If a Terrence Malick film (The New World, The Thin Red Line) is the closest thing cinema has to creating a religious experience, turning the theater into a church, then I choose to worship elsewhere. After four movies I can decisively say that I am not a Malick fan. The man is more interested in making ponderous nature documentaries attached with pretentious, whispery, obtusely poetic voice over. The man is not interested in narrative filmmaking. The Tree of Life, the inexplicable winner of the Cannes Palme d’Or, is less a movie than an impressionistic experience inside a dying man’s brain. It feels like all the synapses are sizzling, memories and fantasies bouncing around and melding. We see a 1950s childhood and a pushy father (Brad Pitt), but then we also see mom (Jessica Chastain) floating at one point, and Malick also manages to squeeze in a 15-minute sequence charting life from the Big Bang to the end of the dinosaurs. What? The Malick faithful declare their man a singular auteur, a man who uses cinema to explore the unanswerable questions of life, the universe, and everything. Terrific. However, most of these edits are only a couple seconds, and with little narrative momentum the scenes drag and drag, and every Malick minute feels like a thousand hours. Sean Penn, as the adult son, probably filmed his stuff during a pee break from another movie; it’s that short. The film is a technical marvel, the cinematography making tremendous use of different light levels, but that’s all this movie is for me — pretty pictures. It’s yet another frustrating, pompous, punishing “film,” a term I’m being generous with, from Malick. The Tree of Life moves so slowly and intractably that I wondered if literally watching grass grow would be a better use of my time. Sorry Malick disciples, I guess I am a movie secularist.

Nate’s Grade: C