by Allan Fish
(USA 2012 112m) DVD1/2 (eventually)
Love makes us one
p Sarah Green, Nicolas Gondo d/w Terrence Malick ph Emmanuel Lubezki ed Keith Fraase, A.J.Edwards, Shane Hazen, Mark Yoshikawa, Christopher Roldan m Hanan Townshend art Jack Fisk cos Jacqueline West
Ben Affleck (Neil), Olga Kurylenko (Marina), Rachel McAdams (Jane), Javier Bardem (Father Quintana), Tatiana Chiline (Tatiana), Ramina Mondello (Anna),
There was a time when the idea of a new Terrence Malick film was something to be treated like the announcement that Brigadoon was due to show up again; something quite literally of myth. The gaps between films have been getting progressively smaller, but here To the Wonder arrives barely twelve months after The Tree of Life and, even more wondrous, there are two more on the horizon. Has Terry been holding back all these scripts for decades? What has prompted him to suddenly make films not with the alacrity of a Bresson or a Kubrick but of a Fassbinder?
The Tree of Life is a good indicator of what was to come. To the Wonder is even more a stream of cinematic consciousness. I was recently asked by a friend what it was about, and had to remind him this was Terry Malick we’re dealing with. On the surface, there is an essential plot, of the love affair of an American man, Neil, and French Marina. We see them in what we assume is the early stages of their relationship, in her native Paris and at Mont St Michel. Neil asks Marina and her little girl Tatiana to come and live with him in Oklahoma. They accept, but over the course of their stay Marina grows restless, her daughter grows homesick and she decides to return. In this period, Neil meets and rekindles an affair with an old high school friend Jane. But Marina returns, this time without Tatiana who prefers to stay with her estranged father. She and Neil get married, but still she’s restless. In addition, there’s a subplot involving a local Hispanic Catholic priest living in Neil’s neighbourhood who’s doubting himself.
Taken purely in terms of its plot, this would be maddening and the character of Marina is so capricious as to make you want to shake her. Yet Malick’s film doesn’t follow any sort of traditional narrative structure, his camera carried along as if on the wind like the fallen leaves on the ground. It’s as if the audience is bidden to follow by the character in front of us. There are flashes both back and to the future, almost subliminal, as if flashing before a barely conscious soul. It’s a feeling intensified by the collective cinematic imagery that we, the viewer, bring to proceedings, and not just earlier films from Malick’s filmography but also those of other directors start to flash back into our consciousness. Images of Mont St Michel, for example, cannot help but recall Yoshida’s not entirely dissimilar Farewell to the Summer Light. Shots of various protagonists at waist height walking slowly through the long grass seem lifted from the Elysian dreams of the dying Maximus in Gladiator. We may not hear the familiar tones of Hans Zimmer, but we’re hardly being short-changed when Malick accompanies so many crucial sequences with Wagner’s haunting ‘Parsifal’. This use of Wagner veers us back to Von Trier’s Melancholia. It keeps going…
And what of the conscious images, full of Malick’s trademark use of magic hour photography, with nearly every other shot taking place at either sunset or sunrise. When the sun is in a more traditional overhead position, we get the equally trademark sun-ripples on water, giving the impression of it being a fantastic mirage. There’s equally typical use of profiles and what I have come to regard as the Malick shot – a medium close of a figure in what is otherwise a long shot, often featuring another figure in the distance. Affleck, Kurylenko and McAdams may do nothing but look lovely, but again it’s typical Malick to use shall we say limited actors because he lets their faces do the talking (see also Richard Gere, Colin Farrell, Brad Pitt). It’s a visual poem of the highest order but made for an audience who won’t appreciate it. It received mixed reviews at the Venice and Toronto festivals; but that’s really a seal of approval.
The reviews are not very good from your side of the pond so far. I do think the extreme hate some people have for Malick these days is basic proof that he’s taking cinema somewhere unique and exciting. People just loss their shit when challenged by a movie that doesn’t stick to a formula they’ve grown accustomed to. Its obvious you like this film from your post, I just wonder where you would place it when compared to his last three? Like The Tree Of Life, I’ll be the first one in line when this appears in NYC. I’m even preparing my last three Malick dvds for viewing right before To The Wonder shows up here (as most know I’m not a huge fan of Badlands or Days Of Heaven in comparison). I want to be in a Malick state of mind when I finally go see it.
