Knight of Cups

Transcendental beauty—what a racket, huh? Terrence Malick, bless his soul, seems to have carved out a niche for himself manufacturing ready-made profundities from ecstatic imagery and Hollywood stars desperate for artistic cred. Knight of Cups is his latest lament for our lamentable age, featuring an actor (Christian Bale, stupefied) confronting his hollow world as Malick muses upon a host of generic existential agonies: Are we living the life we were meant to live? Has modernity robbed us of our spirituality? Can we borrow a feeling? I say battle not with banality lest ye become banal. Sure, these themes have served as the foundation of as much good art as bad, but here they succumb to the director’s manifold filmmaking weaknesses, which can only be obscured behind the lens flares for so long. Malick is a sensitive misanthrope, yearning to express the quivering ache of human existence while having little actual use for human beings. His improvisatory methods—set everyone loose, run amuck with the camera, stitch it all together in post with voiceovers—reveal an inability to direct actors or craft narratives. There’s actually an arbitrary and implausible home robbery just to show that the main character doesn’t own anything worth stealing. (Cause his life’s, like, empty, you know?) We are not in the presence of a great dramatist.

That need not be a crippling failure for a talented image-maker, but Malick inexcusably falls back again and again on clichés to prop up his pretty pictures. Mercifully, the voiceovers, while blandly spelling out the emotional states of his empty puppet-people, obscure much of the risible dialogue, but we still have to watch hoary nonsense like a family fight ending with everyone throwing furniture around the dining room. Set adrift, the performers all too often fall back on mannerism and overacting—Natalie Portman’s generic adulteress and Brian Dennehy’s histrionic paterfamilias being the worst offenders here—to pierce the impenetrable fog of art that surrounds. Malick’s overreliance on the familiar translates into the visuals as well. Initially stunning, the imagery is essentially a string of all-purpose poetic signifiers, anointed by the gilded touch of an Oscar-winning cinematographer (Emmanuel Lubezki): skyscrapers set against piercing blue skies, awe-struck pans of leaves limned by sunlight, hair whipping in the wind as people laugh and love in a convertible. With Knight of Cups, Malick has at last taken his rightful place as our era’s greatest maker of stock footage. Frankly, his talents are wasted on art. He should be making travel commercials.