Back in January, film critics Manuela Lazic and Adam Nayman began working together on a long list that initially had more than 100 titles on it, in order to sum up something interesting—if not definitive—about the past quarter century of film. Narrowing things down was hard. They spread out their picks as evenly as they could over this 25-year period and also across a variety of styles, and for the rest of 2025, they will be dissecting one movie per month. They’re not writing to convince each other or to have an ongoing Siskel-and-Ebert-style thumb war. Instead, they’re hoping to team up and explore a group of resonant movies. We’re also hoping that you’ll read—and watch—along.
Adam Nayman: Some movies feel within our grasp; others evade us. I’ve been chasing after Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life for 14 years. That elusivity is built into the film’s visual style: Over and over again, the camera hovers behind the characters as they move toward some distant vanishing point, sometimes crisscrossing their trajectories like dance partners or celestial bodies, poetry in motion. Sometimes, the shots are so swift that we can barely register who or what we’re seeing despite the crystalline grade of the cinematography. Sometimes, the images are so vivid—a boy kneeling by a river holding a dress; a woman holding her child to the sky; a dinosaur writhing on a beach—that they linger beyond the next cut, superimposing themselves on the retina of the mind’s eye.
It’s at once perfectly accurate and not nearly enough to say that The Tree of Life is beautiful. It’s also worth wondering—maybe reverently, maybe skeptically, and in the film’s own spirit of dialectical inquiry—about the upshot of all that lyricism. Is it in the service of something philosophically profound or merely a deep, revivifying immersion into a slipstream style of moviemaking? Not everybody wants that kind of baptism. I will never forget going to see The Tree of Life—for the second time, with my dad, who had no idea what he was getting into—at a theater in Toronto where the manager had posted a handwritten sign above the box office window. In my memory, which isn’t perfect—fitting one of the film’s most resonant themes, the subjectivity and elasticity of memory—it read something like, “Please do not ask for refunds, the movie is supposed to be this way.”
Over the years, I’ve had enough conversations with people hostile to Malick’s stylistic approach—and to the idea that somebody else might enjoy a film with such a unique conception of drama and character—that I can easily imagine the complaints that led to the buyer-beware signage. I bought a ticket for a Brad Pitt movie and got a work of American Romantic poetry … give me my money back.
One of the reasons that I really wanted us to do The Tree of Life for this series was because, in a way, it represents something like the far shore of American commercial moviemaking—the same basic territory that Malick staked out back in the 1970s with Badlands and Days of Heaven, but even more suffused with Ellipticism and abstraction. “Some people had criticized Days of Heaven for not having enough of a story,” said Malick’s collaborator, Paul Ryan, “but Terry would say, ‘I want to go more in that direction.’ He was interested in a non-narrative style, the cinematic equivalent of how, say, Beethoven had structured his symphonies.” That Malick was able to cobble together $32 million for a dream project he had been working on since the release of Days of Heaven—when it was originally titled Q and conceived as “a history of the cosmos up through the formation of the Earth and the beginnings of life”—is a miracle on par with anything in the movie itself. Imagining what the project would have looked like with Colin Farrell (who worked with Malick on The New World) in place of Pitt (who signed on with Plan B as a producer before taking on the lead role) is one of the many thought experiments that arise with a film whose ultimate realization on such a massive scale was unlikely, to say the least.
