PITT STOP

Opening in the multiplexes this weekend:

F1--This Formula One racing drama stars Brad Pitt as Sonny Hayes. Sonny is a former Formula One driver with a troubled past and a gambling problem, now living out of his van and racing in the 24 Hours of Daytona and other events. Javier Bardem plays Sonny's old rival/pal Ruben Cervantes, who shows up with a Quixotic offer: a spot as a driver in his F1 team, in support of his hotshot young driver Joshua Pearce, played by Damson Idris.

The great Kerry Condon plays Kate,  the team's technical director, a spirited Irishwoman who's massively unimpressed with Sonny's drawly charm. She and the young hotshot and Sonny clash across the circuit, leaving lots of debris on racetracks around the world.

It's only fair to admit, up front, that racing movies leave me cold. The serious, dramatic ones, like Grand Prix, usually feel overlong and pretentious and humorless; the comic ones, like Speedway with Elvis Presley or Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby with Will Farrell, are better, but tend to inanity.

I realize, of course, that this is all a matter of personal hardwiring; show me a baseball movie, where the stakes are exactly as meaningless, and I'll be on the edge of my seat. Show me a racing movie, and I'm bored and cranky. F1 continues the streak, I'm afraid. More than two and half hours is too long to watch people going in circles.

That said, on its own terms, it's an excellently made picture. I tend to appreciate the director, Joseph Kosinki, because he has an old-school, '80s movie approach, serving up a full credit sequence and pulsing music by Hans Zimmer and rapid-cut montages.

Kosinki is a fine hand at this sort of big-canvas action stuff, having previously helmed Only the Brave and Top Gun: Maverick. His touch is crackling and kinetic, he has an eye for corporate swank, and he's superbly abetted here by the dazzlingly deft editing of Stephen Mirrione, who ought to get an Oscar nomination. The movie is propulsive; for all my eye-rolling distaste, F1 never bored me, at least not when the cars were moving. And that's a lot of the movie.

On the other hand, for all the deft skill and lucid precision of the many racing scenes, the movie doesn't add up dramatically. After the screening I saw, someone told me that they liked how the film showed the degree to which Formula One is a team sport. So it does, but when Sonny acts like a maverick and refuses to follow orders and antagonizes his teammate and ignores his team's strategies, I couldn't tell if the filmmakers wanted me to see him a jerk in need of redemption or a clear-eyed individualist hero cutting through the nonsense.

Pitt has the movie star gift: he's amiable almost, it seems, whether he wants to be or not. F1 takes, you should pardon the expression, a free ride on this, since based on his behavior and not on Pitt's charm, Sonny seems, overall, like a selfish, tactless douchebag. The film's prologue ends with Sonny being asked an existential question; at the end of the film he's asked the same question. He doesn't answer it either time. Neither does the film.

Opening at Harkins Shea:

Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore--From her movie debut, in 1986's Children of a Lesser God, Marlee Matlin has been a vibrant presence in movies and TV; captivating, funny, sexy, with a streak of righteous anger balanced by a playful touch of mischief. I'm a fan. But after watching this feature-length American Masters documentary, I realized how little I really knew about her, and how important her story is.

Directed by the actress Shoshannah Stern, it chronicles Matlin's childhood with her loving but unprepared, guilt-ridden parents--she was stricken with deafness at 18 months, after an illness. We get her rebellious, drug-fueled teen years, her abusive relationship with Lesser God leading man William Hurt, her nurturing friendship with Henry Winkler, her prolific movie and TV career, and her sometimes fraught relationship with the deaf community. We learn that she had to pay for her own interpreter when she checked herself into Betty Ford.

I didn't realize the fierceness of Matlin's advocacy; the movie makes the case, for instance, that she's a major reason that closed captioning became standard on TV and videos. Reclined on a couch opposite Stern, who is interviewing, Matlin gives an unassuming account that gets across some sense of the difficulty deaf people have in navigating life, and in accessing information and support, even at this comparatively glamorous level.

