Nominated for five Academy Awards, boasting an 89 percent rating from Rotten Tomatoes, and tallying a healthy $75 million (and counting) at the box office, The Descendants is hardly in need of a defense—but it is in need of further discussion. For all its success, Alexander Payne’s film has been less unappreciated than unexamined…

Indeed, in its obsession with the past, with ancestors, with transience, eternity, and our raison d’être,The Descendants emerges as an unlikely diptych partner to The Tree of Life. Both are fixated on grief and the human response: If The Tree of Life is about the invention of god, The Descendants is about the invention of morality.