Bravo director & writer Terrence Malick and Brad Pitt for helping to produce it financially and Sean Penn! This art film is magnificent in its metaphorical messages, spectacular visuals and photography, and being able to capture the miracle of birth, the innocence of life as babies, the safety of loving parents, the difficultly of raising children, the frustration of lack of success by fathers in their career, and the hope in an afterlife where all decent people will be together again. Brad Pitt played an excellent part as a father of 3 boys who has a faith but somewhat twisted in fundamentalism. As the boys get older, he becomes more a tyrant of a father, elevated by his lack of success in his career and patents he is trying to get. The movie shows the agony and ecstasy of life. One scene shows a distorted pastor in an attic with one of the little boys, going round and round in a circle, which is representative of organized religions that keep people trapped in a box, going round and round in circles, which was representative of the boy's father, trapped in his religious doctrines. This writer and director also did The Thin Red Line and The New World. He doesn't do a lot of movies. When he makes one, he makes a masterpiece. The American public probably won't go out in droves to see this one, because they won't understand it. But I don't think the writer/director and those who were part of this film cared about the money. Jessica Chastain
~Van of Urantia*MPAA = Motion Picture Association of America
