On Blu-ray/DVD: A HIDDEN LIFE (2019) and THE SONG OF NAMES (2019)

A HIDDEN LIFE
(US/UK/Germany/Italy - 2019)

Considering the 20-year sabbatical he took between 1978's DAYS OF HEAVEN and 1998's THE THIN RED LINE, Terrence Malick has been surprisingly prolific since his return, especially in the last decade: his latest film, A HIDDEN LIFE, is his fifth feature since 2011. But it's been an increasingly divisive decade for Malick fans, and even his most devout apologists started turning on him after 2017's atrocious SONG TO SONG, where the filmmaker's embrace of rambling, ethereal voiceover and growing disdain for any semblance of narrative storytelling or forward momentum reached their absolute nadir. Perhaps even Malick felt he'd disappeared a little too far up his own ass with SONG TO SONG, as A HIDDEN LIFE marks a return to actual scripted narrative and conventional storytelling, displaying a side of Malick we haven't seen since 2005's THE NEW WORLD and parts of 2011's THE TREE OF LIFE. That doesn't mean he's completely changed his ways. He's still as meticulous and obsessive as ever: A HIDDEN LIFE, originally titled RADEGUND, was shot back in 2016 as Malick spent nearly three years tinkering with it and tweaking it in the editing room, during which time two of its cast members died (Michael Nyqvist in June 2017 and Bruno Ganz in February 2019). Set from 1939 to 1943, the film is based on the true story of Franz Jagerstatter (August Diehl), a farmer in Radegund, Austria. He's a good, honest man who's happy with his simple life, tending to his fields, doing handyman work at the local church, and spending time with his wife Fani (Valerie Pachner) and their three daughters. But Austria is in a time of turmoil. War is ramping up throughout Europe and able-bodied men are being drafted to serve under Hitler. Much of the Radegund locals--including its Hitler-loving mayor (Karl Markovics) pledge blind allegiance, while Franz, troubled by the Nazi ideology, dutifully goes to church for guidance but gets nothing from the Bishop (Nyqvist), all the while defiantly trying to remain in apolitical detachment.

He's conscripted and goes through the military training, and is then sent home until he's called to serve. That day comes, and he refuses the required oath of allegiance to Hitler. Franz going on the record as a conscientious objector quickly gets around Radegund, as former friends ostracize the Jagerstatters, and no one, not even Radegund priest Father Furthauer (Tobias Moretti) can convince him to simply go along to get along. Franz is eventually hauled away to prison to await trial, where he's regularly beaten and tortured, even refusing a request by a Nazi captain (Matthias Schoenaerts), who promises to dismiss the charges, end his incarceration, and give him a non-battlefield office job if he simply signs the oath to Hitler. Franz Jagerstatter never backed down and never gave in, and would eventually be found guilty before a tribunal and executed on August 9, 1943. As one expects, A HIDDEN LIFE is stunningly beautiful, especially the scenes around the Jagerstatter farm, shot in the mountains of northern Italy. This probably looked great on a big screen, but the film got lost in the shuffle of Disney taking over 20th Century Fox, and something that would've gotten a certain Oscar push in any other year ended up stalling on 151 screens at its widest release, grossing under $2 million. It's nice to see Malick meeting a weary audience halfway by embracing relatively standard storytelling again while still giving himself room to indulge his usual tropes and obsessions (slow walks through fields, long, contemplative, philosophical voiceovers, this time as epistolary narration in letters between Franz and Fani). But at a career-long 174 minutes, it's simply too long, especially when he keeps the bigger picture at a distance to get into the heads of Franz and Fani, and you can almost see Diehl desperately wanting to break out with an Oscar-caliber performance but Malick's methodology keeps him pinned down. He does what he can when it's allowed, and Ganz has a great moment later on as the head of the tribunal, his sad face speaking volumes after he privately tries to get Franz to just sign the oath and be done with it, maybe even silently admiring the young man's conviction even though he has no choice but to sentence him to death. After years of increasingly self-indulgent drivel, A HIDDEN LIFE is a step in the right direction for Malick, whose next film, the Biblical drama THE LAST PLANET (starring Schoenaerts) is currently in post-production, which means we'll see it sometime in 2023. (PG-13, 174 mins)