TRACK STAR

Opening this weekend:

Bullet Train--Brad Pitt plays one of several professional assassins riding the title vehicle on an overnight zip from Tokyo to Kyoto. Dubbed "Ladybug" by his dispatcher (Sandra Bullock), he's a lethal fellow with mad fighting and weapons skills, but he regards himself as a magnet for bad luck, and he's weary of his career and wants more positivity in his life.

This is Pitt in frumpy, glamor-debunking mode, decked out in a bucket hat, drab jacket and sneakers, with horn-rimmed nerd glasses. His manner is pleasant and unassuming; a central joke of the movie is that Ladybug clearly has no wish to hurt anyone. Pitt is very good company here, in the way that only a veteran movie star can be, and as a model for action movie heroes to come I heartily approve.

There are other strong actors here--Aaron Taylor-Young and Brian Tyree Henry as a team of bickering Brit killers, Hiroyuki Sanada and Andrew Koji as father-and-son assassins, Benito A Martinez Ocasio as a vengeful Mexican hit man, Zazie Beetz as a deadly concessions peddler, Joey King as a schoolgirl type with secrets, all chasing a briefcase McGuffin and trying to avoid the wrath of a shadowy Russian gangster known as "The White Death," not mention a pesky (if rather sweet-faced) boomslang snake on the loose. A few big names turn up in amusing cameos.

Yet all of this creditable work doesn't quite add up to a satisfying movie. Directed by David Leitch from a script by Zak Olkewicz adapted from a Japanese novel by Kotaro Isaka, Bullet Train feels like an exercise in nostalgia; it's like one of the innumerable '90s-era knockoffs of Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez or (especially) Guy Ritchie, full of savage yet "ironic" facetious violence and whip pans and cute but bloody flashbacks and characters engaging in detailed discussions of pop culture (Thomas the Tank Engine in this case).

It's well-crafted and perfectly watchable, as long as you aren't too squeamish. But for me, it lacked any real emotional stakes, and the homestretch grows overblown and tediously overextended. Compare it to 2018's underrated Bad Times at the El Royale, another faux-Tarantino throwback that had the same tongue in cheek, but a bit of heart in its chest as well.

Now on Prime  Video:

Thirteen Lives--It's the story of a rescue mission with the number thirteen in the title, and it's directed by Ron Howard. That's a pretty solid recipe for success.

In June of 2018 twelve members of a youth soccer team and their coach went on an outing into a cave in a provincial mountain park in northern Thailand. An unexpected early monsoon hit after they went in, the paths quickly filled up with water, and the boys were trapped, more than two miles into the narrow, twisty passages. The rescue efforts that followed over the next three weeks included participants ranging from Thai Navy Seals to U.S. Military to Brit rescue divers to a Bangkok-based engineer who figured out how to divert rainwater from sinkholes on the mountain, into the agricultural fields below. The movie asserts that more than 5,000 people from 17 countries pitched in.

Howard focuses on the Brits, nicely underplayed played by Colin Farrell, Viggo Mortensen and Tom Bateman, and an Australian diver, played by Joel Edgerton, who was called in because of the specifics of his medical background. Like Howard's best film, Apollo 13, this is a fairly deep dive (sorry about that) into the technical difficulties of the operation, and this attention to detail adds to the suspense rather than dragging on the pace.

The movie's a bit of a harrowing ordeal at times, especially for those of us with a claustrophobic streak, but it's just about impossible not to invest in it emotionally. And while it's inspiring, it may also leave you a little exasperated with our seeming inability to work together for the common good when it's not such an obviously urgent crisis. What a pity it's so hard for us to remember that, in the end, all humankind is one big Thai soccer team, hoping to get out of our respective caves.

