The Hot List | Film: Authority, From God to Dad

The first and only time I saw “The Tree of Life,” Terrence Malick’s solemn contemplation of God, family and creation, the mostly older audience at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas remained as silent and motionless as a church congregation rapt in prayer. I quickly adjusted to the reverential mood of a film whose monumental images of erupting volcanoes and churning seas, as many have observed, recall Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

From left, Jessica Chastain, Tye Sheridan, Laramie Eppler, Hunter McCracken and Brad Pitt as the O'Brien family in 1950s Texas in Terrence Malick's film “The Tree of Life.”

But Kubrick’s biting wit, exemplified by his often sarcastic use of classical music in “2001,” is replaced in Mr. Malick’s film by a tone of unalloyed awe. Excerpts from Mahler, Gorecki, Berlioz, Smetana, Respighi, Bach, Brahms, Ligeti and other composers, along with original music by Alexandre Desplat, interwoven with imagery, transport us to the gates of heaven.

From that single viewing, the most powerful theme I grasped was the film’s punishing view of humankind’s patriarchal inheritance. “The Tree of Life’s” psychological core is its portrait of the O’Briens, an archetypal American family living in Waco, Tex., in the 1950s. Its strict father (Brad Pitt), a civil engineer and aspiring inventor with a wife and three boys, rules the roost with an authoritarian hand. His love for them is inseparable from a moralistic rage that erupts at his children’s breaches of discipline and at their mother’s coddling. Scenes in church connect Mr. Pitt’s character to a fearsome, unpredictable Old Testament God — the God of Job — dispensing arbitrary judgment.

The anguish endured by the O’Briens is focused on the seemingly meaningless death of one son and the rebellion of another (played by Hunter McCracken), whose unhappy grown-up self (Sean Penn) is too briefly glimpsed. The film’s biggest lapse is its unconvincing imagining of a resolution to all human conflict in an afterlife on a beach. But its central vision of an inviolable patriarchal hierarchy, descending from a stern male God to Mr. O’Brien, who endeavors to carry out his idea of God’s will on his tormented children, is the movie’s emotional heart.

After a single viewing, I couldn’t determine Mr. Malick’s attitude toward religious faith. Maybe a second immersion in this great but humorless and hugely flawed film will reveal the answer; then again, maybe not. Maybe there is no answer. Maybe that’s the point.