Terrence Malick: act of creation

How might the surviving American film-makers of the 1970s appear to someone born in the early 90s, a casual cinema-goer who consumes blockbusters at the local multiplex? Scorsese must seem the longwinded master of glossy action-thrillers, Polanski a maker of earnest European fare, Spielberg the purveyor of soured epic, and Coppola not even a name. Would such a person feel, as I once did, exhilarated about the latest Woody Allen? And Terrence Malick? If all you had to go on was The New World (2005) and his new film, The Tree of Life, would it be possible for you to understand the reverence that moviegoers feel for his work?

Badlands (1973), Days of Heaven (1978), and The Thin Red Line (1998) are masterpieces, but that same casual cinema-goer wouldn't know them. And without having seen those films first, how odd and impenetrable might Malick's recent work seem? And if you do know them, I can imagine someone seeing in his last two movies a vertiginous dip in form, the marvels of the early work diminished into mannerisms. Much of The New World would provide evidence for such a view, unable as it is to survive plump, puzzled Colin Farrell's constant hurt look. But what about the Palme d'Or-winning The Tree of Life?

The first time I saw the film several people sniggered at the absurd ambition that connects a suburban family to the origins of life on Earth. Its evolutionary sequence resembles a National Geographic documentary coupled with out-takes from Walking With Dinosaurs. As for the domestic drama, sometimes, at its worst, it looks classy. It can feel as if you are watching an implausibly extended perfume ad – the same earnest breathy voiceover, the same broody enigmas, the same bloodless sheen. Worse, we're told of the departed joys of family life by the kind of "happiness montage" that ended Notting Hill; our grown-up hero, Jack, resides in a home that would look swanky even in Elle Decoration; and the brief shots of his implausibly decorous birth take place in a shiny white hospital room. You could dismiss it as Mad Men plus metaphysics, Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain standing in for the gorgeous Drapers, but with the attention (as in Mad Men we sometimes feel it ought to be) on the lives of the children. The film shares that love of Americana, the remote allure of the past made tangible in a picture – the cars, the hats, the psychological repression.

With all this in mind, you could even start to question how much you loved those early films. Isn't Days of Heaven laden with a heavy-handed symbolism? Might Badlands be the perfect expression of 70s cinema, wide-eyed and wondering about appearances, and deadpan and indifferent to acts of violence? Does it show its murderous young couple's vacancy, or share in it?

Such a dismissal would be risky. After all, Malick is a director who is not only more intelligent than his critics, but better-educated too. More than that, there remains something in Malick's work that transcends all such criticism. The Tree of Life may be bafflingly flawed, and yet it undoubtedly earned that Cannes prize.

There is nothing else like Malick's early work in American cinema. Days of Heaven is a vibrant film, carrying you along with the vitality of its music, the beauty that it frames. It's Henry James's The Wings of the Dove rewritten by Thomas Hardy. That suggests earnest gloom, but nothing could be further from the truth. The story moves fast, telling you more in the first 12 minutes than most movies manage in an hour; in its pure vitality it almost offers a "cinema of attractions", throwing in some manic fiddle playing, virtuoso tap-dancing, a mechanical puppet gag and a flying circus.

Like all Malick's films, it turns on the experience of an idyll. Those first three pictures in particular grace us with entry to an "irresponsible place". They inhabit for a lingering moment an Indian summer of lucid calm and gratuitous games. Here there is no work, no need for more money, no duties to perform. There's just the matter of choosing the password for the day, trying on make-up, or dancing laconically to Mickey and Sylvia's "Love Is Strange". Malick's preference is for islands, river-boats, hideaways and backwaters; his most sympathetic characters all go awol. He is the last film-maker – and perhaps the last artist of any kind – to be so clearly in love with paradisal innocence, even to retain the notion of the noble savage. His great original is Huckleberry Finn and the runaway slave Jim drifting down the endless Mississippi on a raft – the narrating voices of Badlands and Days of Heaven belong to Huck's delinquent grand-daughters. Even the beauty of the actors forms part of the romance, offering us a world where no one is ugly or disagreeable, where all games are played in a spirit of delight. It's this pastoral quality that gives his films their air of enchantment. Picture-book images recur, and the films themselves possess something of a picture-book view of the world, not just in the sense that they marry a highly literate imagination to an astonishing visual sense. Rather it is that they share the emblematic mystery which children discover in their books, telling of a world beyond, while being somehow more alive than life itself.

However, shadows are always ready to fall across these circumscribed paradises. Violence, moral corruption, war, colonial conquest, all play their part in locking us outside the gates of Eden – though Malick allows us to perceive how they were always present within its walls. The contrast between bliss and mayhem is at its strongest in the extraordinary The Thin Red Line, the greatest American war-movie ever made, and a suitably perplexed and awestruck meditation on how human beings die.

