Terrence Malick's fifth film is a grand victory of human awareness and stands among the broadest and greatest of all films. It explores human experience from the inside, from within its characters' thoughts and sensations. Malick identifies its protagonist as its viewer and assembles a multitude of brief impressions of astounding vividness to act as an analogue of our own collection of memories. Roger Ebert wrote of Charlie Kaufman's great 'Synecdoche New York',

'For thousands of years, fiction made no room for characters who changed. Men felt the need for an explanation of their baffling existence, created gods, and projected onto them the solutions for their enigmas. These gods of course had to be immutable, for they stood above the foibles of men. Zeus was Zeus and Apollo was Apollo and that was that. We envisioned them on mountaintops, where they were little given to introspection. We took the situation as given, did our best, created arts that were always abstractions in the sense that they existed outside ourselves. Harold Bloom believes Shakespeare introduced the human personality into fiction. When Richard III looked in the mirror and asked himself what role he should play, and Hamlet asked the fundamental question To be, or not to be, the first shoe was dropped, and "Synecdoche" and many other works have dropped the second shoe.'

'The Tree of Life' is an other of the greatest of these works. As the years pass, our films seem to be moving deeper and deeper inward. This film attempts to be a mirror. It shows us a life such as our own and asks us to discern what is important in a life, what is good, what is lasting; and what is meaningless noise, what does not last. Kaufman's film also explored the human experience in an unconventional way, but while it had very little compassion and was devoid of wonder, Malick's film possesses those qualities and others in rich abundance.

One the main objects of this film is to evoke the early experiences and impressions of a human life, spanning about a decade. And one of its most masterful sections is the one dealing with the first three years or so. The many brief images and events we see delineate a typical landscape of early memories; we're delighted by the colorful bubbles we blow. A child with a grotesque Halloween mask. Our mother dances with us and we love her. That chair just moved by itself, didn't it? A scary dog barks at us and we stay behind our mother. A new baby, what does it do? We dream of the strange triangular room in the attic we went up in once or twice. Night after night our mother kisses us and turns out the lamp and this is the way our life passes. A glow seems to surround all things. I don't doubt nearly all of us could construct a similar sequence from our own memories (Dressing me in the morning, my father says, 'Up-a-sky!', throwing his arms upward. I raise mine in response, beaming back at him with delight - his and mine - as my night-shirt is swished off me).

As we grow older and more aware, as the script says, 'Gradually, the subtle radiance passes from things, as though a layer of cloud had come up over the sun. Slowly as the dawn, the boy is growing up.' We begin to see bad things, sad things. Why does that man walk funny? Will our mother have to look as old as grandma does some day? Later, these things seem to be present in many places, or most. What did that man do to go to jail? Could it happen to us? Then we even find it in ourselves; we disobey our mother even though we love her, and we don't know why! We can't resist playing mean tricks on our little brother, dangerous dares. What did we do? Why aren't things the way they used to be? 'How do I get back?'

Malick had his current style of film-making basically set since his third film, 'The Thin Red Line', but there its greatness was constrained by particularities of the project: its protagonist's wonderings did not feel genuine, its original score was unsatisfactory (my advice to film-makers: Most, to nearly all of the time, use preexisting music, or don't use any), multiple tiny roles filled by distractingly famous actors, and other problems. In his next film, the excellent 'The New World', most of those problems were absent, although, like 'Thin Red Line', it still took place within a historical event it was constrained to tell and to serve. But here Malick has broken free of all that, has no one's story to tell but his own, and applies his poetic technique with complete freedom to the life of this common suburban family (and many other things). One of the most important parts of making books or movies is knowing your subject and its details cold. Setting 'Tree of Life' in the same environment and time Malick himself grew up in, he holds all the cards here too for the first time. He soars where before he could only leap.

I love, love, love the way Malick makes movies. He spurns artificial light, films his actors constantly (even when they don't know it), foreswears story-boards, always seeks to captivate fleeting, chance moments; a butterfly alighting on Mrs. O'Brien's hand, thunder flashing in the skies before Pocahontas, an inquisitive baby giving John Smith a kiss. He films and edits what ever and how ever he wants; what ever feels right, what ever is beautiful. He loves open fields, tall grass. He loves twilight and dusk. He loves water. He loves Sol, loves its light shining among plants, among people. He loves flocks of birds, hands holding hands, heads turned upward. He loves things that glow. He nearly always shoots manually; his camera is free. It swings and flutters about Smith and Pocahontas as they hold each other, smiling. It runs joyously through a forest, peering upward and making Sol beam and dance among the branches and leaves. I am so very grateful there exists such a film-maker as him.