Considering that The Tree of Life went on to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes (where a rumor proliferated that Robert De Niro’s jury was basically told by the festival’s power brokers to pick it lest they be ridiculed by later generations) and score a Best Picture nomination, it might seem silly to try to play white knight for it, especially so many years later. But for all its size and power, there’s something inherently fragile about Malick’s cinema: His films are like stained-glass cathedrals, and they make easy, breakable targets for people who like to throw stones. “I detect a strain of embarrassment in some of the more hostile reactions to The Tree of Life,” wrote Kent Jones in Film Comment, earnestly summing up the potential perils—particularly acute in an irony-poisoned millennial moment—of trying to make a movie inflected by Heidegger and Whitman; scored to modern classical music and Czech opera; adorned with scriptural quotations and embedded religious allegories; and modeled, both obliquely and directly, on the book of Job as a meditation on God’s will and our shared capacity for suffering, forgiveness, and redemption. One angle of attack for the film’s detractors was to say that it was pretentious, unwieldy, or both: the work of a master who’d thrown caution and discipline to the wind. Another was to claim that by conflating the big bang and subsequent geological and biological evolution of the planet with the modest, self-contained story of the O’Brien family—a middle-class, mid-20th-century clan of East Texans based on Malick’s own childhood household—he was scraping the ceiling (or plumbing the depths) of self-indulgence. “There is something mulish about his sophomorism, something stupefying about his work,” wrote the critic Richard Schickel, who diagnosed The Tree of Life with what he called “Terrence Malick Syndrome—a yearning to juxtapose the quotidian and the cosmic in search of some ersatz significance.”
For me, there’s definitely a strain of embarrassment when it comes to talking about The Tree of Life, but it’s not because I’m a detractor. If anything, watching it now—another decade and change deeper into life, and after becoming a father—leaves me dangerously close to proclaiming that it makes me feel seen. I can’t think of another movie where I’m simultaneously so distant from the precise time and place evoked on-screen and so close to what’s happening, as if the choreography and cadence of certain moments had been extracted from my own subconscious. As a sardonic, semi-neurotic North American Jew, I relate more to A Serious Man, another unofficial adaptation of the book of Job featuring a divine heartland tornado and a crypto-rabbinic motto—the humble, agnostic mandate to ”accept the mystery”—that resonates on a deeper frequency when it comes to The Tree of Life. This is not because I find Malick’s movie obscure or incomprehensible (the three-hour cut approved by Malick and distributed on Blu-ray and streaming by Criterion even borders on conventional by filling out the O’Briens as characters) but because I reluctantly and gratefully accept that certain things that have proved so mysterious in my own life—the births of my daughters; the surreal rapidity with which they’ve grown up; the ways they are now moving away from me while I lag behind, trying to catch my breath—place me on some larger continuum. I don’t know if I believe in universality in art, or that The Tree of Life represents some sort of landmark in that vicinity. Still, I take comfort in knowing that many other people see Malick’s bright and endlessly reflective movie as a mirror—including, maybe, you, Manuela …
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Manuela Lazic: I revisited The Tree of Life this past weekend while on a long train journey. I was returning to my home after spending the weekend back home, celebrating my kid brother’s 21st birthday. I quickly realized that this was going to be challenging: Rewatching the film certainly felt, in some ways, like looking into a mirror, especially in that context. I found all the love, regrets, gratitude, and fear I feel around being a sister reflected back at me with overpowering strength and beauty—I was a sniveling mess for the last 20 minutes.
Nothing could have prepared me for how Malick’s masterpiece would affect me this time—I, too, have changed since its release. I was only 18 then, and although my brother was already around, I hadn’t yet left home and started to become my own person away from him. I also hadn’t seen that many movies yet; the dinosaur sequence stayed with me, but mostly because it was the first time in my life that I felt like leaving a cinema mid-film. Now, at 32, on that train taking me far away from my family, I found myself both baffled and moved by that section of the film. I’m still not entirely convinced by it on a formal level (although the effects have aged relatively well), but Malick’s ability to distill the essence of his argument—the difference between the way of nature and the way of grace—while working on such a gigantic canvas moved me immensely. The idea that not even the evolution of a species can be rationalized away as the survival of the fittest is perhaps where all of one’s hope for mankind should begin: If the dinosaurs could show mercy to each other, and even if that mercy mattered very little in the long run, then so can we be gracious to one another.