It is a very rare talent to be able to show with equal power both the free places for which we yearn and the compromise and wickedness that makes their freedom impossible to achieve. At his best, Malick lets us share his humane, unironic and compassionate vision. He presents life as caught between a fragile innocence and an encroaching darkness. In doing so, he respects the apartness, the privacy of human beings: is he the only director of his generation never to have filmed a sex scene? The perpetual melancholy of Brooke Adams's face in Days of Heaven is a fitting emblem for all his characters, unreadable and resonant as they are: we see her sadness, but can only guess at its causes. His people act out their lives back-lit against a background of plenitude; there are lives beyond theirs, passers-by who gaze on at a distance, and then the vast unreachable natural world.

In The Tree of Life that same sense is there in the face of Jack (Hunter McCracken). His surly watchfulness frames the film, disabused, never expecting anything good to happen. Idylls don't contain stories; those come when the suffering begins. Malick has always had an independent view of what makes a narrative. Here what story there is revolves around a frankly Oedipal set-up: the son who yearns for a lost closeness with his generous, soft-hearted mother, while being supplanted from above by his authoritarian father and from below by his younger brother. Seemingly pushed aside, Jack mirrors his father's rage; "I'm more like you than her," he tells him.

The film plays as the attempt to make sense of the younger brother's premature death: its first words are "Brother," "Mother." It is an act of mourning, a retrieval of lost time in response to the lost brother's words, "Find me." The path of bereavement takes the movie first to a consideration of the act of creation, showing the formation of the universe and the development of life on earth. Later, creativity proves equally central to the family drama. The younger brother has the mother's amiable openness, but has also inherited the bad father's gift for music, as well as an aptitude for art. Meanwhile Jack can only scowl on, excluded and envying.

It is a measure of the film's complexity that the father should be the villain of the piece and yet also belong to the life-affirming realm of music. True, he stands for a corporate America, a figure strutting among monumental industrial buildings. The mother suggests that the only way to be happy is to love, while the father affirms a life of competition, the petty struggle of getting ahead. Yet the son too inhabits a world out of human scale – moving among skyscrapers, rooms with ceilings some hundred feet high; even the flat he shares with his wife looks rented, empty, and too large.

The film's juxtaposition of the Big Bang and a boy's life in Waco, Texas, has led some to think of it as mixed-up. In many ways, it joins contrasting possibilities, uniting the tyranny of the suburban father with a God who allows suffering. Similarly the voiceovers address a "you" that might equally be God, the mother, the dead brother or son. Yet the movie turns on the concept of scale that such comparisons inevitably invoke. It draws into one frame both the universal and the concealed world of the child. The "tree of life" both refers to Genesis and suggests the interconnectedness of things – our lives as part of greater forces in motion. God is in the details, not merely on the vast level of the cosmos but in the smallest gesture. Malick renders the brutal intimacies of childhood, that odd mixture of threat and affection that marks the friendships of boys. Having shot off his brother's finger-tip with an air-rifle, Jack tries to make it up by kissing his arm; following each kiss, his brother wipes away its trace.

The film suggests an absolute divergence between those who choose the way of nature and those who choose the way of grace. But how can a movie, with its commitment to the literal surface of things, hope to show the path of grace? Reaching for the truth, art-house cinema often does so through an attentive stillness. In his later films, Malick's approach is quite other; he offers a restless eye, glancing and moving on, intrigued, flitting, American. Things exist in motion, the movie creating a field for another reality. Malick's camera does not so much point its lens at an event and film it, as become an observer in the scene, moving in the space, catching the perspective of a participant. Yet it is hardly a realist picture: the fey shot of mum literally dancing on air recalls the mother who levitates in Andrei Tarkovsky's Mirror.

Elsewhere the simple look of the film stuns us: there are swirling lights and colours representing . . . what? Who knows, but still the camera lingers over grand moments of natural form, the flocks of birds weaving like cloth against a city skyline, enormous fire, ascending clouds, the light shining in darkness. The evolutionary sequence presents a world of turmoil and tumult, creation as an act of turbulent power; at such moments, creation looks like a process of sublime destruction. But at other times, the film quietly places before us an everyday miracle: the magic of a child climbing a staircase for the first time, the serious abstractedness of a baby.

The ultimate effect of all this is that your take on the world does expand. Leaving the cinema at 10 o'clock, I found myself staring up at the high clouds scudding across the still day-lit sky above brutal Rotterdam. Without Malick's film, would I have taken that look? For a brief instant it was as though the movie had expanded outwards into the city, that it had altered my way of seeing things. That Malick continues to make such films has to be a wonderful thing.

The Tree of Life will be on general release next week.