The Tree of Life
The Tree of Life
The impressionistic story of a Texas family in the 1950s. The film follows the life journey of the eldest son, Jack, through the innocence of childhood to his disillusioned adult years as he tries to reconcile a complicated relationship with his father (Brad Pitt). Jack (played as an adult by Sean Penn) finds himself a lost soul in the modern world, seeking answers to the origins and meaning of life while questioning the existence of faith.
CrossCutCritic reviewedMay 3, 2025
“The Ache That Opens the Window”
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There are no villains in this story.
Just memory. And gravity.
And a boy caught between the two.
You don’t watch The Tree of Life so much as drift inside it—like someone waking inside their own childhood, not as a child but as the adult who has finally realized how fragile it all was.
How it almost made sense.
And then didn’t.
There is a mother who floats, barefoot through the grass, her voice a liturgy of grace.
There is a father who loves with fists, discipline, and withheld warmth.
And there are boys—three of them—growing like vines between love and silence.
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The brilliance of Malick’s film isn’t its visuals (though they ache with holiness), or its structure (which feels like God remembering in real time), but its question:
Where does mercy begin?
Not as an answer.
But as a presence.
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The film opens with loss—an absence that never gets filled.
A boy dies. A family breaks. And the grown man that boy once was walks the sterile cathedrals of corporate glass, still haunted by a grace he barely remembers and a father he never understood.
And just when the grief becomes unbearable,
the screen explodes into creation.
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Planets form.
Cells divide.
A jellyfish becomes cathedral glass.
A dinosaur lifts its foot and chooses not to crush the weak.
And somewhere inside this cosmic hymn, you realize—
This is not a plot.
It’s a psalm.
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What Malick dares to suggest—whispers, really—is that the ache inside this family is not separate from the ache inside the universe.
That light and grief are not opposites.
That beauty and suffering grew up in the same house.
There’s a moment late in the film—no dialogue, no exposition—when the mother lifts her hands and says, simply:
“I give him to you.”
And it is this that becomes the hinge.
Not justice.
Not vindication.
Not even understanding.
Surrender.
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The Tree of Life never answers the questions it asks.
It doesn’t need to.
Because grace is not an answer.
It’s what remains when your answers have broken down.
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The father learns too late.
The mother forgives too early.
And the boy—
The boy sees it all, carries it inside him,
and walks toward the shore.
Where all things are remembered.
Where all things are forgiven.
Where someone who once was lost becomes
a boy again.
Running.
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This isn’t sentiment.
It’s resurrection.
Not loud. Not triumphant.
But cruciform. Hidden.
The kind that begins not with victory,
but with letting go.
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The Tree of Life is not a religious film.
But it is a sacred one.
Because somewhere between the galaxies and the grass,
between a father’s anger and a mother’s prayer,
you remember that you, too,
have asked these questions.
And you, too,
have heard no answer—
only light
and wind
and the voice of mercy
that never left.
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Not here to rate.
Here to find the mercy in the wreckage.
—Crosscut Critic
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