Grace and Danger in Terrence Malick's film Tree of Life. (As reviewed in 2013).

In Terrence Malick’s  film The Tree of Life we learn of the death of a 19 year old boy, known as RL.   Most of the film in concerned with his elder brother, Jack, and the spiritual crisis he experiences on an anniversary of RL’s death.  But at the beginning of the film we are with his mother, and her immediate response to this tragedy.  She loves God,  and has been taught that ‘those who follow the way of Grace come to no harm.’   She believes that we have to choose between Grace and Nature,  seen as nature ‘red in tooth and claw’.  But her teenage boy was full of Grace, and he has come to harm;  he is dead.

 

So the mother questions God, but God makes no verbal reply.   Instead Malick offers us a visually spectacular 15 minute sequence telling of the creation of the Universe, the formation of planets and the emergence and evolution of life.    Some find this section of the film incomprehensible, or irrelevant.    Having seen and discussed this film many times I offer this, my response to it,  putting these words into the mouth of the Mallick’s silent Creator. 

 

“Your child has died.  He was 19 years old.  This is tragic.  Because you love your child you scream and grieve and weep and rage and question.     You question me, asking

 

Why?

Did I know?

Where was I?

What do you mean to me?

 

Let me answer you.

 

You conceived your child in love, carried him in hope, birthed him in joy and pain.    You were pregnant for nine months.    I waited nine billion years for life to be conceived on your planet Earth.   And four billion years more before it could give birth to you, my children.    You too were conceived in love, carried in hope, birthed in joy and pain.  

 

Life itself is my Creation gift to you, and it takes time.   Just as your beloved child grew slowly, cell by cell within your womb, my universe also grew slowly.     I spoke and the Universe sprang into existence, and then particle by particle, photon by photon, atom by atom, element by element, grain by grain, it grew within my womb.  My womb?     Where else?  There was and is nowhere outside me, beyond me, outwith me, so the only place my universe could be is within me.    That genesis created everything you see and know, and everything you cannot see and will never know.     

 

Gravity was in my left hand and randomness in my right,  and these tools brought order out of chaos,  and then life out of the inanimate.      I created my Universe to live and to bear life itself, and more – life that is in my own image; the image of love.     Giving, self-giving, compassionate, forgiving love.  Love that cares,  love that hurts and grieves.    Grieves because there is no creation without destruction and no life without death.   That is the story of this Universe.    

 

Every atom in your body was created in the furnace at the heart of some distant sun.    Hydrogen and helium, the only atoms in that first moment,  had to be remade there, fused together under unimaginable pressure to form lithium, oxygen, carbon,  nitrogen, iron, calcium and phosphorus,  potassium, sulphur, sodium, chlorine and magnesium.  You need all of these elements to simply be.    These suns burned for billions of years and then they had to die, burn out, explode and seed the interstellar space with these new atoms.    Atoms that gathered under gravity’s gentle push, gathered and clumped, formed dust clouds, then rocks, asteroids and planets.     

 

How many planets have to form before one can be a cradle for life?    The number would be meaningless to you, as would the trillion of minute actions and reactions needed for these earth-bound atoms to be combined and recombined, to mutate as randomness did its amazing work,  countering entropy by bringing order out of chaos, complexity out of simplicity, forming chemical compounds, amino acids, bacteria,  single and multi-celled beings;  all your ancestors.    Some think that evolution is not miraculous, but that is only because they want miracles to be instantaneous.    My Creation miracle took thirteen billion years, and turned hydrogen and light into love.   Is that not miraculous enough?

 

You were taught that you must choose between Grace and Nature.   That is a false dichotomy.    You thought that your child could escape the dangers of Nature by choosing Grace.    But Grace needs a natural form to inhabit.   Grace needs the cradle of Nature to find a home in.    And do not presume that you are the only living things capable of Grace.  

 

You are compassionate. You feel the pain of others.  The suffering of others stirs deep feelings, often of anger, in your hearts.   Of course you want a world where there is no suffering.  Some people, when they see suffering, call it evil and are angry with me.   How can a loving God allow such suffering?      