JUNGLE ALL THE WAY

Opening in theaters this weekend:

The Lost City--In old movies, lost cities and worlds and civilizations were often destroyed by a volcano at the end, as the explorers just barely escaped. It was as if, in the tradition of such storytelling, once westerners had laid eyes on an exotic unknown place, its destiny was fulfilled and it had no need to carry on existing.

This new adventure comedy, starring Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum, is so old-school that it employs the venerable volcano device. Here, at least, it doesn't come out of left field, but is integrated into the plot; Bullock plays Loretta, a romance novelist who has been kidnapped and taken to a tropical island by a rich nutcase (Daniel Radcliffe) who believes she has the archeological translation skills to help him locate a treasure in a lost city he's unearthed. A nearby volcano, about to erupt, provides the urgency.

Tatum plays Loretta's cover model Alan, who engages a cool ex-Navy Seal mercenary (Brad Pitt) to rescue her, and tags along. Soon enough it's just Loretta and Alan, bumbling through the jungle on their own, struggling to elude the rich guy's goons. And, of course, bickering.

Directed by the brothers Aaron and Adam Yee from a script by a gaggle including Seth Gordon, Oren Uziel and Dana Fox, this film's pilferage goes beyond the volcano bit; it draws, directly or indirectly, on everything from Romancing the Stone to the Hope-Crosby Road pictures. It isn't necessarily all that much dumber than any of those movies; nonetheless it's pretty dumb.

Even so, it sort of works. Bits of the dialogue show flashes of wit, and Brad Pitt, employed to send up the sort of hypercompetent man of action that only exists in the movies, probably constitutes the flick's best joke, although the filmmakers can't resist spoiling it at the very end.

Above all, Bullock never sucks. She's been a movie star for three decades now, and she knows what she's doing; she can be silly without going shrill or cartoonish, and can modulate seamlessly from broad schtick to sweet, delicate moments. Even when a movie serves her poorly, she's consistently good company, and Tatum, with his amiable, logy-minded delivery, pairs well with her. It's also refreshing that, for a change, the leading lady is more than a decade and a half older than her love interest.

THE DEFAULT IN OUR STARS

Opening today:

  

The Big Short—The prestige Christmas Day releases this year have such feel-good subjects as concussions in the NFL and two women persecuted for a lesbian affair in the ‘50s. Beating these two into the multiplexes today is this jolly romp about the criminal idiocies leading up to the collapse of the housing market in 2008.

But I’m not being facetious. It really is a jolly romp. Director and co-writer Adam McKay, best known for Will Farrell flicks like Anchorman, uses his anything-goes comedy techniques to give this infuriating and depressing material a sort of Brechtian vaudeville energy, and the result is one of the most absorbing and perversely entertaining movies of the year.

Based, like 2011’s excellent Moneyball, on a nonfiction book by Michael Lewis, the film follows several traders and investors who predicted, or were made to believe, that the market, balanced on atrociously unstable subprime mortgage bonds, would collapse starting in 2007. Because of the received wisdom that the housing market was unshakable, these guys were seen as crackpots when they began to “short” (bet against) the housing market with “Credit Default Swaps” in the mid-2000s. When the market did indeed melt down in 2007-2008, they looked like geniuses. Jackals too, perhaps—and the movie doesn’t try to deny it—but genius jackals.

Said geniuses (some of them are dramatized under their own names, others under pseudonyms) include Christian Bale as a socially awkward California doctor turned hedge fund manager who horrified his own investors by pouring millions into swaps, and Finn Whitrock and John Magaro as two small-potatoes hedge fund guys who got into swaps with the help of their disillusioned mentor Brad Pitt (who also executive-produced). Steve Carrell plays an abrasive hedge fund boss, haunted by a personal tragedy, who worked under the aegis of Morgan Stanley with his small team of wound-up, bantering, obscenity-spouting traders (Jeremy Strong, Rafe Spall and Hamish Linklater).

