Sean Penn went a little hard (kept it respectful, I think) at his director Terrence Malick and their movie Tree of Life in an interview with the French newspaper Le Figaro:
“I didn’t at all find on the screen the emotion of the script, which is the most magnificent one that I’ve ever read.”
And I think he’s right. There’s something a little cold about Tree of Life. It’s a bit too heady in the sense that We’re constantly working, intellectually, to decode what all the images mean and how the parts all fit together. People are comparing it to 2001 because of the similar big themes and the temporal scope, from pre-history to the far future. That movie somehow stuck to my bones a little more and even if I don’t know what exactly the baby and the old man signify, I get a sense of the sublime in regards to mortality and the limits of my existence. Tree of Life is obviously very much about family and parenthood and brotherhood which are very much topics-of-the-heart. And I think the heart isn’t what Tree of Life and Malick, in this case, appeal to.
Brody (The New Yorker blogger / critic) saying that Penn's wrong for wanting to make the movie about him sort of sells Penn's opinion short. Brody's right that Tree of Life is a marvel, but Penn's righter in that it could have been marvelous.