 

 

So they blame me for allowing harmful as well as beneficent bacteria to evolve, or for allowing the movement of tectonic plates to cause volcanos and earthquakes.   Some would like me to temporarily suspend the laws of gravity when falling objects hurt bodies, or when falling hurts bodies.    Some people seem to want fire that does not burn, water than does not drown.   To eat without killing.   

 

But do you think that if I could have created you, and your beloved children, without suffering and death being part of it, without Nature being as it is, without your Universe being as it is, I would not have done so?    

 

I also have to live, like you, with the necessary randomness that makes life possible and unpredictable.    Randomness and gravity, my necessary creative tools,  mean that life is fraught with  danger.   Maybe that danger makes it precious.   I would not have spared myself the waiting, the dying, the grieving, if I could?

 

 

If you look at Nature and hate it, and me, if you blame me and fear me, reject me for the death and loss and destruction you see in the world,  then before you condemn me, consider this.   It has taken your kind half a million years to learn how to take atoms apart.    How long do you think it would take you to put them back together, to create them, to create enough to make your own Universe,  and to breathe life and love into your creation?    How long would it take you to make a Universe in your own image, because you despise this one, made in mine?

 

You husband is an inventor, proud of the patents for his devices.   I am proud of my devices too.   Your eldest son is an architect.  He knows that form has to follow function.  Function dictates form.   Otherwise building fall apart.  I am the architect of the Universe, and my Universe has not fallen apart.  

 

It also has a function. Love is that function; to love and to be loved.   This Universe has become aware, and has learnt to love.   It took thirteen thousand million years for you to learn this, in your tiny corner, but in all that time my Universe has not fallen apart.   You could say it has fallen together.  Say ‘thank you’ to gravity. 

 

It is well made.    And just as your child grew from its conception as a single cell, with no interference from you, save sustenance, my Universe grew from a single moment, just one event, and grew to what it is, with no interference from me, save sustenance.  As it is, it was always going to be,  from the beginning. 

 

O yes, I know some believe I could create this Universe and all living things in days, not billions of years,  and  make you out of mud in an instant.   They wonder why I did not make a Universe in which there was no suffering.   Maybe I could have done so.   It would be a different Universe.   And in such a Universe would you be truly human?   Would you have your capacity for costly love, for compassion, for Grace.   Would you be made in my image?   Would you be so intimately connected to the whole of creation?      And could I be truly incarnate?    At One with you?    

 

Your beloved son has died, and you grieve.  How many of my beloved have I seen die?    If you believe that I love, then you know that I grieve for your boy too, and for every living thing.     You live today in the shadow of his death.   Because I gave you the capacity to choose love and Grace I had to also give you the capacity to turn away from them, so I too live in the shadow of death.   The death of the Cross, of the Holocaust, of Hiroshima, of the Gulags and the Killing Fields.    I live in the darkness cast by the fear that lives in the heart of every child, every woman, every man subjected to abuse, to violence, to hatred.     These are not my actions, but yours. 

 

You grieve for what you value.     So add this to the value of your boy.  In him his elder  brother, Jack, found me.   Found the love and trust and forgiveness and Grace – and the creativity – that are my image.   For RL, his brother, your child and mine, lived and lives in love.   All who live in love live in me.  And I live in them.  In all eternity.    

 

Because you love your child you grieve and weep and rage and question, asking 

 

Why?   

Because there is no other way.

 

Did I know?   

Yes.

 

Where was I?   

With you.  Within you.

 

What do you mean to me?   

Everything.

Sitting in the shade of The Tree of Life.  

(I recently revisited this movie, and thought I would add a piece I wrote very soon after my first encounter with it.   This is not my 'film brit' - which I will also republish here, but a more theological reflection on one of the most important films I have ever seen.) 

Hamnet. The Movie.

  

 

“Grief fills the room of my absent child.”

