In an interview that appeared yesterday in Le Figaro, Sean Penn spoke harshly of Terrence Malick’s film “The Tree of Life,” in which the actor makes a relatively brief but memorable appearance: > I didn’t at all find on the screen the emotion of the script, which is the most magnificent one that I’ve ever read. A clearer and more conventional narrative would have helped the film without, in my opinion, lessening its beauty and its impact. Frankly, I’m still trying to figure out what I’m doing there and what I was supposed to add in that context! What’s more, Terry himself never managed to explain it to me clearly.

To quote Fritz Lang’s famous response in “Contempt”: “In the script it is written, and on the screen it’s pictures.” “The Tree of Life” is a marvel, Penn is very good in it—but Malick wasn’t shooting it for the pleasure or the benefit of the actors. What Penn conveys in his performance (as the adult protagonist whose memories, in flashback, provide most of the film’s action) is his very stardom, his charisma, his emotional intensity. Malick’s methods don’t let the actor employ much of his accustomed technique, but this doesn’t at all lessen the beauty and the impact of his performance.

I once read about a director who referred to an actor as the equivalent of a color on a painter’s palette. Penn brings an acid yellow to the glass-and-metal grays of his scenes, and it adds something important to the film; but he doesn’t get to do the kind of showy and theatrical performance for which Oscars are won. The star system, the flatteries of celebrity—and, for that matter, the temperament that makes a person become an actor in the first place—contribute much to an actor’s sense that a movie is, or should be, all about him. There are some movies—and some great ones—in which this is so. But in “The Tree of Life,” Penn’s unhappy and unexpected less really is more.