Angels in Waco

Brad Pitt as Father

TERRENCE MALICK, who wrote and directed this long-awaited film gets right to the point at the beginning. The opening titles of “The Tree of Life” ask the question Jehovah asked Job: “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?” Later we see images of the Creation (“when the morning stars sang together”) and a terrestrial scene that recalls another of the Creator's questions: “Can you draw out Leviathan with a hook?” The fact that Mr Malick's Leviathan is a beached plesiosaur will draw fire from anti-Darwinians. Though “The Tree of Life” is a Christian film, it is not for filmgoers with narrow views.

The joys of growing up in Waco, Texas, during the Eisenhower era are remembered by Jack (Sean Penn), an architect trapped in a world of greed and glass skyscrapers that he probably helped to build. His questioning voice-over, addressed to God, alternates with young Jack (Hunter McCracken) asking God his own questions as the camera tells the story of Father (Brad Pitt), Mother (Jessica Chastain), Jack and his brothers, all from Jack's point of view, with very little dialogue. Father, who thinks the world is a jungle, is an abusive patriarch; Mother shows her children the way of grace. “Father, mother, always you wrestle inside me,” murmurs Jack. The film-maker has remembered his own Texas childhood and recreated it brilliantly with his young actors.

In keeping with the belief that any life closely considered justifies the ways of God to Man, Jack's childhood becomes the centre of a cosmic narrative that takes us from Creation to the End of Days, where we discover that Leviathan (or nature, here) was God's mask, like the discarded domino mask in one of the film's last images. Jack is redeemed by an apocalyptic vision that answers the reproachful questions he imagined Mother asking God at the beginning, when her second child died. It is this great film's boldest stroke to let her questions float over those fearful early images of an indifferent cosmos as if she had been asking them since the dawn of time.