For his fifth feature, Terrence Malick seemingly set out to tell both the smallest story possible and the biggest. Drawing from his own life growing up in Texas, it’s primarily a coming-of-age tale in which Jack (Hunter McCracken) confronts the twin influences of his nurturing mother (Jessica Chastain) and oppressive father (Brad Pitt), and also his notions of right and wrong. But its perspective shifts more than once over the course of the film, to years after Jack’s childhood, to a present in which the grown-up Jack must sort through the past, to some kind of afterlife, and back to the beginning of time and the first stirrings of life on the planet. These shifts, particularly that last one, should be jarring, but they’re as graceful and beautiful as the rest of the film, which comes as close as any movie has come to simulating what it might be like to see the universe through the eye of God—as simultaneously aware of the whole of time and space as the smallest torments in the heart of one kid in the suburbs outside Waco in the 1950s. That isn’t the only element of Malick’s film that approaches the miraculous, either. It sustains a tone of wonder and heartbreak through remarkable imagery, lyrical narration, and musical selections that match so perfectly to the film around them, they could have been composed with Malick in mind. It’s a singular film, particular to the vision of a one-of-kind filmmaker, but also the most universal movie this decade has yet produced. —Keith Phipps
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