Tree of life

The "fragmented and non-linear narrative" (so called by Wikipedia) that is Terrence Malick's 2011 Cannes award-winner The Tree of Life, isn't necessarily off-putting per se. All depends on the movie's overall dramatic impact and the individual elements that create the mental images left with a viewer.

Are the actors portraying credible characters or token figures, does the cinematography advance meanings more than just the director's aesthetic desires, do fragments blend excitingly on-screen and in the viewer's mind?

Yes and no, of course, because Malick is incapable of creating a movie that isn't encrusted with glistening, provocative and unforgettable images. At times during this 140-minute display, one wants the movie to freeze, to let one savour the beauty of a composition, its lighting, its disturbing angle. On various occasions, Malick obliges by reducing the camera movement or action to almost nothing, creating a slide-show effect that's both beguiling and alienating.

The sparse plot only comes to narrative life during the film's middle hour. In a tree-lined middle-class district of Waco, Texas in the 1950s, a frustrated power plant executive (Brad Pitt) runs a God-fearing dog-loving old-fashioned household with a dutiful wife (Jessica Chastain, an excellent US TV actress in a breakthrough film performance). His three young sons include Jack (first-time actor Hunter McCracken, a teenage Sean Penn look-alike), who has become an angst-filled architect (Sean Penn, in a constantly wandering-around and wondering-aloud role as a man with unhappy childhood memories).

One of his brothers had died (we aren't told how or why) at the age of 19, as we were told dramatically early on, evoking enormous sorrow from his parents, as we saw extensively. Was it the brother whose hair started falling out in later scenes, with no narrative explanation or off-screen information? Was it the youngest brother, whose musical talent and looks carried the father's genes? Was Jack jealous of either of them, or merely a miserable soul?

During the very refined soap operatics of that central hour, Malick's cameras focus fairly and squarely on the family, at dinner, in its grassy yards, amid Jack's playful games with his brothers or adolescent viciousness with schoolmates. His father says and shows he loves all his sons (and expects their respectful kisses) in his rough, tough, Navy-trained ways, but his oppressive persona earns Jack's hatred. The father represents Nature, the off-screen mother's voice told us; she stands for Grace, the other half of humanity. Many other recollections, mostly from Jack, contain unrelated memories, pensive asides and mumbled thoughts.

Moment by moment, the interactions of the boy and his parents are revealed like a quilt pulled from the shadows with slow gestures and sudden yanks. Not fully revealed, frustratingly for those who seek narrative clarity. We also never learn whether Jack really had an Oedipal obsession for an ethereal mother who seemed to float, whether the father was embittered because he couldn't be a serious musician, when and how Jack left home, why he's shown apologising on the telephone to his presumably still-living father, what happened to the family when the father lost his job, whether the tree Jack and his father planted in the yard grew ... and those are just some of the unconnected loose ends, seen as dramatically inconsequential as various dogs that run around the family garden.

However, it looks as if Malick realised this finely-photographed family portrait presented an inadequate overview of humanity. The audience needed to be made aware, be in awe, of the writer-director's philosophical thoughts about love, God, Christianity, losing a job and failing to be a successful parent. The film starts with quotations from Job and detours for self-indulgently exquisite long works of cinema art depicting the creation and history of the universe and Earth, including the day when a dinosaur discovers the concept of mercy for smaller creatures.

The cinematography is astonishing: Mexican Emmanuel Lubezki has been Oscar-nominated four times and deserves to win this time. The sound effects are also subtle and striking, as is some of the original music (Frenchman Alexandre Desplat, another four-time Oscar nominee). But much of the music, especially the classical extracts (presumably reflecting the father's love of music), is over-emphatic, flabby with wailing choirs and ringing requiems.

The worst conceit of all is Malick's 20-minute closing section: it's an increasingly irritating succession of closing scenes, suggesting either that the director couldn't bear to eject any one of his magniloquent images or that he delights in tantalising his audience. At the really final fade to black, the audience sighs rather than gasps: Malick has proved he's a major cinematic talent, but he's done so with such self-conscious spiritual primness and visual pomposity that his messages are drowned in his media magic. Is his story an anti-Christian morality tale dressed up as a church-goer's cinematic sermon? How can we care when Malick doesn't care to show us why.