Half-asleep, musing on The Tree of Life

This line in a recent A.O. Scott piece in the New York Times discussing, among others, Terence Malick's The Tree of Life, caught my eye:

I “read” the film as much darker; well, “darker” is not the right word, but I did not see the sequence about the dinosaurs as “impl[ying] that something like divine grace was operative … before humanity”, but instead that the film, while it does not endorse, it wistfully acknowledges that despite our aspirations to Grace, we live in a world of Nature (that is to say, a world indifferent to Grace, and yet a world that has produced us, so needy of Grace). Certainly this film needs more viewings than I have been able to accord it thus far, but for now I do see the “key” as lying in the Chastain voice-over early on in the film, about choosing between the way of Nature and the way of Grace (the film offers no resolution, of course, but makes us experience that although the way of Nature rules the cosmos; an insistence on Grace might be the only thing that makes us human)....