The Tree of Life (A Return)

A while after seeing THE TREE OF LIFE, I returned to it with a fresh mind, but sturdy opinions / expectations. The viewing experience was pretty much the same: occasionally boring, but often exciting. I have discovered what it is, however, that makes Terence Malick's film merely good, and not great. Here was a film I came into wanting to love, and yet there are only small aspects of it that I admire: Jessica Chastain as Sleeping Beauty, Dinosaurs and the creation/destruction of Earth, Jessica Chastain flying, DDT, the music, Brad Pitt's face, contradictions, the likeness to Kubrick's 2001. For, Malick's film has revealed itself to be deeply personal. I see a close up of a lamp by the house, and see it again later, I see broken sequences of mangled faces at the shops and Brad Pitt's desire to invent and surmise that it must be Malick's own experience that formulated such images that seem misplaced/uneven. This is ubiquitous in the film though, and sequences seem out of place or irresponsive for me because the experiences belong solely to Malick. This is the pretentiousness of his film: that his life experience is ours, and in the cosmic scale scenes, we can apply our own trivial thoughts to his contrast. However, I came to admire the film slightly more for its style. It seemed more "memory-like" than it had before. Still an okay film, but even in the light of his fantastic setting, it seems minor, or like a failure to say that an attempted masterpiece failed at being that.