"A more conventional film would have assigned a plot to these
characters and made their motivations more clear. Malick, who is
surely one of the most romantic and spiritual of filmmakers, appears
almost naked here before his audience, a man not able to conceal the
depth of his vision.
"Well," I asked myself, "why not?" Why must a film explain everything?
Why must every motivation be spelled out? Aren't many
films fundamentally the same film, with only the specifics changed?
Aren't many of them telling the same story? Seeking perfection, we
see what our dreams and hopes might look like. We realize they come
as a gift through no power of our own, and if we lose them, isn't
that almost worse than never having had them in the first place?"
A few days late - from Roger Ebert's very last review - on Terrence
Malick's To the Wonder.