They’re all excellent, but the liveliest of the leads is Ryan Gosling as the swaggering Deutsche Bank trader who sells Carrell on shorting the market. Gosling’s character frequently looks into the camera and addresses us—several characters do, but this guy most of all—and having the least tortured, most unapologetically mercenary of  The Big Short’s players serve as its spokesman goes a long way to rescuing it from piety.

You’ll notice that in the preceding paragraphs I throw around financial terms like I remotely understand them. I assure you I probably understand them far less than you do, although after seeing this movie—assuming that it’s reasonably accurate—I now understand them far better than I did before. McKay makes the movie a remedial-level course in finance, and he uses gimmicky shtick to keep us interested—he shows us Margot Robbie luxuriating in a bubble bath with a glass of champagne while she explains subprime mortgages to us, and a couple of other celebrities pop up to give us brief tutorials.

The implication of these gags could be seen, in a sense, as an insult to the audience. But it’s an elegant and entertaining insult. And, alas, not an unfair one

THE DEAD AND THE QUICK

“Movement is life.”

So says Brad Pitt, as the hero of the zombie epic World War Z, to a family he’s urging to evacuate. Director Marc Forster certainly seems to have taken this maxim to heart. Whatever else one can say about this adaptation of the Max Brooks novel, it can’t be called slow-paced. From beginning credits to end credits, the action is pretty close to non-stop.

Death seems to be movement, too—these zombies aren’t old-school slow plodders. In the early scenes, we see Pitt and his wife and daughters flee the viral horde from Philly to Newark, while their undead pursuers run and lunge and leap like wildcats, and charge headlong at their prey so heedlessly that they plummet right off the sides of buildings.

What we don’t see is those spry zombies tearing their victims up, or shedding much blood. They don’t seem, even, to be cannibals, just biters. World War Z, rated PG-13, is the least gory zombie movie I’ve ever seen (though I haven’t seen Warm Bodies). There are no dismemberments or disembowelments; a hand gets chopped off in one scene, but it happens out of frame. Gore enthusiasts may be disappointed by this, but Forster is admirably deft in keeping the splatter offscreen, and the result isn’t really a horror movie. It’s an action-adventure picture, and a fairly exciting one.

Once he’s gotten his family to relative safety, poor Pitt, who’s some sort of vaguely-defined UN investigator, must dodge the ghouls from South Korea to Jerusalem to Wales in search of the key to the plague. He’s very good here—not jaw-droppingly good, like he was as Jessie James or in Moneyball or The Tree of Life. The role is too conventional and underwritten. It’s just a good-guy leading man part, but he executes it with skill, and he gets plenty of support from a large and fine international cast, which includes Peter Capaldi, Ruth Negga and the always cool-looking Pierfancesco Favino as researchers, Mirielle Enos in the thankless role of Pitt’s wife and, for a single creepy monologue about North Korea’s response to the zombie problem, David Morse.

One other actor deserves a nod: Michael Jenn, who plays a twitchy, snappy zombie that besieges Pitt in a hospital lab, turns his small role into an audience-pleasing showcase of grotesque comedy. Also, toward the end there’s a very clever product placement—a soft drink brand comes to the rescue. As with Roland Emmerich’s 2012, apparently even the Apocalypse can’t stop commercials.

GOOD & BRAD

RIP to Davy Jones of The Monkees—& arguably The Wife’s first love—passed on too young at 66.

One more quick Oscar note: Sunday evening’s show featured talking heads of famous people discussing their earliest movie memories. Brad Pitt recalled being taken to see a movie featuring “a good Gargantua and a bad Gargantua,” & that the good Gargantua had to sacrifice himself at the end. He’s thinking, of course, of the 1966 Japanese kaiju film War of the Gargantuas (Furankenshutain no Kaiju: Sanda tai Gaira; released in the US in 1970), a vague sequel to 1965’s Frankenstein Conquers the World.

