This is Dana Steven, Slate's movie critic, here with the Slate Spoiler Special podcast on the Tree of Life, the new Terrence Malick film that opens this week.

With me in the Slate studio is Seth Coulter Walls. Hello, Seth.

Hi, Dana.

And we saw Tree of Life together last night. It was my second time, your first time.

Exactly.

We have to get into the considerably daunting task of summarizing it in a second, but first of all, I just want your basic reaction.

Loved it. I would tell you. I really, really enjoyed it. I think it's something of a function of the fact that every Malick film feels like a real event in the way that they're so spaced out over time and that we don't have them every season. At the same time, you could look at it as an event that was overhyped and therefore disappointing, which I don't think either of us did experience.

In fact, the day that we saw it was the day that it won the Palm Door, the grand prize at Khan.

Great.

Let's talk for one sec about Terence Malick and why a new Terence Malick movie is such an event in case anybody listening doesn't know his work.

Sure. I remember when I first sort of came of cinematic consciousness in adolescence it had been a long time since Terence Malick had made a movie. It was during that

18 year dry spell. It was during that like, yeah, 18, 19 year dry spell between Days of Heaven

and Thin Red Line. And I had caught up to Terence Malick just on video. But as I think anybody who

comes into contact with his work is going to recognize, you sort of want to see some of these, like, really beautiful and elegiac and nature-filled images on a big screen and have that kind of cinematic experience.

And if you only had it on VHS, you were sort of, you know, what's next?

Or here's this guy who made these two movies, and then we haven't heard from him since.

Right. I actually only have seen Thin Red Line on VHS. It's the only one of his movies that I haven't seen screened in a theater.

And I sort of feel like I haven't seen it in a way.

I get what it's about, you know, but I didn't.

Are you just holding up for a five-hour cut to be released someday? Has that happened on DVD at this point?

No, no, I don't think so. the real movie. Oh, wow. Maybe someday. He'll open up his tins of old film.

But so, yeah, so he's, I mean, I sort of think of him as the Thomas Pynchon of filmmakers,

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