This is a story of spin and how works of art travel in our media-sick culture. Terrence Malick’s film, The Tree of Life is a truly great film in my view, a masterpiece. It’s by no means a difficult film. Its narrative is straightforward. There’s not much in the film that’s ambiguous, except the very large questions about our existence which simply have no answer.

Yet in the half-century I’ve watched movies, I can’t remember a single film that generates so much discomfort from critics and audiences.  Why? In one word: television. The clichéd narrative structure — conceived, written, executed and watched by us dominate television and has re-wired our brains.

The Tree of Life is a big movie. Terrence Malick reaches for something grand, something beyond our immediate comprehension. In particular, the film’s montage sequences at the beginning and end which frame the central story make many in the audience unhappy. I blame some of this on confused audience expectations and how the film’s spin out ran its substance.

I witnessed the spin start at the film’s first press screening at the Cannes Film Festival.  As the film ended the audience sat respectfully watching the long credit sequence. Then, there were a few boos in the theatre balcony,  certainly less than a dozen people. With over two thousand people watching, this hardly constitutes universal condemnation. A kind of stunned reaction ensued “Why are these idiots booing?”  followed by applause.

Yet within days, the narrative that Malick’s much anticipated film was greeted with “mixed reaction” or “boos” fueled the journalistic fodder of websites and mainstream newspapers including The New York Times.

The film opened a week later in the United States. In some ways, The Tree of Life is a film killed by reviews. “Terrence Malick makes films only slightly more often than God makes pronouncements,” wrote Rick Groen in the Toronto Globe and Mail, “the meaning is clear and the narrative is quite linear in its linearity,” he assured his readers.  But standing in the way of linearity seemed to be that beginning, with its “origins of the cosmos…celestial stirrings, the big bang, galactic formations, starry constellations, planetary eruptions, a single-cell organism, a jelly fish,  a predatory shark and, almost risibly, a small dinosaur getting stomped on by a large dinosaur, carving out its territorial imperative. With its requiem score, the sequence unfolds like a gorgeous episode of Nova.”  Still, this was “Malick at his accessible best.”

Peter Travers of The Rolling Stone, who churns out more quotable lines than probably anyone in film history, began his review “Artistic ambition can be a bitch for filmmakers.” To prove his point, he claims that Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey was badly received when released in 1968, but is now a classic. The Tree of Life, says Travers, “delivers truths that don’t go down easy.” But then, not wanting to be left out of the film’s ad campaign, he delivers the one-liner, “No one with a genuine interest in the potential of film would think of missing it.” Really?

Joe Morgenstern in The Wall Street Journal was more direct. He said it’s an “exquisite but also exasperating new film…tiny and vast, eternal and evanescent, these are the polarities of a work of art that defies categorization.” By the end of the review he, too, seemed to encounter a problem: “Others will react, as I did, with dismay — not because of the coda’s unabashed spirituality, but because the banality of its images blurs the beautiful originality of what’s come before.”

Gary Thompson in The Philadelphia Inquirer was sure that the key to The Tree of Life is the Hubble Telescope, which, he thinks, it seems Malick got for Christmas: “the director’s search for rapturous images takes him (via the Hubble) to the far-out reaches of the galaxy, where he shows us stars in the making.”

The Tree of Life, wrote Ed Gonzalez in Slate, “is overwhelming, a gorgeous kaleidoscope of light and color that can feel like a prison. Malick’s ravishing but exacting vision is…prone to frustrating redundancy.” But then Gonzalez says, “even Malick’s more masturbatory impulses have a way of making perfect, practically cosmic sense.” So Ed, what is the complaint?

Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times was perhaps the most honest, because he talked about the film in mostly personal terms,  how it reflected his own memories of small-town American life.

The Tree of Life reveals the written word’s limitations when confronted by image-making on an epic scale. Journalism proved incapable of reducing the grand scope of the film to words, sentences in reviews quickly turned to hyperbole. The Tree of Life is not Cars 2 or Transformers: Dark of the Moon.

In the inconclusive and paradoxical quibbling by critics struggling to reduce The Tree of Life to one-line summaries, the audience was left to bear the entire weight of Terrence Malick’s intellectual and moral enterprise. But considering our failure as critics on this film, maybe that’s better for all of you.

Shortly after the Cannes Film Festival, someone asked me whether they should see The Tree of Life. I said, “yes, absolutely” but read nothing before you go. Just accept it. I repeat that advice today.

Milos Stehlik’s commentaries reflect his own views and not necessarily those of Facets Multimedia, Worldview or 91.5 WBEZ. His reviews air on Fridays.