 

Adapted by Maggie O’Farrell’s from her 2020 novel with the Director Chloe Zhao, starring Jesse Buckley as Agnes and Paul Mescal as William Shakespeare.  Cinematography by Lukasz Zal, Music by Max Richter, Production Design by Fiona Crombie. Produced by Steven Spielberg and Sam Mendes.  

 

I am writing this article assuming that most people who read it will by now know that the film deals with the death of Hamnet, the Shakespeare couples young son, and suggests how this may have affected William’s work on the playHamlet.   

 

 In it I look at how the film affected me and those I have seen it with, especially those closely acquainted with grief;  how truthfully it seemed to speak about the nature of grief; how the media of print and film can speak to us in different ways; with a brief exploration of possible actual links between Hamnet’s death and his father’s writing; and lastly a consideration of the film’s score, and the slight critical dispute about it.       

 

It is generally understood that our response of any film depends on what we bring to it.

Some audiences of Hamnet will not have read the book.    They will, I think, enjoy a beautifully filmed love story, set in the late 16^th century English countryside, with two very good actors playing Agnes and Will Shakespeare alongside a fine supporting cast,  sensitively directed and lusciously filmed with a wonderfully persuasive score and soundscape.    It may well move them to tears, but not, I expect, leave them bereft.   I hope that many of them will then read the book. 

 

Some will have read the book, and come wondering how it has been have adapted for the screen.    I do not think they will be disappointed.    I am sure that many will, like me, appreciate the way the filming of the final scene offers rather more than the written word could.   

 

There are also some who come to see it knowing that both book and film centre on grief, in this case parental grief;  but grief is grief is grief, and all grief is about love.   So they will not expect this movie to be altogether easy to watch – or listen to.   They too may be moved to tears as, we are told, many previous audiences have been.   But the ending comes to a kind of resolution and a reconciliation that I found comforting and profound.    Having watched it twice, with friendsI am now sure that this beautiful and demanding gift from the novelist, film maker and crew offers catharsis and consolation to those who need it and are willing and able to accept it.   Our response of any work of art depends on what we bring to it – and are able to take from it.  

 

I also want to encourage those who have not seen this movie to do so in a cinema.   Sharing laughter and/or tears in the company of an audience is so much more powerful than home viewing.  

 

Good Art, in its visual, literary, musical or kinetic forms, can sometimes reach into our heart-strings and strike chords there that evoke deep responses of joy, pity, compassion, love, agitation, calm  – and sorrow.        

 

I have read Maggie O’Farrell’s novel Hamnet twice, once to myself and once out-loud to someone I love, so I knew that grief was at its core.   As young and brilliant actor Jacobi Jupe, who played Hamnet, said at the Golden Globe Awards, “This film is about grief and love.  And grief is love.”    We do no grieve for someone we do not love.  More than that; love is the sea on which we sail our little lives and grief but one of the storms that disturb it.    We hold on, praying that the storm will abate with time, and the sea will abide.          

 

Hamnet is a work of fiction and Ms O’Farrell does not claim that its story is true.  But fiction can be truthful rather than true.  I have now seen it twice, with four friends, and out of the five of us three have been bereaved, two by losing a boy-child, one their wife;  two are trained therapists and one of us a Vicar who has worked with hundreds of families before, during and after funerals.   This film reached deeply into all our hearts and the chords it struck there rang true.            

 

For the first part of the film I was, in a way, ‘watching the book’,  seeing how O’Farrell and Chloe Zhao had between them transferred the words to the screen, and how the cast, especially Jessie Buckley as Agnes and Paul Mescal as Will, had interpreted their characters.  From the start I loved this watching this ‘translation’.  And then the film itself took over.    The production design and costumes seemed very authentic,  properly grubby and lived in.   The composition of every image was gorgeous.     The editing, which obviously  could not replicate that of the book, was coherent.        The soundscape and music carried us forward without ever being intrusive.   