The argument that Malick was being too self-absorbed when basing his protagonists on his own people is completely absurd. Every piece of art comes from somewhere and, ideally, somewhere personal—even when it is an adaptation of existing material or centered on something one doesn’t know, the point of reference is always, inevitably, the self (and that is why AI will never satisfy our need for human understanding through art). Like you, I have very little in common with the O’Briens, but Malick didn’t make a film about what makes them different from everyone else. He made a film about the things that connect them to everyone else, namely joy, suffering, doubt, and hope. I am not a religious person, and I don’t know if there is a God, but I do believe in love, as cheesy as that may sound, and this is what Malick is talking about here. What he captures in the lives of his characters isn’t simply the facts of them, but what these facts carry within. I hope not everyone on Earth has been unlucky enough to have a father like Mr. O’Brien, shouting at them to sit properly at dinner but himself keeping his elbows on the table, but I can imagine a lot of people recognizing the forcefulness, desperation for control, and loneliness behind his behavior. Not everyone has had the experience of their mother kissing them goodnight and switching off the light every day for years, as we see here in a brief but evocative montage, but these are the kinds of gestures, at once practical and emotionally charged, that children later remember. It is love or its absence (or its burying), how one chooses to follow or resist it through time, that Malick has managed to catch like lightning in a bottle.
I will always remember my brother as he was when he was 3 years old. It seems that Jack can only remember his brother R.L. as a young boy, and we never see him as he was around the age of his passing, at 19. Memory is not only a theme of the film but a structuring force. It’s the mechanisms of the mind traveling through time that determine the shape of the film, and perhaps this is why it is called The Tree of Life, as each branch is connected to the others, even though some at first seem so far apart. The film has a stream-of-consciousness quality, perhaps because remembering is a bit like dreaming about the past, and so it would make sense for Jack to think of his brother as always looking the same. It also explains the sudden appearance of their youngest brother, as well as the film’s ending, which is completely devastating for its total embrace of both nature’s cruel ways and the enduring, unquestionable existence of love in the world. Jack, now grown, finds his memories merging with his feelings of loss, longing, and affection, and he can imagine a place, out of time, where nature and grace finally find an equilibrium. It’s a heart-expanding (if not exploding) moment because it promises that no matter what, one will always be able to love the world, and it echoes the moment when Mr. O’Brien apologizes to young Jack for having been ruthless at times. If even he can see that, if even he can actually love, then there is grace in the world.
The branches of that tree are connected to each other but also reach down to the earth, and this time around, I couldn’t help but also see the film from an ecological point of view. Nature, in a literal sense, is present in Jack’s and his brothers’ childhoods. Malick and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki manage to give meaning to the clichéd image of kids climbing up a sunlight-dappled tree: They are growing up, and so is that tree, and this inevitable, unstoppable change is at once exhilarating and vertiginous. Nothing in the natural world and our lives ever stays the same; the elements always end up taking over. Watching the clean stream where Jack plays contrasted with the stunning image of children running into pesticide smoke, blissfully unaware of its nefariousness, I felt Malick both paying tribute to the once barely touched environment as he must have known it and trying to keep a record of it for a future he predicted to be less green. Almost 15 years later, it sadly feels like we have arrived at that moment. How many children these days get to have childhoods like Jack’s, where they are confronted daily with the way of nature—its indifference and beauty, its complexity and simplicity—in creatures besides themselves without, crucially, being terrified of it? Kids today learn all about pollution and our pitiful attempts at containing it, and they might even grasp that the Earth is, in a way, simply going through another phase of adapting to its circumstances, yet that is little comfort when that change of climate means the end of the human race.
Adam, do you think Malick’s perspective on nature (and grace) can help us deal with the havoc we have wreaked on our one and only planet? Can he help us face the future, on an individual and global level?
Nayman: That sort of responsibility is a tall order for any filmmaker, especially one who’s working in such an oblique register: For every viewer who might buy into The Tree of Life as a design for living, there’s another who’d probably ask for a refund. But I agree with you that the film functions powerfully as an environmental polemic, attuned to how the world looks both with and without us, with one eye trained on the distant past and another on the end of history and beyond: Maybe we could call it Please Look Up.
