Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life

Sticklers are fond of pointing out that Proust was not remembering things past but in search of lost time, as the original French title says. So is Terrence Malick. His most Proustian film to date is The Tree of Life, which is now awing and stumping audiences, trailing a Palme d'Or from Cannes in its processional through movie houses where most of the audience, children of Star Wars and Scooby Doo, stand as amazed as Nebudchadnezzar reading God's message in fiery letters. The film is autobiographical and philosophical, like Proust's A la recherche, and just as maannered in its stylized language, although in this case the invented diction is visual.

Malick's film is an artwork, replete with dazzling images of Nature, that deliberately overreaches. In all seriousness it competes with the Bible. The Book of Job is played out allegorically through the bitter travails of Mr. O'Brien, as the script tersely calls him (played with sobriety and fierceness by Brad Pitt), an engineer raising his family of three boys and a delicate beauty of a wife in 1950s Waco, Texas. Curiously, critics have taken the setting, with its tree-lined streets, screened porches, and gauzy curtains fluttering in the breeze, to be an innocent world, when in fact it is exactly the opposite: this is the same New World that failed to redeem fallen man when the Pilgrims landed, recycling theological torments that contorted Jonathan Edwards and Captain Ahab.

Read the full review by Huntley Dent on the Berkshire Review, an International Journal for the Arts