 

And all of that was scene-setting for the central and essential tragedy, and its aftermath.   And now it became very personal.   Jessie Buckley’s anguished howl as she held her dead son instantly took me back nearly twenty years to when I held my own dead wife in my arms.    Then Paul Mescal’s acting out of Will’s response reminded me of how I had also struggled for years to find a way to live out my own grief.   

 

Agnes and Will may share a common grief, but like so many of us they responded to it in differing ways, and that is not always easy for grieving couples or families.  But then came the film’s masterstroke, expanding the book’s final chapter not with words but with profound direction and the acting of the two lead players as we watched their healing in front us.  Here the medium’s advantages became most important.    I love written fiction, but sometimes words can be brought even more to life by film.   It is a little like the way a type printed page differs from an illuminated manuscript, but much more so.   The uses of pauses, silences, gestures, looks and facial expressions cannot be written on the page as well as they can be shown on the screen.   

 

It is only when Will has transmuted his grief into words, into the play that bears his son’s name, transferring  it as he needed to from those of the father for his son, Hamnet, to that of the son, Hamlet, for his Father, and then physically acting them out on stage, that he 

can break down and privately weep.  Then we see Agnes’ dawning understanding of her husband for the first time, of how his art was vital and essential to his emotional processes.    She is then no longer enraged that he had run away to avoid his grief, now seeing that he had run away to find a way to express – and ultimately perform - his grief.   

 

We also see the child Hamnet freed at last from the dim grey space he entered when he died.  This seemed to me to resemble the Jewish Sheol or classical Greek realm of after-life in which the dead are not punished but live a half-life in a shadowy realm where there is no hope, no volition, no direction.   Very early in the story Will tells Agnes the story of Eurydice and Orpheus and how she was condemned to remain in Hades.   Both Ursula le Guin and Phillip Pullman wrote about their versions of this place in their Earthsea: The Other Wind and His Dark Materials volume Three; The Amber Spyglass, each of them finding way for these dead souls to be released.   And we see Hamnet released as both his parents allow him to move on -  as they have at last moved on.   The film ends with the glorious smiles of the child and mother.   

 

Most of the audience who watched Hamnet with us sat in silence for some time after the credits had finished, and I remember how glad I was that by accident or design the houselights were not turned up for a while.   And yes, there were tears, as reported from many previous showings, but I think and hope that for many of us, maybe even most of us, they were tears of relief.     Agnes and Will’s grief had not become lessened, but this play, Hamlet, had helped them to become more reconciled to it and to each other.   Now at last they could walk forward together, hands and hearts joined together again.    And it seems to me that by the magic of this high art so could some of us, as we also move forward a little, having revisited our own personal losses and taken an another small but significant step along our own healing journey.    

 

With regard to the quote that heads this piece, Will Shakespeare’s son Hamnet died in 1596.  He was eleven or twelve years old.  Shakespeare’s play King John  appeared in the same year.  In it Constance is the widow of King Richard I’s younger brother Geoffrey, and the mother of Prince Arthur.  Arthur had the most legitimate claim to the throne so John had him assassinated.  In Act 3, scene 4 we hear Constance pouring out her rage and grief.  Having lost her husband and her son she is drawn to suicide.    When Cardinal Pandulph, the Papal Legate, tells her she is talking madness, not grief, she says;

 

 “Young Arthur is my son, and he is lost!

I am not mad: I would to heaven I were! 

For then ‘tis like I should forget myself:

O! If I could, what grief would I forget.

Preach me some philosophy to make me mad, 

And thou shalt be canoniz’d, Cardinal,

For being not mad but sensible of grief,

My reasonable part produces reason 

How I may be delivered from these woes, 

And teaches me to kill or hang myself”.