Back when we were talking about Step Brothers, I suggested that Adam McKay and Terrence Malick had certain things in common, Exhibit A being editor Hank Corwin, who was hired to cut The Big Short based largely on his sterling work on The Tree of Life. In an interview with Deadline, McKay praised Corwin’s willingness to “take bold leaps” in assembling footage, and considering that Lubezki and Malick shot nearly 350 hours of material, it’s a miracle it took only five editors (and a gaggle of USC film students and interns) to bring the final product in at feature length. It’d be a fun experiment—and a bold leap—to intercut the playground bullying scenes in Step Brothers with the boys-will-be-boys brutality in The Tree of Life, or maybe juxtapose Sean Penn’s adventures on the beachfront astral plane with the utopian expanse of the Catalina Wine Mixer. To go a little further, is that wounded plesiosaur writhing on a prehistoric beach (an image beamed in from the Discovery Channel, or Jurassic Park) a symbol of our shared frailty, or is it simply using ninja focus to slow its heart rate down? Let’s just say that both movies understand the sublime emotions that can be conjured up by a well-placed aria and leave it at that.
There’s some circumstantial evidence that Malick would appreciate the above comparison. Because the director is a bit of a recluse, any little nuggets of information about him get treated like gospel. My favorite is that he’s an avowed fan of Zoolander; he also let alt-comedy cutups Thomas Lennon, Joe Lo Truglio, and Nick Kroll wander loose through the Hollywood Babylon of Knight of Cups as a de facto peanut gallery and sicced a chainsaw-wielding Val Kilmer on music festivalgoers during the making of Song to Song. About 15 years ago, I attended a European film festival where one of the guests of honor was—drumroll—John C. Reilly, who talked about working with Malick on The Thin Red Line and recalled how the director once paused in the middle of blocking an elaborate combat sequence, pointed up at the sky, and said, “Look at that red-tailed hawk.” Malick’s reputation as an intellectual precedes him: He was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford who tackled Heidegger and Wittgenstein in his dissertation. But the fact that he never finished his degree matters, too. It ties into the feeling—present in the majority of his movies, but paramount in The Tree of Life—that he’s a kind of perpetual undergrad filtering his big, metaphysical ideas through a series of wise-beyond-their-years mouthpieces. That quality of in-betweenness is crucial: Whether his narrators are living in turn-of-the-century Texas, ’50s-era South Dakota, or the deep forests of The New World, they articulate their observations like emissaries from a teenage wasteland.
A few years ago, writing about Zodiac—another movie I’d love to pair with The Tree of Life as an object lesson in how to depict the passage of time—Kent Jones wondered whether or not certain films could be visually and intellectually stimulating enough to actually transcend their makers’ intentions. His not-so-rhetorical question was “Can Movies Think?” and I’d say The Tree of Life resembles his criteria for cinematic sentience. Like its namesake, it’s a movie that branches out in all directions, a tangle of sturdy, load-bearing boughs and spindly limbs. Such is the nature of Malick’s art, and maybe the reason I prefer The Tree of Life to the similarly styled films he made afterward—at an accelerated rate that altered the public and industrial perception of his work after decades of only sporadic activity—is because it foregrounds meaning-making in the mind of an adolescent protagonist. I’m hard-pressed to think of a performance by a child actor that conveys the idea of a consciousness in formation the way Hunter McCracken’s does; every time the camera catches his eye, there’s a palpable sense of processing, a mask of rapt contemplation. I love movies whose form is instructive, that effectively teach you how to watch them as they go along: Don’t Look Now comes to mind, and also the work of Claire Denis, whose Beau Travail feels inflected by The Thin Red Line. Jack’s anxious, roving, voracious gaze is what holds The Tree of Life together even as it pulls it apart; it’s an entry point to an inner life and also a mirror for our own spectatorship.
I had a friend whose major criticism of The Tree of Life was that it made him feel like his mind was wandering—that the style was a cover for a lack of dramatic focus. Is there a contradiction between holding a viewer’s attention and leaving it free to roam? Do you think that The Tree of Life is a movie that thinks, and is there anything else that it makes you think about?
