Pitt aims for an for Oscar in Tree of Life

Who's in it? Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain, Sean Penn

The plot Tree of Life is the movie which finally sees Brad dipping his toe into potential Best Actor Oscar nomination territory. Actually, it's less a toe dip and more a full-on bombing session of his best mates in the pool. At the deep end. Shouting ‘Look out!" as he comes.

Brad stars as Mr O'Brien, whose son, Jack (played by Hunter McCracken as a young boy and Sean Penn as a man), has grown into a disaffected middle-aged man, working as an architect and drifting through life, until he is forced to look back on his childhood spent in 1950s Texas and marry his memories of growing up with who he has become. Mr O'Brien stands out as a strict and authoritarian figure, in stark contrast to his wife (played by Jessica Chastain), who is the family nurturer. And it is in his two leads that director Terence Malick reveals his own simple yet uncompromising view of the universe - that there are two paths one can choose in life: grace, as embodied by the gentle mother, or nature, as epitomised by the rage-prone unpredictable father.

And it is in Mr O'Brien's attempts to reconcile the love he has for his three sons, with the responsibility he feels as a parent to harden them up in preparation for an often cruel and tough world, that shows the man himself to harbour regrets about the path he chose for his own life.

Reaching adolescence, Jack finds himself at the grace/nature crossroads and experiments with rebelling when his father leaves the country on a trip to try and sell some of the inventions he tinkers with. With Jack ultimately unsure of where his rebelliousness is taking him, when Mr O'Brien returns home, he finds himself with the same Hobson's Choice as his son when he is informed that the plant he works at is closing and he must choose between relocating to work a stable yet unfulfilling job, or accept redundancy. Choosing the former safer option the family leaves Texas, with neither man able to speak freely in one another's company.

Winning the Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes Film Festival, Tree of Life also journeys into both the beginnings and ends of time and the planet, making it a much more far-reaching project than anything else currently on offer at the flicks. A definite must-see.

Rating 5 out of 5