Song to Song

For all his visual grandeur and existential musings, as well as various off screen myths that don’t necessarily directly inform his oeuvre but permeate its existence anyway, Terrence Malick’s films can typically be boiled down to the most elemental of emotions, like love, pure love, a love that finds humanity and nature, free from industry and egotism, in blissful harmony. That is the hopeful end point of his sorta, kinda protagonists, Faye (Rooney Mara) and the enigmatically named B.V. (Ryan Gosling), of his latest opus, “Song to Song”, set in and around the thriving music scene of Austin, Texas.

At a poolside bacchanal hosted by music impresario Cook (Michael Fassbender), Faye and B.V. (not so) subtly check each other out, a grin-inducing evocation of sudden physical attraction, before a jump cut leads to a moment quoting “Begin Again” with the aspirant romantic pair connected to one another by earbuds, a sonic cum spiritual connection, and all rendered under a flawless magic hour sky, one the camera makes sure to drink in, like the sensual ogler it always is in the hands of cinematographer Emanuel Lubezki. From there, Faye and B.V. indulge in extended bouts of wandering, looking and touching, each other and other things that catch their fancy, rendered in those swooping, roaming wide angle shots where Malick becomes excavator, seeking to extract myriad individual moments of beauty, confusion and ugliness to weave a patented tapestry of Everything.

It is nothing if not traditional Malick-ian courtship, which in recent films has wavered in plausible passion, dependent upon the actors within those frames to completely breathe them to life. Thankfully Gosling, deploying that little grin made famous at the Oscars, and Mara, reciprocating with a grin of her own, whether bashful or faux-confrontational, share a certifable chemistry by exuding a punch drunk playfulness. That playfulness is eventually compromised by jealousy, mostly effectively rendered when B.V. questions Faye about her other relationships and the camera becomes his point-of-view, leaving Mara to stare right at us as she wraps and unwraps herself form billowing curtains, like she is trying to avoid his gaze.

That jealousy stems from Cook, who becomes something like the stand-in for the music industry, lecherous and a little unhinged, as if upon assuming his place in the power structure it becomes much less about the music than wielding that power, for good and for bad, mostly for bad. He helps Faye out, yes, even as he becomes romantically involved with her, underscoring how business and pleasure eternally mix. And when Faye ditches him for B.V. then Cook hooks up with the next woman he sees, a waitress, Rhonda (Natalie Portman), down on her luck and receptive to his seduction, carnally adventurous even as she is simultaneously presented as Christian, a unique parallel that leads to her unraveling.

Portman’s notably skimpy costuming also allows for fairly lustful bouts of Male Gazing, call it that or not, and the gazing goes into hyperdive as B.V. and Faye drift apart, leading her to an older French woman (Bérénice Marlohe) who just sort of mystically appears and effortlessly instigates a relationship, though the way Malick films it, for all the nudity, feels more primly buttoned up than the roughhousing in which B.V. and Cook also occasionally engage, unwitting, or not, bro-ish flirting that unfortunately Malick is too afraid to treat with the same wantoness as similar moments with women. Alas.

This relationship detour, as well as the detours B.V. makes, and as well as the detours into Faye and B.V.’s respective home lives where all is not copacetic, all achieve a strange languor, not unlike the middle passages of “To the Wonder” which played like a deliberate delaying tactic. After all, the main characters’ pensive, ponderous voiceovers in “Song to Song” make clear that they still pine for one another, and so, like the lazy Colorado River that becomes a silent, watery Greek Chorus, they wind their way back to one another, rolling and tumbling, “song to song, kiss to kiss” as Faye says in an early voiceover, a fine equivalent for Malick’s movie themselves, which often adhere to a notion of life being a sum of their moments.

And while the brass tacks of both the music business and making music are of little interest to Malick, that does not mean music has no bearing, as innumerable pop songs fade in on the soundtrack and then quickly fade back out, mere glimpses, shooting stars seared into your memory, not unlike an impromptu dance that re-imagines Del Shannon’s “Runaway” in the image of Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” video under the night sky at Austin’s Long Center on its illuminated ring beam. There is so much discourse on Malick these days, good and bad and worse, but when he finds his way to moments like this one, which he does more often than not, and your heart skips a beat, what else can you do but surrender?

