TREE OF LIFE isn't a movie; it's a poem. It's not narrative but rather impressionistic and more interested in shifting moods, reflection, and the ambivalence (esp the unwatchable violence and insupportable beauty, side by side, inside each other) of life. You go in mouth skeptically atwitch, thinking "I dunno- that title is reaching awfully high" but in fact it turns out to be ironically *small* but accepting. It's the most madly ambitious (I hate the condescension of that word but it's simply true) movie I've ever seen besides only "Synecdoche" and "2001" (it reaches even wider in time and space than the latter, which I would previously not have considered possible) - and sports an even less conventional "story" and structure than either of those. It contains less of the movie content and vocabulary we're presently accustomed to (my friend complained that you often couldn't even clearly understand or hear what little was expressed verbally, but there can be no question that even that was intentional and not a failing of the theater or sound mixer), and more audacious, "I dare you to complain of boredom" sequences, angles, repetition and symbolism, which I can only assume have already been called "self-indulgent", "obvious", "tiresome" and "heavy-handed" respectively. I don't know that I'd disagree, but didn't mind...must've been in the right mood (and I won't look the gift horse of a movie that makes you think this much (and dares to contemplate, let alone attempt to convey, a God's-eye view of life, the universe and everything...whaaat.... Green Lantern, your move) in the mouth)...sometimes it's not so bad to receive a mental bath, to experience something ultra-slowly that doesn't need to be and usually isn't, just for the sake of some SPACE to listen, see and feel. The movie expresses itself in the exact opposite way to how most of us live, come to think of it- reactively, back on our heels, life hurtling by so fast we can't feel it, the way we (mercifully) don't perceive the cosmic winds whipping through our hair as the planet spins. Phenomenal acting, not least by the kids, esp the actor who plays the pre-adolescent Jack who tellingly is the only character given a name (that I recall).