Now, the degree to which there are 'good' actors and 'bad' actors is much exaggerated; actors are basically as good as the script is and the director allows or coaxes them to be. But there are actors who simply ARE the characters they play; who fit them like a glove. Brad Pitt has worked perfectly well in many roles; I should note he does not fit the over-bearing, mood-shifting Mr. O'Brien seamlessly. We're aware every moment that we're watching Brad Pitt playing this character. In a way, the softness his acting produces between himself and his often harsh character may be in keeping with the film's gentle feel. I don't know. I learn that Heath Ledger was originally intended to play the part. I think he would have been just about the perfect fit; not as bright-eyed a man as Pitt, excellent at conveying a certain muddle-mindedness. Look at his character in 'Brokeback Mountain', in which he had children too. Think of how he might have raised sons if he had been more of a family man and you pretty much have the character right there, accent and insufficient love for his wife and all. But so it goes.

Mr. O'Brien is a remnant of a past age in which men lived by their toughness, by their ability to control, to discipline, to command. He raises his sons the way his instincts dictate him to, the way his line has succeeded. But our genes can linger far longer than the conditions which bred them, and a boy need no longer be taught in such detail how best to fight back if he is hit. 'If he blinks, crack 'im!' This generates hype and a sense of moral importance on an event which will not likely ever come (and certainly their father's attempted training sessions only disturbs the boys). In the script, driving by a team of disheveled men digging a ditch in a poor part of the town, their father advises them: 'See those people. Somebody got the upper hand with them. Don't let it happen to you. You've got to get ahead of the other guy. He'll be doing all he can to do the same to you.' And later, 'If you're good, people take advantage of you. Think of yourself as someone caught behind enemy lines. Work! Fight! I see you wasting your time -- staring out the window -- playing! I make sacrifices for you. You honor those sacrifices by what you do. That's how a family works.' His mind is every where at once, among other, worse problems. Malick describes him early in the script: 'His boys regard him warily. His sharp, sarcastic words, and orders so irrational he hardly expects that they will be obeyed. He never asks what they did at school. He does not know the names of their friends. Were he to inquire, they would suspect it was a trap.' 'He has the unshakable belief that he must approve or modify everything the children do. He is full of petty and exasperating cautions.'

It's obvious (especially in the script) that this man grew up instilled with the sense that he would become a great leader of men, but as this didn't happen to much of a degree, he begins ventilating this life-long desire to command and discipline onto his family. Not smart. By making them tend the minutiae of the yard's crab grass and other botany, he seems to think he's cultivating a healthy, moral sense of obedience and diligence in them, when it serves only to alienate him from his sons and cause them hours of misery. For each ounce of obedience he gains from them, he loses a pound of their love. He endlessly goes over the fine points life, or at least his life; things that might have some meaning to men his age, but are little more than strange noise for his young boys. 'Twenty-seven patents, your father has. That means ownership. Ownership of ideas.' After R.L., the second son, asks if a friend can come over and his father turns him down, he explains in the script, 'Your mother's from a farm family. Irish. They had people down from Chicago every weekend. That's why they never got the weeds out of their fields. The Norwegians would drive by and laugh!' He also has a temper, and 'introspection' is a word entirely alien to him. But he's not quite all bad. Now and then he is at peace and plays his piano at home as well as in church, and his boys feel love for him and wonder at his unfixed personality. In one of the film's sweetest moments, R.L. joins in with his guitar while his father plays Couperin's 'Les Baricades Misterieuses' (surely one of the best songs ever composed, and which is used to devastating effect no less than thrice in the film). Malick knows this character so very thoroughly; was his own father such a man?

Oh dear. Sean Penn. Poor Sean Penn. He costarred in an other of the greatest films I've seen, Tim Robbins' 'Dead Man Walking', and was so perfect as Harvey Milk in Gus Van Sant's 'Milk', that I have, at times, passed pictures of the real Harvey and temporarily failed to mentally differentiate between the two men. Penn called Malick's script the most magnificent one he'd ever read, but was disappointed and a bit confused by the filmed result, and that his own small role ended up being essentially one of a figure rather than a character (and alas for Penn, since his first film, 'Badlands', of nearly four decades before, Malick has not made actor's films). It's true that the script was clearer about several things, especially Penn's character's existence in the city: 'The others do not meet his eyes. Each makes his way alone, shut up within himself. None can be sure of the other. No tie is fixed or lasting.' 'The supreme misery:... to find oneself abandoned to the busy dance of things which pass away.' My guess is it's one of the best things ever written, and much less a movie script than a poetic story, stunningly beautiful, unbelievably vivid in its descriptions of places and experiences. But many of its ideas would be impossible to communicate in film, and ultimately the best medium for the script, as it was in that form, was the written word. I would console him by saying the film has a power very few have ever achieved, and an effect no other has.

With his use of Zbigniew Preisner's 'Lacrimosa', Malick has produced the modern answer to Kubrick's use of 'Also Sprach Zarathustra' in '2001' and, for my money, trumped it as an iconic stellar theme. Their effects are almost opposite: while Kubrick used Strauss' profound and rather simple theme to signify his (very, very far from humble) idea of humanity's ascension in the universe, Malick's use of Preisner's requiem of immense, tragic loveliness evokes the defeating vastness of the realms of fire and gas in size and in age and in beauty, and impresses on us that we and all the lives it holds are lost in it and obscured.

