Details on the trailer for Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life and two new stills

“It’s never easy to summarize a trailer that the reader can’t watch (for a little guidance, here are two new images, the Pitt one above and Penn below), but here goes.”

“The piece begins with several mystical shots of smoke and fire before diving into the birth of young Jack O’Brien. “He’ll be grown before that tree is tall,” his mother, Jessica Chastain’s Mrs. O’Brien, says. And indeed, we soon track a boy playing with bubbles, roughhousing with his brothers and engaging in other boyhood activities in a Mayberry-esque town circa the 1950s.”

“Mrs. O’Brien has a binary view of the world. “There are two ways through life, the way of nature and the way of grace,” she tells her boy. “You’ll have to choose which one you’ll follow.” But Jack’s father (a convincingly severe-looking Brad Pitt) is a domineering sort who, over the objections of his wife, is constantly telling his son things like “Always be strong, always be your own man.” (In an interior monologue Jack can be heard volleying back and forth, “Father, Mother, always you wrestle inside me.”)”

“A little more than halfway into the trailer we see the first cut of a troubled grown-up Jack (Sean Penn), which is pretty much when the trailer takes a turn into an epic, unnamed crisis. Jack is going through something tough, and while we don’t know what it is, we see him dealing with it, seemingly alone, against stark and painterly backdrops (reminiscent in several instances of what Julian Schnabel did with “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”).”