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.

To The Wonder

The Tree of Life may have been messy, confused and pompous, but there was at least a great film buried somewhere in that bloated carcass. To The Wonder, Terrence Malick’s follow-up, is pure rot. The director’s characteristic flourishes have deteriorated into self-parody: the camera constantly drifting through the world like a drunken ghost, the narrators whispering sweet nothings in our ears, and light forever flickering on the lens. Frankly, the most surprising thing about this uninspired film is that everyone isn’t blind from the sun constantly shining in their eyes.

Consider the plot, such as it is: Neil (Ben Affleck) and Marina (Olga Kurylenko) meet in Paris, fall in love, move to America, split up, get back together and marry after Neil frolics with Rachel McAdams for a while, break up again after Marina cheats on him, and a priest loves god and Marina’s daughter loves the supermarket and love is love is love love love, to paraphrase the film’s hushed, faux-poetic narration. (Mumble, mumble, says Ben Affleck.) “What is this love that loves us?” Marina actually says at one point. Indeed, and what is this hate that hates us? What is this dog that dogs us? And what is that bison that bisons us? Only Terrence Malick or his understudy, God, knows the answer.

For all his dreamy obscurity, Malick is rarely a very subtle filmmaker, and his limitations are piercingly clear in To The Wonder. So much of the film is spent watching the characters dance over lawns, toss leaves into the air, twirl in the magnificent light and gawp at the world in a state of uninhibited joy. But when these people aren’t drunk on the intoxicating beauty of life, the universe, and Bumfuck, Idaho (or wherever the film is set), they’re staring blankly at nothing as the pain of existence chews up their souls. Malick’s manic-depressive style oscillates between exaltation and sorrow with little time for everything in between, which is unfortunate since that is where most of life is actually lived. Between his lean, stolid men and willowy, petite women, the director’s vision of humanity is little more nuanced than a perfume ad.

Mere life can hardly stand up under the self-conscious gravity of the film. Javier Bardem—who is surely as confused about his role here as the rest of us are—plays a priest going through a rather lackadaisical spiritual crisis. Poverty and pain shake the man’s faith; helping the impoverished and suffering restores it. As far as theological threats go, this is DEFCON four, at best. The film’s environmental concerns are similarly sketchy, amounting to little more than Malick frowning at pollution. Neil takes readings at industrial sites and talks to people living in the shadow of smoke-belching refineries, because these are apparently things he is paid to care about, but that’s about it. (Mumble, mumble, says Ben Affleck.) The director is so divorced from earthly matters most of the time that he’s ill-equipped to say much about the planet. However, the film does offer one powerful, if unintentional statement: against the banality of the modern city, the blandness of the suburbs, and the numbing uniformity of the supermarket, even the poetic ecstasies of Terrence Malick have become feeble and trite.

Upstream Color

If Primer came from the left side of Shane Carruth’s brain, then Upstream Color is from the right. Both films showcase their creator’s puzzle-box approach to narrative, but the former is austere and antiseptic while the latter is sensuous and dreamy. Carruth has moved from the cool intellectualism of his first film to a more sentimental strain of science fiction, and the difference is as stark as the contrast between Stanislaw Lem and Philip K. Dick. Brooding over the ethics of science, Primer explored how new discoveries illuminate not the world, but our own moral failings. In his latest, Carruth’s fantasies grow more elaborate as he strives to reveal—and finally, perhaps, even heal—the gnawing sickness of life in a numb world where no one loves each other and everyone’s spirit animal is a pig. For all of Primer’s oblique twists, one suspected the film’s secrets were neatly laid out somewhere in a spreadsheet. Whatever mysteries can be glimpsed in Upstream Color will more likely be catalogued in a pile of paper scraps at Carruth’s bedside table, written in an illegible midnight scrawl.

Is it strange to admire a film that cannot be summarized without eliciting embarrassed laughter? It can be hard enough to simply describe what you’ve seen on screen, never mind digging into its deeper meanings. “And then they drank the, um, worm-tea, and those kids we never see again auditioned for the Happy Hands Club, I guess, or something, and there’s the director going for a jog, and did that lady just stab herself?” So simply accept that this is what a sci-fi B-movie would look like if Terrence Malick directed it, and focus on the damaged couple at the heart of the film, Jeff (Carruth) and Kris (a particularly strong Amy Seimetz). Both are victims of a white worm that burrows into the body and takes control of the mind, or something like that (let’s not get too science-y, please). The two combine the ruins of their lives and slowly dissolve into each other until they can no longer tell where one’s memories end and the other’s begins. Like two cleaned-up junkies, they lean on each other as they hobble down a steady path towards obliteration.

