Where were you?

A mother opens a telegram, and her face tells us before any words do: her son is dead. Then The Tree of Life (2011) does something few films dare. It goes back, past the family in 1950s Texas, past the earth itself, to the birth of the universe. It won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, and Terrence Malick, who wrote and directed it, opens it with God’s answer to Job out of the whirlwind:

Two ways through life

The mother, Mrs O’Brien, speaks the film’s first idea in a whisper: the nuns taught her there are two ways through life, the way of nature and the way of grace, and you have to choose which one to follow. Nature in the film is strong, proud and competitive, like the father. Grace is gentle and forgiving, like her. Critics have traced the idea to The Imitation of Christ, the fifteenth-century Catholic classic, which has a chapter on the “diverse motions of nature and grace”.

Then comes the creation sequence: galaxies, the first cells, a dinosaur that stands on a wounded smaller one and, for no reason the film explains, lets it go. The effects pioneer Douglas Trumbull came out of retirement to help make it, and much of it was filmed with real chemicals and fluids, not computers. Under it plays Zbigniew Preisner’s Lacrimosa, a setting of the old Requiem prayer for the dead. The film asks the oldest question, why suffering, and answers it, as the book of Job does, with wonder rather than an argument.

How each faith answers grief

The film ends on a shore where the living and the dead meet, and the mother lets her son go. Whether you read that as heaven, memory or hope, it leaves a question worth sitting with: when you have lost someone, what helped more, an explanation or a sense of something larger than the loss?

See also Job: protest and patience.