Knight of Cups

Watching Christian Bale dreamily skedaddle about all manner of Los Angeles outposts, and even a few in Las Vegas, brooding and searching for……something, I couldn’t help but think that if Jay Gatsby had been without the greenlit beacon at the end of the dock to consume his fervent longing, that he would have wound up much like Bale does in Terrence Malick’s “Knight of Cups”, brooding, walking, endlessly walking, and searching for……something. Indeed, in one of those Malick voiceovers that sound like rugged masculine solipsism filtered through a Condé Nast Traveler confessional, Bale likens his quest to a knight who went west, searching for riches, only to be a served a drink that erased his memory. And now “(he) can’t remember the man (he) wanted to be.”

This would liken “Knight of Cups” to something like a modern adventure story, except that Malick is never interested in conventions but busting them. He has been speaking in a different cinematic language since his beginning, and that language, more common in the 1970's when he first appeared, has become more and more obscure as time has gone on, and more difficult to penetrate, like Sanskrit, given the increasingly consecrative nature of Malick's work. In another movie, the early story earthquake that rattles Bale’s little if trendy-looking apartment would have been the ground-shaking Call to Adventure; here it’s just a rumbling from within, or something, a geological manifestation of the desperate cries of agony a man’s soul makes when it forgets its purpose on this earth. It doesn't spur him to action so much as plunge him into the beautiful abyss of cosmic existentialism.

Malick conveys all this with his patented National Geographic-ism, reveling in enormous swaths of skies, which characters stare up into longingly and cavort beneath dramatically, and beatific stretches of ocean, which characters frolic in like a momentary baptism that will not last. Occasionally, nearly unbelievably, he even exults in the seemingly un-exultable – namely, Vegas, Sin City itself, where his camera, entrusted to the impeccable Emmaneul Lubezki, drinks in the inside and outside of Caesar’s Palace, making its phony baloney Eiffel Tower gleam in the nighttime desert sky and rendering the inside of the hotel as a convincing Michaelangelo knockoff. Why, exactly, the film briefly diverts to Sin City I cannot recall, and I’m not entirely certain I even knew in the moment, but then that’s because Malick isn’t following narrative like a treasure map; he goes searching for treasure the way Stephen Meek went searching for the Oregon Valley – “we’re just finding our way.”

That’s how the whole film feels, and the camera too, for even if these innumerably sumptuous shots ae carefully staged, they always feel concocted of the moment, conveyed in the way that Lubezki’s camera remains semi-permanently affixed to the backs of characters, tracking with them, as if following their movements rather than the director’s. And yet, even as the characters saunter – or yes, on occasion, twirl – forward, he seems primarily concerned with the past, which is where most of “Knight of Cups” seems to be taking a place; they always feel like the past, like a rolodex of memories, brooding males searching through their minds for where they went right and where they went wrong. Many of these memories involve women, a virtual revolving door as the narrative, as it were, flints from Cate Blanchett to Natalie Portman to Frieda Pinto to Teresa Palmer to Isabel Lucas to Imogen Poots, “a rebellious young woman”, which is how Wikipedia describes her, which I reference here because that's truly the extent of their depth, existing primarily for the camera to ogle them, as Bale’s character does too.

But then, Bale is no doubt presented just as shallowly as the women. I’ve been calling him Bale because, when asked, he says his name is “Rick”, which sounds incredibly wrong tumbling out of his mouth, partially because a character in a movie like this should be named Claude, or Jean-Paul, not “Rick”, but also because the name is meaningless – he’s an avatar, as all Malick males seem to be anymore. With the camera, as stated, so frequently at his back, there are times when you could transpose Affleck from “To the Wonder” into “Knight of Cups” and no one would notice. Apparently “Rick” is a screenwriter, which I only learned after, because this is entirely beside the point. Males in Malick movies don’t have time to punch in and punch out, and so we just occasionally see him at work, where it looks more like commercial shoots and magazine cover shoots then anything have to do with movies. A brief foray into a backyard party hints at the soulless vacuousness of Los Angeles, but that vacuousness seems to be everywhere “Rick” looks, and so he returns again and again to his memories.

That runs counter to the idea the movie pitches at its thesis, in one of those quintessential Malick scenes where he simply shoehorns in a person to say what he wants to say; you can practically hear Malick off camera with his book of philosophy telling the guy what to say. The guy speaks about Monks and living for the moment. But that's what his movies anymore seem to be about, trying to capture that moment with their lustrous aesthetic, jettisoning any pretense toward character or story to find it. Who did that? What happened? When did it take place? Where did it take place? Why did that happen? “Eh, whatever,” says Malick, “and immerse yourself instead.” Whether or not you choose to follow his desire is entirely up to you.

