Tree of Life

Or "Koyaanisqatsi, if it starred Brad Pitt."

There's a lot of whispered voiceover, pretty pictures and thundering classical music here, and part of me wants to dismiss this as a very expensive student project: "for my thesis, I'm going to do a bricolage where I mash up 2001, Baraka, Sean Penn's 35mm childhood home movies and a National Geographic special."

That would not be entirely fair, though. It's not every day you see a huge blockbuster movie about the nature of God, starring Brad Pitt. The title of the movie is from Proverbs ("[wisdom] is a tree of life to those who hold fast to it") and it begins with an epigraph from the Book of Job, and if you guess right there that a big tragedy is going to occur and the movie is not going to explain it for you, then give yourself five points.

Then there's a long montage of truly breathtaking scope that attempts to cover the majesty of the entire universe. So you might well ask yourself why this human tragedy matters, when the point of this montage seems to be that the universe is vast and not being run for your comfort or your happiness? Why should we care about Brad Pitt's stern father-who-should-have-been-a-musician-but-missed-his-calling, or Jessica Chastain's adoring mother and their sullen-faced son Jack growing up in Waco, Texas in the fifties?

Well, if we roll back a few verses in Proverbs we come across the instruction: "whom the Lord loves, he chastises, as a father does the son he loves." So maybe Brad Pitt is God. And like the common view of the God of the Old Testament, Pitt is stern but also loving towards his children.

And what about mom, who flits around in gorgeous shifts that catch the breeze and the light? Is she the more loving God of the New Testament? Are the brothers Cain and Abel? What does it mean that dad is a little sorry he treated his family like a jerk? Watch the movie and make up your own mind.

I said earlier that it's not every day you see a movie about the nature of God. But the movie that this reminds me of the most, in terms of subject matter, is the Coen Brothers' film A Serious Man, which is also loosely based on the Book of Job and asks us to think about the nature of a God who allows such terrible things to happen to His children.

I would say that personally, the Coen Brothers' less bombastic, less pretentious, more human-scale, even humorous film appeals to me more. In the end, my feeling about The Tree of Life is that it is very well made, thought-provoking, and it reminds me of a lot of other movies that I like very much. The one thing I'm not sure it reminds me of, is itself.