Lazic: I think the best films tend to “think,” in the sense that they are open enough for the spectator to derive meaning from them on their own, freely yet with the gentle guidance of the filmmaker. I agree that Claire Denis’s films (perhaps most intensely The Intruder) fit that description, as does the work of David Lynch and Michelangelo Antonioni, who made films that have their own internal logic that cannot be explained, only experienced. And yet, Denis, Lynch, Antonioni, and Malick can’t be said to have similar styles, which I think demonstrates Jones’s point that “we need to stop thinking so much about this thing called ‘cinema’ and start letting movies think for themselves.” (And yes, this also applies to Step Brothers.) The issue instead is one of personal disposition to a filmmaker’s style: Some people will respond more to Lynch than to Denis, and that is fine. I also wonder if disposition is such a fixed thing: As I mentioned earlier, everything is always changing, so perhaps films can open up for us over time (as The Tree of Life did for me) or instead come to feel overdetermined and suddenly limited.
McCracken’s thoughtful performance reminded me of Babak Ahmadpour in Abbas Kiarostami’s 1987 masterpiece Where Is the Friend’s House?, in which a young child faces the indifference and cruelty of people (the way of nature) as he tries to do the right, altruistic thing (the way of grace) and save his classmate from punishment. Kiarostami claimed that in order to get Ahmadpour to look as though he were anxiously weighing the pros and cons of all his decisions, he’d simply ask him to solve math problems in his head. I imagine Malick’s approach was more Method-like, in the sense that he and his collaborators—I’m thinking in particular of the stunning work of production designer Jack Fisk—made sure to create a world in which his actors could fully immerse themselves and be left to interact with it. Like in Kiarostami’s film, where the kid has to actually run from village to village to find his friend’s house, there is an element of doing in The Tree of Life, especially for the children, which can help bring out convincing performances: When you have to climb a tree, you don’t have to think about or show that you are climbing the tree; you just climb it. Malick is often mocked for being whimsical, but his (good) films are usually anchored in physical behavior and in the world. The Tree of Life features some of its actors’ best work: I don’t always connect with the bravado of Jessica Chastain’s performances but find her irresistibly honest here (her “no!” when toddler Jack goes to hit baby R.L. has never left my mind), and it’s a pleasure to see Pitt going through unsettling emotions. Mr. O’Brien’s apology to Jack is actually not as devastating as what happens right after it: Pitt and McCracken separate after a hug and stand awkwardly near each other, the distance and tension between their characters returning after this moment of intimacy, the actors struggling with that odd mix of emotions, the camera stepping back to follow this gap as it widens again. The film reaches an even deeper level for me when it shows not only Jack thinking but also his father, a man usually so controlled that he lets nothing on, neither his feelings nor his mind.
I think we can both agree that this discussion is our most galaxy-brained one to date in this series, which is of course appropriate for a film about the birth and fragility of the world itself. To bring it back down to a slightly more concrete place, I’ll close by mentioning the film’s visual effects, courtesy of Douglas Trumbull. Malick brought Trumbull out of retirement (he hadn’t done effects since 1982’s Blade Runner) in order to avoid an overly digital look, and the results are beautiful. It’s interesting that at no point in this exchange did we talk about The Tree of Life’s influence on the films that came after it—perhaps because few filmmakers have Malick’s ambition to make a film about Life Itself—but Trumbull presents an opportunity to talk about a film The Tree of Life is indebted to, another Trumbull masterpiece, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Both films are existential in their own ways, and their starting points are exact opposites—one begins from a large tree, the other a mysterious, inorganic monolith. These filmmakers have different sensibilities, of course, and perhaps Kubrick’s film is more readily referenced than Malick’s because there is less vulnerability in precise storyboards and irony than a free-floating camera and whispered musings about love. Does Malick represent the way of grace and Kubrick that of nature? I’m not sure, but in any case, they both have their place in the cinematic firmament.
