To watch
The Tree of Life (2011) is, in analogous fashion, to participate in its making. And any criticism will therefore have to be provisional. [
Terrence Malick] might have been well advised to leave out the dinosaurs and the trip to the afterlife and given us a delicate chronicle of a young man's struggle with his father and himself, set against a backdrop of rapid social change. And perhaps [
Herman Melville] should have suppressed his philosophizing impulses and written a lively tale of a whaling voyage.
