Malick's purpose is not to tell a story of melodrama, but one of loss. His tone is elegiac. He evokes the loneliness and beauty of the limitless Texas prairie. In the first hour of the film there is scarcely a scene set indoors. The farm workers camp under the stars and work in the fields, and even the farmer is so besotted by the weather that he tinkers with wind instruments on the roof of his Gothic mansion.
Voices are often distant, and there is far-off thunder.
Against this backdrop, the story is told in a curious way. We do see key emotional moments between the three adult characters. But all of their words together, if summed up, do not equal the total of the words in the voiceover spoken so hauntingly by Linda Manz. It is flat, resigned, emotionless, with some kind of quirky Eastern accent. The whole story is told by her.