There doesn't seem to be any beginning or end of existence, nor a smallest scale of matter, or largest. Multitudes live among the immensity of a single leg of a mite, the keys I type these words on are uneven plateaus gigamiles across. A galaxy is a twisting amoebic mote, stars are searing subatomic particles and my neighbor's welcome mat is more vast than all the wastes of Mars. I set a glass of milk on a table, and there it will stay with all the worlds it contains for a million aeons before I pick it up again. In our search through the inward planes, we now find within the realm of orbiting spheres to exist a landscape of webbed and dancing strings. This will never end. And all the matter we have perceived is a little explosion whose trifling cause we can not see, whose flying sparks will in an instant fade and turn to lifeless smoke, perhaps to be dispersed by a wind or to sink into an earth, forgotten or unseen. It does not end, it only continues. We live in infinity and eternity. But the film shows us with humbling beauty what little we know of outward realms, and of the history of the continual rearrangement of matter, and gives context of the O'Brien family's existence; the cauldron that will become their world, the microbes they will descend from, the calamity that will allow their species to thrive and, later, the expansion of the star that will devour their planet in the unimaginable aeons to come.

A few silly people inform us that Malick's acceptance of scientific models of the formation of our universe, of Earth and its biology, conflicts with his at least semibiblical spirituality (he opens the film with scripture and refers to it a number of times, among other examples, and he is as interested in the birth of a soul as of a world), because it contradicts all that the creationists say. Malick, I'm sure, could scarcely care less about the current fancies of that endless debate. He knows that scientists do not spend their years making up malicious lies, and he also obviously feels a silent goodness in the universe. Says Jack the script: 'You whom we met in the woods and on the hills, whom first in her eyes we knew -- how shall I name you?' In 'The New World', Pocahontas speaks to it in the same fashion: 'Dear Mother, you fill the land with your beauty. You reach to the end of the world. How shall I seek you?' Around me I hear religious people confiding to each other that their god feels more present to them when they walk through woods, when they see and do beautiful things, than when reading their holy book. My mother tells me she felt this goodness touch her one night as she sat quietly holding one of her newly born children.

Those who search eventually find the word 'god' to be an ancient verb meaning 'to call out to'. This is exactly what Malick's characters do, although they never once use the word in direct address of the presence they speak to. Kneeling at the foot of his bed, young Jack goes through his prayers as he's been taught to, but we hear his true thoughts running underneath. 'I wanna see what you see.' Malick's main characters tend to have, deep down, the advantage of a rare freedom from established theology; a freedom to directly question their gods, not only request of or thank them (I must confess I lacked this freedom at his age and didn't look beyond my considered prayers). 'You let a boy die. You let any thing happen. Why should I be good if you're not?'

I suppose any established theistic religion tends to forget the idea of such questions, as they seem to go for ever unanswered, and focus on established assumptions. Malick, though, does a thing that few people have had the courage to do in perhaps a very, very long time by renewing those questions, insisting on them; by once more crying out to the powers that may or may not be. 'What are we to you? Answer me.' And perhaps, at times, answers are not wholely absent. Near the end of 'The New World', chasing her little son through a garden in England, feeling peace at last, Pocahontas seems to find one. 'Mother. Now I know where you live.'

Terrence Malick is the great poet of the cinema, and 'The Tree of Life' may remain his greatest poem. It is, among so many other things, the ultimate family movie. It radiates a holiness of family, draws us closer to those we love most. The over-arching tale of 'The Tree of Life' is simple: A man is lost amid a perplexing life lacking purpose and joy. The tale opens in brokenness as he and his mother and father mourn the loss of his younger brother, the kindest and gentlest of the three sons. Seeking a way from his meaningless toil, a way back to the Eden he once knew, he lays his hand on a tree and witnesses the past and future of himself and of all existence pass before him. Jack - and we, the viewers - begin a search for meaning, for that which is lasting, holy.

I am stunned to learn that Malick himself lost his own younger brother as a young man, for which he largely blames himself, and has borne that guilt and grief for the rest of his life. This explains so much about his films - this one above all - and the depth, meaning and power of it are made so much more profound by this knowledge. 'The Tree of Life' is the product of a tortured man, and what we see in it is not only his philosophical message, but is from his own wounded heart. His own pain is present. We are told artists must suffer for their art, and here Terrence Malick, in his anguish for his little brother he's carried since the late sixties, has made a film which stands among the greatest and most essential of all human art. Jack's vision of the after-life is also more clear in this light; what Malick shows us is not only his belief, but is deeply personally important to him. It is his consolation, his hope.

Above all, the film is wondrous. It instills us with its wonder, its awe of all things, and helps us to better appreciate beauty and goodness when it passes before us; to hold on to it, how ever small or brief. There's a moment in the film that moves me more than film has ever before moved me. One morning, when the boys wake to find their father has gone on a trip, and they're free to romp in the house and tease their mother with a lizard and for once life is as it ought be with them, they run outside laughing with her as 'Les Baricades Misterieuses' plays, and we hear the mother's prayer for her children - for all that live. 'Help each other. Love every one. Every leaf. Every ray of light. Forgive.'