MOVIE OF THE MONTH: OCTOBER 2011

                                                     
Director              :Terrence Malick
Writer                 :Terrence Malick
Cinematography : Emmanuel Lubezki
Distributor          :Fox Searchlight Pictures
Duration             :139 minutes
Country              : United States 

The Tree of Life,  Terrence Malick’s new film, which contemplates human existence from the standpoint of eternity. Recently showered with temporal glory at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Palme d’Or, this movie, Director Terrence Malick’s fifth feature in 38 years, folds eons of cosmic and terrestrial history into less than two and a half hours. 

The film opens with a quotation from the Book of Job, then cutting into a dramatization of the formation of the universe. As the galaxies expand and planets are formed, Jack's voice is heard asking various existential questions. Its most provocative sequences envision the origin of the universe and then, more concisely and less literally, the end of time, when the dead of all the ages shall rise and walk around on a heavenly beach.  

Embedded in the passages of cosmology, microbiology and spiritual allegory is a story whose familiarity is at least as important to the design of “The Tree of Life” as the speculative flights that surround it. The world of neatly trimmed lawns and decorous houses set back from shaded streets is one we instinctively feel we know, just as we immediately recognize the family whose collective life occupies the central 90 minutes or so of the film.  

The miraculous paradox is that this universal pattern repeats itself in circumstances that are always unique. And so this specific postwar coming-of-age story, quietly astute in its assessment of the psychological dynamics of a nuclear family in the American South at the dawn of the space age, is also an ode to childhood perception 
and an account of the precipitous fall into knowledge that foretells childhood’s end.  

There are very few films that convey the changing interior weather of a child’s mind with such fidelity and sensitivity. So much is conveyed — about the tension and tenderness within the O’Brien marriage, about the frustrations that dent their happiness, about the volatility of the bonds between siblings — but without any of of the usual architecture dramatic exposition.  

This movie stands stubbornly alone, and yet in part by virtue of its defiant peculiarity it shows a clear kinship with other eccentric, permanent works of the American imagination, in which sober consideration of life on this continent is yoked to transcendental, even prophetic ambition. To watch The Tree of Life is, in analogous fashion, to participate in its making. And any criticism will therefore have to be provisional.   

Website of the movie: http://www.twowaysthroughlife.com

Review Courtesy: http://movies.nytimes.com