 

 Is this a pre-echo of ‘To be or not to be’ in Hamlet?  Some critics have objected to this speech being used in the film as Will contemplates suicide, but King John shows that close to Hamnet’s death Shakespeare had deeply looked at the link between grief and suicidal thoughts.   Hamlet is surely a better play for Maggie O’Farrell to use as a conduit of Shakespeare’s grief than the much slighter King John.   I would also suggest that by this time in his writing his internal word-thoughts could take metrical form.    I know it can be quite easy – easy enough to become natural -  to think in iambic pentameters, not to turn thoughts into poetry but to think in so natural a poetic form, so why would not Will do so at this crucial juncture?  

 

And when scolded for holding ‘ too heinous a respect for grief,’  Constance turns on the celibate priest saying  ‘He talks to me, that never had a son.’  King Philip of Spain then says to her ‘You are as fond of grief as of your child,’ and she replies, 

 

“Grief fills the room up of my absent child,

Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,

Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,

Remembers me of all his gracious parts,

Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form:

Then I have reason to be fond of grief.”

   

Constance is actually given 73 lines in this short scene, and they are the most memorable in the play, speaking to us about the emotional and fearless power of her maternal love and grief.    It seems likely that Shakespeare made his Arthur younger than the historical account, maybe almost as young as  Hamnet, in order to express something of his own grief; and he did not mind putting his words into the mouth of a grieving mother.     It was almost five years before  Hamlet appeared on stage, and grief is much more central there,  even if it is for a son grieving his father, rather than a father grieving his son.   Tom Stoppard once said, rather ruefully I thought, that in the links between an artist’s life and work ‘Nothing is wasted.’    

 

 

After seeing the King John connection I sought out the Steven Greenblatt article  The death of Hamnet and the making of Hamlet  referenced at the beginning of the film telling us that in the 16^th century the names Hamnet and Hamlet were interchangeable.  In this article the earlier play is explored more deeply.  He suggests that by the time Shakespeare was writing Hamlet his own father may well have been approaching death, and that writing Hamlet was a turning point for Shakespeare.     Hamlet considerably expanded his vocabulary – and ours –  and moved his characters away from actions motives based on reason to actions that grew out of powerful but confused feelings  (Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Coriolanus?)    (The article can be downloaded at scribd.com.). 

 

I also confirmed that my supposition that Agnes, the name used for the woman we know as Ann Hathaway,  comes from the Greek and Roman for Holy and lamb.    In both the novel and film Agnes is shown to be a deeply spiritual, though not religious woman,  and shows the willingness to sacrifice her own happiness to help her husband fulfil his destiny, almost like a sacrificial lamb.   In her father’s Will she is indeed named Agnes.     

 

As a postscript for those who pay attention to film scores, I see that Jesse Buckley’s suggestion that Max Richter’s previous composition, On The Nature of Daylight, be used for the final scene was taken up.   Some critics have found fault in this.   

 

I remember reading this reproach in the New York Times review in November 2025, and it was recently repeated by one of my favourite film critics, Mark Kermode.     And yes, this music has been used a number of times, perhaps most effectively in Arrival where it was added to Johann Johannsson’s score.   Mark Kermode celebrated Arrival as showing ‘the way that joy and love and grief and mourning and celebration can be refracted’ by the combination of film and music.   He did not object to On The Nature of Daylight being used again in podcast review, or in his movie music book Surround Sound.   I love Arrival, and its inclusion of Max Richter’s piece.    Surely what matters is how appropriate a piece of music is, not how often I has been used?  

  

Allegri’s Miserere Mei has been used at least ten times in films ranging from  Chariots of Fire to Two Popes.    Faure’s Requiem in a similar number, and Bach’s Cello Suites  in well over 20.     If On The Nature of Daylight was as obvious as ‘manipulative’ strings playing swooping minor cords,  the Faure piece or Samuel Barber’s Adagio (in fact especially Samuel Barber’s Adagio) I may well have abreacted to it.   But its use in Hamnet was, for me, seamless with the rest of Richter’s score, and utterly at one with the complex emotions the final scene evoked.  

 

I have seen some fine films in the last twelve months, Conclave, Flow, 28 Years Later, Sinners and One Battle After Another,  but I am sure Hamnet is the one that will live with me the longest.