Terrence Malick is considered by many as one of the all-time great auteurs. Even with his sparse work rate (he's made five films in 38 years, which includes a twenty year break in between his second and third features), he has still managed to craft a reputation for himself as a master of the craft. Many profess their profound love for his work, citing each of his films as influential masterpieces that deserve to be put up among the pantheon of the greatest works in the history of cinema. Unfortunately though, I've never been able to get on the Malick bandwagon. While I admire and enjoy most of his films (read everything but 2005's "The New World"), there is always something about them that keeps me back a bit, something strangely distant about them. It's hard to pin down exactly what it is about his films that keep me from embracing them as much as I would like, but if I had to hazard a guess, I think I would say the problem with his films is a lack of humanity. With endless shots of nature and the environment surrounding his characters, the lives of the protagonists have always seemed secondary to his interest in the world barring down on them, giving them a cold, almost austere feeling.
To cure this, I would have thought the answer would be to go the traditional route and focus more on the narrative, making the stories more character driven, like the films of some of my all-time favorite auteurs such as Tarantino and Kurosawa. Apparently I would have been wrong though, because the thing Malick needed was not to go more into the traditional narrative, but less. For this is exactly what he does with "The Tree of Life", only retaining the slightest semblance of narrative but paradoxically creating the most human film of his career , one of the most human films in the history of cinema. I wouldn't have thought it going into the film, but Malick's almost experimental "The Tree of Life" gives him a film I can embrace with total sincerity, whole-heartedly. Finally, a true masterpiece that belongs with the greatest films in the history of the moving image.
