The Tree of Life

“Nothing stands still.”

A middle-aged man (Sean Penn) sits in silence, and his mind returns to 1950s Texas, to a childhood split between his mother's grace (Jessica Chastain) and his father's severity (Brad Pitt). Young Jack (Hunter McCracken) moves through that house and yard caught between two ways of being, two visions of how to live. Malick frames this memory against the birth of stars and continents, suggesting that what we become is written into the same forces that made the world.