice-overs from the characters, which suffuses these sequences with a sense of childhood dream memory.

The final act brings all these elements together (past and present; cosmic and corporeal; life and death) on an empty beachfront landscape which may be the afterlife, or simply a physical manifestation of Penn's character's lifelong recollections.

Ironically, the last image shown is a bridge, not a tree, which could be the film’s most telling metaphor of all. Everything is connected.

Malick’s film reminds us that there is something larger than our comprehension of who we are and where we come from. Not only is it the tree of life, but also of consciousness, awareness, death and, finally, of transcendence.

Whether or not you respond favorably to this most exceptional film may well depend on where exactly you see yourself in the larger scheme of things. I believe the movie and its remarkable creator will stand the test of time.

Joe Frinzi is an and . He is the longtime movie critic for the Easton Irregular newspaper.