The actor:	Jessica Chastain
The character:	Mrs. O’Brien
The film:	The Tree of Life
The line:	“The nuns taught us there are two ways through life: the way of Nature and the way of Grace.”

For as much as people want to struggle over The Tree of Life, what it means, what’s the deal with the dinosaurs, how much of this is Malick making a movie about his own upbringing, it’s a movie which tells you what it’s about without much fuss. It’s about the way of Nature and the way of Grace. It’s about serving oneself against serving others, about the power of go-getting and the resolution of patience.

The way of Nature is represented by Mr. O’Brien, the way of Grace by Mrs. O’Brien, father and mother. “Father, Mother, always you wrestle inside me, always you will.” That line develops this idea further. When people imagine two paths, they almost always imagine a fork that ends up diverging more and more from that initial fork. The straight and narrow heads in a different direction than the wide and broad. Maybe it’s like that scene from Beauty and the Beast where Maurice leads the horse down the obviously horrifying path because he thinks it’s a shortcut. If you want to blame Robert Frost for this idea, down to “and that has made all the difference,” I have a petition you can sign. What The Tree of Life does differently in offering its own dualistic pairing is that it does not pretend that those two paths are very apart from one another. Perhaps they are no further apart from one another than the sidewalks on either side of a road in a suburban neighborhood. Perhaps they are closer still, just a curb apart. Closer still, the floorboards in a house, both equally creaky and stained, almost impossible to tell the difference between them. If Father and Mother are able to wrestle inside a person’s mind or heart, then they must be awfully close together for two people who are on such different paths.

In The Tree of Life, the paths are not deceptive but merely unexpected. One person may slip off that path and stumble onto the other even if it’s only a few steps. Mr. O’Brien, who the film asks us to see as the primary figure taking that way of Nature, leaves a footprint or two on the way of Grace. He has pushed, he has performed a tough Texan masculinity for his sons, he has tried to succeed in business. But in one scene, an older O’Brien reckoning with his defeats apologizes for what he’s done. Maybe I was too hard on you, he says. Grace gets between his toes.