Malick’s Tree of Life: is it worthy of all the hype?

Harry Pottermania is already upon us, but there’s another big release today - Terrence Malick's new film, Tree of Life, heavily anticipated – and hotly disputed - since it won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in May. Sadly, it may prove a disappointment to some.
 
In post-production for the last three years, and only the fifth film by Malick in just under 30 years, it is a meandering, fragmented and ultimately abstract movie which sets out to ask life's biggest questions. Who are we? Does God exist, and if so, who are we to him? And why do bad things happen to good people?

If you like your films with a strong plot, this could be one to miss.
 
It is "a cosmic-interior epic of vainglorious proportions, a rebuke to realism," says Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian. "This is visionary cinema on an unashamedly huge scale: cinema that's thinking big."
 
From mesmerising scenes of a nascent earth to the origins of life and dinosaurs, one thing the film does not shy away from is imagining the previously unimagined.
 
But it also looks at the tiny moments that make up every childhood: snatched glimpses of sunshine streaming through tree leaves; sharp words from a parent over the dinner table; and the inexpressible pull and push of sibling relations.
 
"There are very few films I can think of that convey the changing interior weather of a child's mind with such fidelity and sensitivity," says A O Scott in the New York Times.
 
Brad Pitt plays the frustrated and severe father with lip-jutting brilliance, while Jessica Chastain is the angelic mother, so in tune with nature and the fragile ebb of familial relations that she barely seems human.
 
Hunter McCracken is unnervingly exact in his portrayal of the oldest son (played as an adult by Sean Penn) experiencing the violent turmoil of growing up.
 
These are three "extraordinarily graceful performances", says Scott, in a film whose "sheer beauty" is "almost overwhelming".
 
Indeed, no-one could contest the extraordinary aesthetic power of the film, or its refusal to conform to the standard Hollywood formula. "It's impossible not to marvel at the ambition of The Tree of Life," writes Sukhdev Sandhu in the Daily Telegraph.
 
"Yet," he continues, "it’s impossible too not to overlook the film’s many faults. Everywhere there is the appearance of profundity, everywhere the grandiose signifiers of 'the epic'.
 
"If this wasn’t directed by Malick it would attract far curter dismissal." ·