These are vitally important questions to be sure, and certainly ones worthy of asking. Swedish director Ingmar Bergman did this masterfully and artfully, albeit sometimes ponderously, throughout his extraordinary film career. Woody Allen humorously touched on such themes in his films. (His newest offering, Midnight in Paris, which I can recommend, ponders playfully the importance of presence, appreciation and acceptance of reality and what we possess here and now.) Such questions commonly come up during the course of psychotherapy. As they should. (See my prior post.) Malick admirably dares to take on similar territory in The Tree of Life, but does so in such a disjointed, lumbering, clumsy and cinematographically pedestrian manner that the viewer (at least this viewer) is underwhelmed, bored, confused and ultimately, thankful when the film finally, after a seeming eternity, ends. Perhaps this reaction is, in part, a reflection of Malick's own feelings of confusion, despair and perplexity about life. And partly a problem of poor technique and direction. Indeed, had the editing of this movie--which itself supposedly took place over a period of three years--deleted at least thirty minutes, this would have improved the viewing experience considerably. But, as is, the movie is an overly long, self-indulgent mess.

Curiously, The Tree of Life received high-praise from many critics. Some call it a "masterpiece." Which makes me wonder whether we were watching the same movie. Perhaps such praise is relative and contextual, given the generally impoverished and sophomoric state of cinema offered to audiences today. Several critics have compared the imagery and artistic ambition of this movie to that found in Stanley Kubrick"s classic 2001: A Space Odyssey. But there is no comparison. Not even close. Kubrick's imagery and storytelling was stunningly inventive, majestic, breathtaking and visionary. Malick's often consists of derivative or mundane visuals that we've already seen many times before, either in other movies or television series about nature, space and the formation of the universe. The point of interweaving this imagery, for Malick, in more or less non-linear (feminine versus masculine), stream-of-consciousness style (similar to free association in psychoanalysis) appears to be to confront the audience experientially with the vast mystery, transience, randomness, terrifying dangers and awesome power and beauty of the cosmos and life on this planet. What Malick neglects to acknowledge in any satisfying depth is the equally unknown, equally limitless and equally enigmatic inner universe referred to by both Freud and Jung as the unconscious. (In this sense, the psyche can be said to mirror the cosmos, and vice-versa. The interior and outer worlds are parallel universes, so to speak, symbolically linked, like heaven and earth, spirit and matter, by the archetypal tree of life.)  Mr. Malick strives to impose a decidedly more dogmatically religious than secular spiritual point of view of life's organic wholeness and continuity (symbolized by the titular tree) and nature's elusive significance. But he falls short visually. Musically, the sound track is only slightly more successful, conveying a combination of beauty, tragedy, joy, sadness, awe and transcendence, albeit monotonously so. Yet even that is relentless, in your face, manipulative, and way over the top.

What does this confused, chaotic and, yes, pretentious film say about the conscious and unconscious psyche of its creator, director Terrence Malick? I believe The Tree of Life to be partly autobiographical, and, like dreams, a sort of CAT scan of his soul: a penetrating peek into the director's sometimes traumatic, often idyllic childhood experiences growing up during the post-war early 1950s in Waco, Texas, and deeply troubling existential, psychological and religious conflicts that arose and still linger (as with all of us) long into adulthood: Who am I? What is life? Why is there evil? What is goodness? What does it mean to be a man or woman? Can we be "too good," as Brad Pitt's character tells his son? Is life a struggle to assert the ego's will, or to submit to what God dictates? How do we deal with our innate aggressive and sexual impulses? Our inherent human capacity for evil? Our shadow or what I call the daimonic? Mr. Malick attempts to pose these big questions in his picture, both from a personal and transpersonal perspective, as well as from the standpoint and through the eyes of both childhood and adulthood. But does so in a somewhat unsophisticated fashion. Religion, like philosophy, is, after all, a way of trying to make sense of life, evil, meaningless suffering and death. And this is precisely what we witness Terrence Malick struggling mightily to do based on what I take to be his own religious and, later, philosophical leanings. Indeed, it could be argued that what we are seeing throughout the film are fleeting images from the adult son's (Jack, played by Sean Penn) or Malick's own troubled unconscious. But merely depicting such unruly inner demons and random memories in cinematic form (as did Bergman and Fellini so successfully) does not necessarily equal art, in much the same way that one's personal journal writings do not a coherent or readable book make.