So, for inspiring Mr. Pitt with his selflessness…

Monster-of-the-Week: …let’s give the honor to Sanda…

…the brownish, mountain-dwelling “Good Gargantua,” who does battle for humanity's sake with his greenish, sea-dwelling, people-gobbling brother Gaira…

…in that movie. I was taken to it by my long-suffering Mom, for all I know on the same day as Pitt (he’s only about a year younger than I am, which is probably why I’m often mistaken for him), & I remember it spooked me slightly more than the Japanese monster pictures usually did. Accidental byproducts of Frankenstein-ian experiments in the earlier film, these shaggy anthropoids with their ugly ogre-ish faces & their Cain & Abel dynamic, plus the goriness of Gaira’s eating habits, combined to make this one grimmer & nastier than the typical Godzilla fare.

Also, there’s the matter of this horrible song, which has been occupying space in my cranium for four decades…

HEROIC FEET

2006’s Happy Feet was a truly crazy movie, a blend of Pixar-style animation, Bollywood musical & a streak of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Set in a world in which penguins sing to connect with their soul-mates, the film focused on the unfortunate young Mumble, unable to carry a tune but endowed with a natural talent for tap-dancing.

It starts off, in short, as a fable about nonconformity & finding your own individual path—a good joke right off the bat, in the black-&-white uniformity of the penguin rookery (in The Far Side, Gary Larson once depicted a single penguin amongst the multitudes belting out “I’ve Gotta Be Me”). But by the end, director George Miller had spun the film from a sweet, if deeply eccentric, underdog tale into a grandiose environmentalist vision for which the word epic is hardly sufficient—“cosmic” would be more like it.

I’d be tempted to say it’s a one-of-a-kind movie, but as of this weekend, it’s not. A major box-office hit & an Oscar-winner besides, Happy Feet could hardly fail to spawn a sequel, & here it is, some five years later. In Happy Feet Two, Mumble (voiced by Elijah Wood) has the penguins mixing some fancy footwork in with their stirring oratorios—the tiny feet often splashing in ominous melt-water—but alas his own son Erik, ironically enough, isn’t much of a dancer. Poor Erik runs away from the shame of this, accompanied by two loyal pals, & Mumble heads off to find them.

While they’re gone, a huge chunk of Antarctic ice collides with the rookery, sealing thousands of penguins, including Erik’s Mom Gloria (voiced by Alecia Moore, aka Pink, replacing the late Brittany Murphy), off from the ocean. So it’s up to Mumble, Erik & his friends to try to find a way to save them—from hunger, from marauding skuas, & from general despair. Their allies this time include the Latin-accented Adelie penguin Ramon (Robin Williams) & his colony, elephant seals, electric-guitar-playing human researchers &, albeit unwittingly, two nearly-microscopic krill (Brad Pitt & Matt Damon) who have broken away from their enormous swarm to strike out on their own existential search for identity.

There’s also, of all birds, a puffin—named Sven, & voiced complete with Nordic accent by Hank Azaria—who has somehow found his way to the other end of the world. He’s been mistaken for a penguin who can fly, which gives him the status of a sort of self-improvement spiritual leader.

In other words, like the first film, Happy Feet Two is another big helping of off-the-wall weirdness. But also like the first film, it’s funny & good-hearted, & the musical numbers—which, a la Bollywood, freely mix snatches of the Rawhide theme, grand opera & Queen & Bowie’s “Under Pressure”—are thrilling, both in their relentless rhythms & in Miller’s dazzling, undulating visual perspectives.

Miller’s apparent purpose, this time, is to stave off the sense of despair that many of us feel over the seeming futility of individual action in the environmental struggle. The moral which the movie asserts—it’s also on the poster—is “Every Step Counts.” To this I can only say: I hope so.

IT'S NOT THAT EASY BEING BEANE

“It’s so hard not to be romantic about baseball,” says Billy Beane near the end of Moneyball. He’s right, it is. Indeed, it’s so hard not to be romantic about baseball that the makers of Moneyball just went right ahead & romanticized it. The result is that a sports movie set mostly in the front office & concerned with a purely quantitative approach to success turned out, improbably, as one of the more engrossing big-studio films of the year.

