Nobody's quite sure what it is, but at least we know roughly when we'll see it.

"The Tree of Life," the long-awaited drama from mercurial director Terence Malick ("Days of Heaven," "The Thin Red Line," "The New World"), has been picked up by Fox Searchlight — which, in an announcement today, said the movie would be released sometime in 2011.

Considering the movie started filming in 2008, and Malick may have been working on the script for 20 years before that, news of an actual release date (or at least year) is big news.

Fox Searchlight describes the movie thusly: "The impressionistic story of a Midwestern family in the 1950's chronicling the journey of the eldest son, Jack (played as an adult by Sean Penn), through the innocence of childhood to his disillusioned adult years - trying to reconcile the complicated relationship with his father (Brad Pitt). Jack finds himself a lost soul in the modern world, seeking answers to the origins and meaning of life while questioning the existence of faith."