LOS ANGELES – From director Terrence Malick ("Badlands," "Days of Heaven," "The Thin Red Line," "The New World") comes a thought provoking film experience. His fifth film, "The Tree of Life," is a hymn to life, excavating answers to the most haunting and personal human questions through a kaleidoscope of the intimate and the cosmic, from the raw emotions of a family in a small Texas town to the wildest, infinite edges of space and time, from a boy’s loss of innocence to a man's transforming encounters with awe, wonder and transcendence.
An impressionistic story of a Midwestern family in the 1950's, the film follows the life journey of the eldest son, Jack, through the innocence of childhood to his disillusioned adult years as he tries to reconcile a complicated relationship with his father (Brad Pitt). Jack (played as an adult by Sean Penn) finds himself a lost soul in the modern world, seeking answers to the origins and meaning of life while questioning the existence of faith. Through Malick's signature imagery, we see how both brute nature and spiritual grace shape not only our lives as individuals and families, but all life.
"The Tree of Life" is an open-ended journey into uncharted territory for contemporary movie audiences, one that will no doubt impact each person in a unique way. As Malick enters such nebulous, imagination-rich worlds as childhood memory, pre-human history and the burning realm of the stars, the story plays out both at the microscopic level of the heart and at the unfathomably massive level of eons and eons of time, with both always in motion.
"Terry has his own unique cinematic language," notes producer Grant Hill, who previously worked with Malick on "The Thin Red Line." "No one else talks the cinematic language that he has invented, in a sense. He has this wonderful gift of being able to really make you feel that you are there, that you know his characters. And with 'The Tree of Life,' he takes that film language somewhere new in order to draw the audience into an original journey, to take a leap of faith, and to allow them to bring parts of their own life experiences into the canvas of this story – a story that is very much about a single family but also, simultaneously, the creation of the cosmos."
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