Today I saw an EXCEPTIONAL movie: The Tree of Life

I rented it from Netflix. Its cinematic beauty is stunning and its story deeply touched me. It's beyond magical--it ventures into mystical realms with the most intense questions of the soul.  It is a film that was either loved or hated by theater audiences--you can get a taste of the different opinions in the amazon.com viewer reviews.  Those who prefer loud, fast-paced, thrill-a-minute car/train chase movies may not be able to grasp the subtle messages being iterated in this film through "everyday" life experiences.  As the NY Times reviewer says below, the film is archetypal; anyone who has lived through some of life's most difficult experiences will recognize themselves in it.  As I watched it, I began to think, "This is very much like the life review described by people who have had near-death experiences."  Caught up in total empathy with the characters, you almost feel as if you are floating above the scene while watching your own life being spun out, incident by incident, for you to observe and understand.  I highly recommend this movie -- more than any other movie I can remember seeing.  I think it will especially be recognized as "Oh, that's my life!" by people who were born from the 1930s to the 1960s, as it perfectly exemplifies childhood life that came before the children's "play dates" of today's world.  The combination of the beautiful cinematography with the incredible, perfectly chosen classical music contributes to make this a very special film that you may want to see again and again, even if just to behold the breathtaking cosmic displays of galaxies one more time.  I know I do.

EXCERPTS from the New York Times review by A. O. Scott
(You can read the entire review at: http://movies.nytimes.com/2011/05/27/movies/the-tree-of-life-from-terrence-malick-review.html?pagewanted=all )

The sheer beauty of this film is almost overwhelming, but as with other works of religiously minded art, its aesthetic glories are tethered to a humble and exalted purpose, which is to shine the light of the sacred on secular reality.

Embedded in the passages of cosmology, microbiology and spiritual allegory is a story whose familiarity is at least as important to the design of “The Tree of Life” as the speculative flights that surround it. The world of neatly trimmed lawns and decorous houses set back from shaded streets is one we instinctively feel we know, just as we immediately recognize the family whose collective life occupies the central 90 minutes or so of the film.

The particulars of these people — Mr. and Mrs. O’Brien and their three sons — and of the place they inhabit are drawn from Mr. Malick’s own biography, but they also have an almost archetypal cultural resonance. This is small-town America in the ’50s: Dad’s crew cut, Mom’s apron, the kids playing kick the can in the summer dusk.

To some extent this tableau — words can hardly do justice to the honeyed sunlight streaming through kitchen windows and refracted through the spray of garden hoses, or to the loose-limbed rhythms of children at play — offers an idealized glimpse of a lost Eden.

There are very few films I can think of that convey the changing interior weather of a child’s mind with such fidelity and sensitivity. Nor are there many that penetrate so deeply into the currents of feeling that bind and separate the members of a family.

This movie stands stubbornly alone, and yet in part by virtue of its defiant peculiarity it shows a clear kinship with other eccentric, permanent works of the American imagination, in which sober consideration of life on this continent is yoked to transcendental, even prophetic ambition. More than any other active filmmaker Mr. Malick belongs in the visionary company of homegrown romantics like Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Hart Crane and James Agee. The definitive writings of these authors did not sit comfortably or find universal favor in their own time. They can still seem ungainly, unfinished, lacking polish and perfection. This is precisely what makes them alive and exciting: “Moby-Dick,” “Leaves of Grass,” “The Bridge” and “A Death in the Family” lean perpetually into the future, pushing their readers forward toward a new horizon of understanding.