If you feel you have to be in the zone for it, go the full hog. It may seem strange, but rewatch Melancholia and Gladiator again.
And yes, poor reviews for this are just people who don’t wish to understand. It’s more a sign of how dumbed down film criticism has become.
I think it appears Stateside in April. It’s out on Blu Ray in the UK in June.
I too have been following some negative reviews…..some which refer to Malick being in “self-parody” mode. Allan do you think Malick may soon suffer from a preciousness factor or is already in certain people’s eyes? This is the first time I can recall that a film of his has been deemed a bit silly. Surely I prefer interesting filmmaking and perhaps divisive filmmaking at that. Many people do not like you’ve said, and it’s mixed reviews should be a sign of something being done right perhaps.
Maurizio….what’s your issue with Badlands and Days of Heaven?
No issue Jon. Both are good films that suffer only in comparison to post exile Malick. He’s still working out the kinks in his style with those two. He just doesn’t have total command of his unique aesthetics yet IMO. The innovative editing and rhythm of his latter films aren’t completely there at that point. Days Of Heaven is like a warm up to where he was planning to ultimately go. I think that The Thin Red Line is the moment that Malick puts everything together.
Gotcha.
Good to see a review of a new release from Allan. Shame it has been quickly sidelined by a premature post from Mr Clark.
Sounds like another challenging effort from Malick. His films are if anything ‘cinematic’ with the visual elements carrying the burden of exposition over a minimalist narrative. In fact he is paring back the accretions to cinema over the decades to its esence: the moving image. This visual poetry – to use Allan’s description – challenges the critical preoccupation with narrative. Though I personally find the reference to Melancholia off-putting. Von Trier is a bombast with little substance. Instance his talking head incoherence in Cousin’s The Story of Film. Hopefully To The Wonder has more depth.
I’m no fan of Melancholia, but the reference to Gladiator is if anything more off-putting, especially since Scott, like Andrew Dominik, uses Malickian imagery as a form of cheap cinematic shorthand rather than establishing an actual sense of time and place (as Malick does). Regarding Wagner, it’s hard to be sure, but I do think Malick was at least tangentially alluding to Herzog, and his use of the Das Rheingold prelude in his superb Nosferatue remake.
And to himself, there’s Wagner in The Thin Red Line.
Yeah, Scott definitely got that from Malick not the other way round (and Zack Snyder took it from Scott for 300).
But I would take issue with the dismissal of Dominik. Obviously he’s influenced by Malick, but I think The Assassination of Jesse James is a masterpiece of the first order. And I don’t know how you could possibly argue that it doesn’t “establish a sense of time and place.”
“Shots of various protagonists at waist height walking slowly through the long grass seem lifted from the Elysian dreams of the dying Maximus in Gladiator.”
Perhaps, but when I first saw those shots in Gladiator, my immediate reaction was, “Wow, that looks lifted right out of Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line!”
I’m glad you liked it, Allan. I was beginning to get worried everyone hated it.
What I’m most surprised about, though, having just seen the film, is how almost every review, including this one, talks about the film as if it’s more of the same from Malick, filled with his usual devices and super-pretty images, and you either like that or you don’t. This is not exactly untrue, but the To The Wonder is in fact radically different from his past films, most obviously in its up-to-the-minute contemporary setting: the characters go to fast food restaurants and talk on Skype, people! And the photography, while obviously gorgeous and with always moving camera, emphasizes the mundane, the prosaic, and yes, even the ugly as never before. The small town is real, with cookie cutter neighborhoods, franchise restaurants and motels, wrong sides of the tracks, broken-down buildings, boarded-up windows, a prison, oil wells, factories, ground pollution, and actual non-actor residents who look nothing like the beautiful stars we expect in our movies (even our Malick movies).
This is something new from Malick, smaller and more difficult and more off-putting; it does not have the crescendoes of The New World and The Tree of Life, and it did not leave me in raptures as those two did. But it’s fascinating and compelling and genuinely experimental, and it deserves to be actually engaged with, not dismissed or mischaracterized.