To the Wonder

“Where are we when we’re there? Why not always?” 

There is a remarkable shot in the early going of legendary recluse and suddenly (by his standards) prolific auteur Terrence Malick’s latest film "To the Wonder" when Marina (Olga Kurylenko) appears to walk on water. She is not walking on water, of course, and the film does not try to trick us into thinking she is walking on water, instead making it quite clear she is tiptoeing along stones on the edge of the sea. But then the sea gently laps in, momentarily erasing the stones from view, and there is Marina…..gliding. It is not Christ-like, it is something else. It is saying: to experience love, true, uninhibited, overwhelming love, even if it is fleeting, is to feel, but for an instant, as if you are walking on water.

The breathless first fifteen minutes of "To the Wonder" mix swooping images of astonishing beauty in both nature and physical human contact with whispered voiceovers that tell us everything and nothing. The cleansing rush we feel is the cleansing rush they feel – that is, Marina and Neil (Ben Affleck), an American on vacation in France, who meets the beguiling Ukrainian divorcee, living in Paris, which results in a whirlwind if spellbinding courtship. Generally all we receive here are impressions of what is happening but their affection for one another is unmistakable. We do not need to be told what is happening because Malick lets us feel it. This is cinema of almost inexpressible grace and power, it is a sacrament To the Wonder of love.

Neil invites Marina and her ten year old daughter Tatiana (Tatiana Chiline) to return with him to the United States, to his home in Oklahoma, and they accept. The contrasts on display from Europe to America are stark but, of course, Malick being Malick, still ring with the same rarefied beauty. Whether it is the Seine or a Sonic Drive In, he renders each image as if it belongs on a canvas.  Life, as it must, grows more complicated. Marina and Tatiana in their dress and mannerisms, their constant pirouetting in the tall Oklahoma weeds or in the fluorescent aisles of colossal supermarket stores, often seem far from their own shore, unhappy pilgrims yearning to re-cross the Atlantic. Neil, we sense, is less than an ideal mate beyond a romantic getaway. Notice how Malick continually frames Affleck with his back to the camera, as if long ago he turned his back on the world, as if he harbors personal demons for which he has yet to offer penance.

This might be enough to sustain a film for a mere mortal but, again, Malick being Malick, he adds an alluring friend from Neil’s youth, Jane (Rachel McAdams), who comes and goes almost like a windswept apparition (even now I wonder, did I dream that Rachel McAdams was in this film?) as well as a Catholic priest, Father Quintana, played by Javier Bardem in what is no doubt the Sean Penn Memorial "Tree Of Life" Award (given to the character in a Malick movie whose part was clearly pared down in editing). He could have wandered across the Atlantic with Neil and Marina from an Ingmar Bergman movie, suffering from and internally raging against a perceived absence of God. Jane factors into the main story prominently in her own less-than-prominent way but Father Quintana merely tangentially interacts with our primary characters, seeming to exist in a narration entire separate from the one in which we have become invested. It is odd, no doubt, but then Malick has always crafted his films with his heart as opposed to his head and while at its most elementary level it might seem unnecessary consider that Father Quintana, mirroring Neil and Marina’s splintering relationship, has lost all sense of wonder, that intangible mysticism beyond our earthly grasp. 

This is the question Malick abstractly poses again and again as the movie progresses: “Where are we when we’re there? Why not always?” Perhaps this is simplistic, but then I have always admired Malick’s ability and, more crucially, want to not shy away from the most broad and, in turn, grand mysteries of life. And what makes "To the Wonder" such a vexing if celestial conundrum is that rather than building to the wonder itself he positions it upfront at the start, making the remainder of the film a spiritual slog, a confusing struggle to re-connect with a sensation that is hardly possible to understand. You might even check the time. This experience that only a short time ago was so transcendent has turned you into a tragic clockwatcher.

A patron next to me at theater remarked to his companion during the closing credits: “I was with it for that first act and then in the second and third acts it lost me.” Well, exactly! That’s life! You’re in tune with it and then, suddenly, you’re not. What happened? Where did it go? You grapple with it. You try to get it back. Can you get it back? How do you get it back?

I left the theater wrestling with these questions in my mind. I noticed the sky. It was filled with those sorts of stratocumulus clouds that cause the sun to play peek-a-boo. I could not stop looking. I kind of never wanted to stop looking.