“You ever been skull fucked?”

Joseph Gordon-Levitt takes a break from being the clean-cut badass we’ve seen before. Now he’s a different kind of badass.

For entirely too much of the running time of Hesher, I believed the titular character was a figment of TJ (Devin Brochu, a good child actor)’s imagination. The film did not seem to want to commit to the reality of the character and his inexplicable habit of just showing up wherever and the casual disregard for him shown by the adults in the movie. That was immediately interesting and definitely intentional as it allowed me to understand what this movie is trying to do satirically as well as where its heart really lies.

“Tell us a story from before we can remember.”

Of all the many, many beautiful images from this film I think this one is my favorite.

The Tree of Life is a film that requires those elements of moviegoing acumen that are most often discarded, devalued, and ignored by the vast majority of moviegoers: attention, critical thinking, analysis, and level of empathy that has to be generated by you, not by manipulative mechanics of character and plot. This is a largely plotless movie. The scope and gravity of the narrative are such that the connective tissue is secondary to images, tone, and feeling. To even ask people to deal with this without prepackaged cynicism is ambitious. That the film contains some of the most memorable photography you’re likely to see this decade (it’s Malick after all), including several sequences of imagery that can only be described as cosmic, is already proof positive of a heady level of ambition.

It’s difficult to review The Tree of Life. It’s hard to talk about what worked for me because I’m still not 100% sure how I feel about the film. Like Malick’s other work, I’m left with some very big and unwieldly impressions as well as a feeling of disconnect brought on by the unconventional level of sheer impressionism with which this experience (because it is that, more than a film alone) was crafted.