THE TREE OF LIFE Trailer Is A Beautiful Mystery...

By Matt Holmes / June 25, 2011

the newly posted HD trailer for Terrence Malick's super mysterious drama The Tree of Life, which will open May 27th, 2011 and hopefully will get a premiere a few weeks earlier in Cannes. Such a controversial and ambitious film is what that festival was built to showcase. We've seen some awful trailers in the last couple of weeks and for a while there I was beginning to asses my options for a sabbatical or possibly go into hibernation for a year because Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, Thor, Green Lantern and the like-minded made 2011 look like a place I didn't want to be a part of. Then this trailer hits... You know I barely have any idea for what The Tree of Life is about. Likewise, I have no idea what the general public are going to make this trailer. I know from the synopsis that Brad Pitt's portion of the film is set in the 1950's, where somewhere along the line the time narrative shifts and later picks up with his son (played by Sean Penn) some decades later who hasn't quite got over his childhood... and I know there's some kind of thematic about the larger meaning of the universe, nature and perhaps even dinosaurs... which explains the cutting nature to Earth and it's creatures and plants. But how does it all fit together? Well that's a beautiful mystery I can't wait to solve. Friends, family... leave me alone for 30 mins whilst I replay this over and over as my imagination runs wild...

From Terrence Malick, the acclaimed director of such classic films as Badlands, Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line, The Tree of Life is the impressionistic story of a Midwestern family in the 1950's. The film follows the life journey of the eldest son, Jack, through the innocence of childhood to his disillusioned adult years as he tries to reconcile a complicated relationship with his father (Brad Pitt). Jack (played as an adult by Sean Penn) finds himself a lost soul in the modern world, seeking answers to the origins and meaning of life while questioning the existence of faith. Through Malick's signature imagery, we see how both brute nature and spiritual grace shape not only our lives as individuals and families, but all life.