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Time moves in epochs, in billions of years, but that's not how we measure it. We measure time in moments, memories of our childhood, our parents, our siblings, our joys and sorrows.
Director-writer Terrence Malick, in his wondrous and confounding new film "The Tree of Life" (which won the Palme D'Or at the Cannes Film Festival), juxtaposes one upon the other in search of a cosmic connection between the Big Bang and the small pleasures of growing up. It's a mind-altering, if sometimes head-scratching, movie. It's also an emotional experience that will affect every viewer differently, because it will make each of us consider our relationship with our parents.
On the human level, the movie begins with a telegram delivering bad news. We don't need to be told this (after all, when has a telegram in a movie ever brought good news?), as the anguished cry of the woman who receives it (Jessica Chastain) is enough.
That moment is recalled by Jack (Sean Penn), who works in a large building in a large city. Jack is distracted by a feeling of loss — whether for his brother (whose death, we presume, was announced in that telegram to his mother) or for his innocence.
Jack thinks back to his relationship with his caring mother, who made Jack (played as a child by Hunter McCracken) and his brothers laugh while playing on the front lawn, in the 1950s. He also thinks back to his father (Brad Pitt), with his tie and briefcase, sternly commanding his sons to behave at the dinner table and do their chores.
Malick mixes these images — and the sparse, ghostly voiceovers of Jack and his mother — with images of the Big Bang, the creation of the sun and planets, the formation of the first living cells, and even dinosaurs battling for survival.
What one makes of these images is up to the beholder. Is Malick suggesting that the struggles of this family are insignificant in the cosmic scale? Or that these moments of our lives are as important to us that they are equal to the universe's cataclysms?
Malick's images prompt comparisons to Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey," even to the operatic music accompanying them. But where Kubrick's futurescape was antiseptic and rather grim, Malick uses the music and narration to evoke an ethereal spirituality. This is especially true in the movie's final passages — filmed in part at Utah's Goblin Valley — that allude to some sort of unburdening in the afterlife.
But the emotions that resonate the strongest in "The Tree of Life" are tied to the bonds of family. Jack's dad, portrayed by Pitt with a coiled tension that occasionally springs into rage, is a taskmaster to his sons — but you can feel the strain of him trying to live up to, and do better than, his own father. Meanwhile, Jack's mother, touchingly played by Chastain, glows with joy and love for her children, and burns with a determination to shield them from their father's intolerant impulses.
As I said, how you read the parental relationships in "The Tree of Life" — and how you gauge them against your own parents or your own children — will determine more than anything how you react to Malick's masterful film. Not everyone is going to like it, but most everyone should go see it.
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The Tree of Life
The micro and the macro collide in Terrence Malick's astonishing, perplexing look at the universe and we mortals who dwell in it.
Where • Broadway Centre Cinemas.
When • Opens Friday.
Rating • PG-13 for some thematic material.
Running time • 138 minutes.