Billy Beane, played here by Brad Pitt, had a mostly forgettable career as a player in the Major Leagues—stints with the Mets, Twins, Tigers & Athletics. He found his niche in management: he’s been the GM in Oakland for more than a decade. During this time he is credited with making the franchise as cost-efficiently successful as any team in the Majors, through his application of analytical principles of the sort pioneered by the maniacal baseball writer & statistician Bill James, of Baseball Abstract fame.

Beane’s story was told in the 2003 Michael Lewis book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game. Steven Soderbergh was at one time slated to direct the film adaptation, but his approach was reportedly too unconventional, & he was replaced by Capote’s Bennett Miller. The script was also reworked—the finished product is credited to Steve Zaillian & Aaron Sorkin.

Interesting though it might have been to see Soderbergh’s take on this material, it’s hard to argue with the quiet tension & wit of Miller’s elegant, leisurely-paced work here, or with the lively, idiosyncratic dialogue. Miller is somehow able to use just the sort of romantic & sentimental notions that run counter to Beane’s management style—superstition, jinxes, crazy longshots—without violating the cool, dryly humorous tone he’s established. There’s even a tingly sports-movie climax, though the film ambles on for quite a while afterwards.

It’s hard to argue with the performances, either. Fresh from intense work in The Tree of Life, & looking almost laughably beautiful, Pitt turns in another gem here. His Beane is laconic yet tightly-wound, in the vein of his scary, overlooked performance as Jesse James in that Jesse James movie with the cumbersome title—the same bullying aggression under the bonhomie, the same sense that he’s nagged by melancholia.

Wide-eyed under the weight of Beane’s imposing presence is Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), a fictionalized version of A’s assistant GM Paul DePodesta. An Ivy-Leaguer with a degree in Economics, Brand schools Beane in anxious, intimidated blurts, & their relationship is the movie’s core. There are other fine performances—by Steven Bishop, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Robin Wright, Arliss Howard, & especially by Chris Pratt as catcher-turned-first-baseman Scott Hatteberg & Kerris Dorsey as Beane’s daughter—but they’re basically glorified cameos; the godlike Pitt, & Hill as his nebbishy Sancho Panza, carry the movie.

To the degree that I understand it—never a profound degree, where statistics are concerned—Bill James-style baseball analysis is intended to replace conventional wisdom with empiricism. It challenges, most famously, the reliability of batting average as an indicator of a player’s value to a team, especially by comparison to on-base percentage. In other words, it’s an attempt to apply hard rationalism to an activity that makes a great show of valuing the traditional, the intangible, the ineffable.

Somehow, though, even those of us for whom baseball has almost the quality of an orthodox religion—a set of grandly absurd ceremonial flourishes that seem, against reason, to add up to metaphysical significance—may not find this approach offensively reductive, maybe because the mad-scientist number-crunching of James & his disciples is so clearly born of a love of the game. Or maybe it’s because it points to a democratizing effect—it means that the rich teams won’t always win.

In any case, in professional baseball, what owners & managers actually value is money, & what paying fans generally value is winning. It was likely that any formula that promised to deliver the latter for a minimum expenditure of the former would sooner or later be given a try.

The question, of course, is—why should we care if it succeeded? Even if we love baseball, why should we care? At one low point Beane reassures his sweet, worried daughter that “I’ve got uptown problems, which aren’t really problems at all.” Again, he’s right (more coarsely, these are sometimes called “white people problems”). In human terms, Beane’s career fortunes matter even less than, say, the King’s stutter in The King’s Speech, & since the movie is about taking mushy-brained poetic thinking out of baseball, we really shouldn’t even grant this story metaphorical importance.

