As someone who was raised Christian and attended parochial schools until my sophomore year of college, I am always fascinated with how religion in films is discussed by cinephiles, whether they be devote in their own religions, agnostics or atheists. Personally, I often look for not-necessarily-religious-at-all “big life meaning” in films, whether the filmmakers intended those kinds of interpretations to be made or not. Clearly, these types of discussions are right up my alley.

I disagree with Alejandro’s opening point that one must “embrace” The Tree of Life’s Christianity to like the film. I think it would be possible for someone to love ToL even as an atheist if one “forgave” the Christianity-based ideas presented. After all, as the GOP has taught us, many Christian values can be labeled “family values” and there are probably many “non-believers” who were moved by ToL’s fairly universal memories of distant dads, passive moms and push-pull sibling relationships.

I share Mike Ryan’s complaint that The Tree of Life is overly simplistic, but not in relation to details of Christianity or the afterlife, etc. It’s how Malick expressed himself so simplistically yet messily with imagery and editing that bothered me. I used this pejorative term on Twitter a few weeks ago, but I felt Malick was “spoon-feeding” the audience and acting like a Big Ole Self-Flattering Wise Guru in doing so. What he served up with the film as a whole was ultimately pablum and insulting to me as a film-goer.

I admire that Malick wanted to break things down to their essentials. I admire that he was so ambitious in his scope. I admire that he took such personal memories and personal beliefs and managed to strike some universal chords. What I don’t admire is the *how* (OK, well, I don’t admire 80% of the how — the first 25 minutes of ToL took my breath away).

I think Alejandro explained the problem with the “how” best in his Look of the Week #7 segment where he described that Malick had layered expressionism on top of impressionism. The impressionism was working for me. In those first 25 minutes of ToL, I was getting all the gut emotions and narrative details I needed in a flutter of gorgeous imagery and a gush of human experience. Then the Discovery Channel footage came and crushed the life out of all that impressionistic beauty that was letting the audience complete the emotional loops. Yep, the spoon came out and Papa Malick started dishing the mush, even resorting to CGI dinosaurs that were laughably Spielbergian in their very presence. Stalling the engine of the beauty he’d begun with, Malick then launches into the more straight-ahead family drama. All of that is fine and dandy, but outside of some lovely “sense memory” moments and child POV shots, it felt like a story we’ve seen and heard 100 times before.

By the time Sean Penn was encountering his younger self in the sands of time and the politically correct cast of extras were making footprints on the beach, I was stifling laughter. That’s not God’s fault, that’s Malick-Playing-God’s fault.