This is a movie NOT to see:
The Tree of Life (written and directed, so to speak, by Terrence Malick)
With Brad Pitt, Sean Penn (non-speaking role), Jessica Chastain, and a host of uninspiring others.
How it won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture this past season is unfathomable. The fact that it did is disturbing on many levels.
One reviewer (Wall Street Journal) opined: "Exquisite ... A work of art that defies categorization."
La Presse found it "Extraordinaire".
Jacket blurb touts it as "one of the year's most talked about films."
All of those comments are a polite way of saying that the 140-minute film is bizarre, incoherent, twisted, ....
The portions of the film which do not involve a peopled "story" are artistically and technically superb, albeit more often than not disrupted with voice-overs of words and phrases which are supposed to be significant (and somehow relevant to the peopled story) but which turn out to be just obfuscatory interjections.
Recommendation: Do not see this film unless you wish to regret 140 minutes which you'll never recoup.
