Religion Dispatches
The film is disingenuous—or rather the marketing for it is—as it suggests that we make a choice between nature and grace. One reviewer suggests that it’s about the middle way, about the redemption of siblings.
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Structured around a family (mother, father, three children) which suffers a terrible loss, The Tree of Life is an extended midrash, or commentary, on the Book of Job, a verse of which forms the epigraph to the film and which is sermonized upon during an extended scene at a church. At once essentially Catholic and doggedly scientific in its worldview, its central family becomes an archetype, undergoing processes of childlike wonderment, Oedipal lust and rage, the loss of innocence, the loss of faith, and finally, it seems, redemption.
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