Finally, a new movie I'd really like to see! Here's an excerpt from Deepak Chopra's review of it:
Among the Oscar contenders this year, The Tree of Life stands out for inspiring awe and wonder. That was the intention, I'm sure, but audiences mostly express awe about the stupendous visuals, which depict the cosmos from the scale of an amoeba to the scale of the Big Bang. What's gotten ignored is the spiritual argument that Terence Malick, the writer-director, clearly poses. It's a very old argument but one that resists acceptable answers today.
Yet the entire story is about Jack's spiritual confusion, because his Job-like father and his saintly mother stand at two poles. An Old Testament God pulls him one way, a New Testament God the other. The beauty of this dilemma, which could seem artificially schematic, is that it feels so American. Malick made an earlier film, The New World, that explicitly showed America as a land of rebirth, a new Eden. For him, as in all of his movies, the American dilemma is about that ideal beginning and where it has led us. Is it our role to find a special grace that the Old World cannot deliver? Or did the new land turn us into Mr. O'Brien, missing the glory of God because we are fixated on materialism?