Skillful filmmaking can get you to care about almost anything, but when you think over the wistful tone of Moneyball’s final act, you may laugh out loud that you sat still for it: In a season in which he set a landmark record & revolutionized sports management, Beane is saddened because he didn’t win the World Series. He still hasn’t, & problems don’t come much more uptown than that.

TRUNK SHOW

The specific subject of Terrence Malick’s new film The Tree of Life is a mid-century, middle-class, middle-American family—dysfunction & tragedy played out in Norman Rockwell light. Malick isn’t big on specificity, though, & it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that what he’s really taking on with this movie is no less than the Meaning of Life, the inscrutable Fruit & Root of the title Tree.

Malick’s story concerns the O’Briens, of Boomer-era Waco, Texas: Dad (Brad Pitt), who gave up his dream to be a classical pianist for a career as an industrial engineer, the radiant & saintly Mom (Jessica Chastain), and three boys. The eldest of these, Jack (played by Sean Penn as an adult & by the terrific Hunter McCracken as a preteen), is our point of view for most of the film.

It’s an iconic American motif; what makes The Tree of Life different from innumerable other treatments is, first of all, Malick’s narrative style. The story is given to us in elliptical fragments, mostly brief, often enigmatic, seemingly meant to suggest snatches of memory. In its broader organization, it’s also suggestive of a piece of symphonic music, with movements: a light & joyous passage devoted to the mother, a brooding one for the father, a turbulent one for the boy’s sexual awakening, and so forth (the powerful score is by Alexander Desplat).

Past and present, the dramatic & the trivial, are freely mixed with scenes of the characters wandering in expressionistic landscapes. It’s disorienting at first, and some of the questions that arise about exactly what’s happened to the family remain ambiguous. But the wisps & glimpses of story accrue emotional force, & most of what’s onscreen is superbly done—it includes, among other merits, one of Brad Pitt’s best performances, a turn of almost Brando-like vibrancy. Still, what we aren’t shown can be exasperating.

Secondly, The Tree of Life is remarkable for Malick’s ambitiousness of scope: In addition to emotional conflicts—career and personal disappointments turn Dad from a stern & hard-assed but by no means unloving father to a repressive tyrant—& coming-of-age drama, the family is also visited by heartbreak & loss. They cry out to the Almighty, as people do in such times, with the Eternal Questions: “Who are You? What are we to You?” And Malick takes his unironic best shot at giving them, & us, an answer, in visual terms.

The oddest branch on The Tree of Life is a lengthy, epic special-effects sequence depicting the formation of the Cosmos, and the development of life on Earth, from slimy blobs & worms to plesiosaurs & dinosaurs. It’s a majestic free-standing episode, inevitably reminiscent, in atmosphere, of Kubrick’s 2001 (Kubrick crony Douglas Trumbull reportedly worked on the effects), but what, you might well ask, does this titanic spectacle have to do with the O’Briens of Waco, Texas?

The question could be answered in more than one way. It could be that Malick is saying to the bereaved questioner, in the manner of a rationalist-era Voice of God to Job: In light of this magnificent, terrible, pitiless, glorious pageant, how dare you ask for an explanation for your sufferings?

I don’t think, so, though. I think he’s trying to put personal & family travails into a cosmic context—to suggest that our lives are every bit as important, in the grand scheme of things, as exploding suns & volcanoes & primordial monsters. The film seems in some sense theistic in outlook, though not simplemindedly so, & the point seems to be that human life & our interpersonal connections do have metaphysical or transcendental significance, even if we can’t quite understand it.

Of course, Malick’s depiction of The Grand Scheme of Things is just that—a depiction. Your own sensibility will have a lot to do with whether it repels you or thrills you, whether it seems pretentious & presumptuous or an audacious & visionary use of the medium.

For me, it was the latter. Malick, now 67, has made only five features as a director. His marvelous debut, 1973’s Badlands, holds up as a classic; I’ve found most of his subsequent work interesting but diffuse. But The Tree of Life, for all its loose ends & ramblings, strikes me as another that may still look like a classic four decades from now.