High-concept weirdness draws the viewers in—just ask anyone who has seen Primer—but it often exacts its own toll on the film. In constructing this arcane mythos, Carruth forces the audience to enter the film on his terms, to trust that he actually understands the rules of his own game and isn’t simply making it all up as he goes along. He throws away anything that might anchor the film to a set time and place. Cut loose from the particular, we drift into the universal, where Carruth’s ideas on free will and nature are supposedly floating free in some kind of Platonic intellectual paradise, unsullied by distracting, earthbound details. But the mechanics of a world populated by brainwashing thieves and pig-farming foley artists will invariably demand more attention than the themes uniting it all. Viewers are apt to spend as much time parsing the significance of the telepathic worm-tea as they will actually working through the emotional effect of the film on them.

That would be a shame, because there is something deeply affecting buried withinin this hollow world Carruth has deliberately crafted. The bond between Jeff and Kris exists in a vacuum, unhindered by any relationships beyond their lonely pairing. Where are their families? Where is the rest of the world? Where is life? The film takes place on a planet seemingly constructed by aliens who read a book about humans once but got bored before the last chapter. Absence defines this place: the absence of nature, of society, and of humanity. In the end, Kris cradles a piglet as if holding the child her damaged body will never produce, caring for this animal with a tenderness missing from most of the human interaction in the film. This is either the first step towards learning to feel again, or the final cold delusion that proves everything is already lost. The beatific lighting and uplifting score gild the scene, suggesting either redemption or deeply sarcastic mockery. There is a faint sense of euphoria, or perhaps madness. This is a shining dead world.

The Tree of Life

The Tree of Life is pompous, self-indulgent, much too fond of its own flakey bullshit mysticism, not fond enough of coherent thought, and quite possibly the best film to be released this year. Terrence Malick gets full marks for ambition, even if he has to take a few deductions for the windy ending and bloated beginning of his cosmic memoir. But the film’s middle section, a tour de force that recounts the childhood of Jack, the eldest of three brothers, is one of the most lyrical evocations of adolescence yet to make it onto the screen. Just look at the montage of Jack’s earliest years, which turns the years to minutes and exemplifies the potent mix of nostalgia and dread that makes this film so hard to shake. Seen largely from the child’s perspective, images rush by: two sets of hands floating in a mirror, a man collapsing into seizure on the front lawn, light refracted through a mobile forming a dancing ghost on the wall. The whole world seems mysterious, terrifying and deeply wonderful. Malick, as ever, makes one very grateful for the simple pleasures of seeing.

Equally true to form, Malick also makes one much more ambivalent about the act of hearing. While the use of classical music is well suited to the material, the voiceovers remain ponderously poetic, pricking holes in the corner of scenes and slowly sucking the air out. Let the moments breathe, please. They’re so fragile they need all the oxygen they can get. Then, when the film finally screams out for some sort of context, the voiceovers fail us, and we are left drifting through Malick's subconscious doodlings with nary a whispered epigram for guidance. Suddenly, this humble family drama is tied to all history, including the birth of the universe, the creation of life, and two dinosaurs attempting to reenact “The Insult that Made a Man out of Mac” on a riverbed in the Mesozoic.

The juxtaposition of the grandness of all time with the smallness of our memories, the unity of all life into one great tapestry of pain and forgiveness: well, that’s just got to be more fun than Green Lantern, but does it actually hold together? Not quite, which makes this film as frustrating as it is pleasurable. Malick has set out to do nothing less than make a film capable of holding the entire universe. Unsurprisingly, he comes up a little short (I think he missed Pluto, understandably considering how tiny it is, all tucked away back there). Still, in these dire movie-going months, when so many big-budget beasts are too bloated and lazy to leap even the lowest hurdle to achieve mere mediocrity, there’s something noble in a film that sets the bar so high it can’t help but fail to ever jump over it. May we all fail so splendidly in our endeavours.