THE SONG OF NAMES
(Canada/Hungary - 2019)

Another barely-released prestige project that came and went with little fanfare during the 2019 awards season (Sony got it on 182 screens at its widest release), THE SONG OF NAMES is an earnest but empty period drama that jumps back and forth between 1939. 1951, and 1986. In London in 1951, 21-year-old Polish-born violin prodigy Dovidl Rapoport (Jonah Hauer-King) is set to make his much-anticipated debut performance before a sellout crowd that will be broadcast on BBC radio, but he never shows up, and neither his manager Gilbert Simmonds (Stanley Townsend), his son, Dovidl's best friend Martin (Gerran Howell), nor Martin's girlfriend Helen (Marina Hambro), know where he is. We learn that Dovidl has lived with the Simmonds family since 1939, when his Jewish father left him in the care of impresario Gilbert to let him study the violin and be safe as Hitler's Germany began its conquering rise to power. Young Martin (Misha Handley) is resentful of Dovidl (Luke Doyle), whose pre-teen arrogance, self-proclaimed musical genius, and the attention he gets from Gilbert is initially a source of conflict, though the two boys eventually form a bond and become the best of friends. In 1986, Martin (Tim Roth) is a classical music talent scout in London, and while judging an otherwise routine talent show at an area school, he sees a student using a very particular and unique way of applying rosin to the bow that is identical to what he watched Dovidl do countless times when they were children. Only then does he realize how Dovidl's disappearance has quietly gnawed at him for 35 years, and he switches to amateur sleuth mode--going from London to Warsaw to NYC--to find out what happened to him.

Second-billed Clive Owen's name is above the title with Roth's, so it's not really a spoiler to say that 1986 Dovidl will eventually appear much later, but the first hour and change is spent on Martin chasing a series of coincidental leads that get increasingly more contrived with each new clue. Based on a 2002 novel by Norman Lebrecht and scripted by Jeffrey Caine (a 2005 Adapted Screenplay Oscar-nominee for THE CONSTANT GARDENER), THE SONG OF NAMES telegraphs too many of its reveals so that nothing that happens is particularly surprising, especially in the way 1986 Helen (Catherine McCormack), Martin's wife of over 30 years, really doesn't want him to waste his time tracking down Dovidl. 1951 Dovidl grows more and more concerned over the fate of his family, from whom he hasn't heard in years, fearful that they were among the dead at Treblinka, and it's in these scenes that director Francois Girard (THIRTY TWO SHORT FILMS ABOUT GLENN GOULD, THE RED VIOLIN) fares best, with a devastating sequence that's diminished somewhat by the ludicrous way Dovidl gets to where he goes to discover the truth. The same incredulity applies to 1986 Martin just walking into a small violin repair shop in Brooklyn, where the owner (Saul Rubinek) just happens to still have the address of an anonymous caller who never gave his name but inquired about selling a particular violin four years earlier. That scene with 1951 Dovidl's discovery--and the origin of the film's title--is an emotional wrecking ball, but THE SONG OF NAMES trudges on for another half hour before its big soap opera reveal that isn't even a surprise by that point. The younger actors do a lot of the dramatic heavy lifting, as Roth essentially just plays detective and listens to people talk about Dovidl, while Owen really isn't onscreen long enough to make much of an impression. (PG-13, 113 mins)

On DVD/Blu-ray: SONG TO SONG (2017) and SALT AND FIRE (2017)

SONG TO SONG
(US - 2017)

After taking 20 years off between 1978's DAYS OF HEAVEN and 1998's THE THIN RED LINE, Terrence Malick's directorial output in the 2010s is coming at a furious pace that rivals Woody Allen and Clint Eastwood. Counting the 40-minute IMAX film VOYAGE OF TIME, SONG TO SONG is his sixth movie of this decade, and the final part of a loose trilogy that began with 2013's TO THE WONDER and 2016's KNIGHT OF CUPS. Shot back-to-back with KNIGHT OF CUPS way back in 2012 and endlessly tinkered with by its maker, SONG TO SONG takes the first-world ennui of CUPS' self-absorbed Los Angeles navel-gazers and moves them to the hipster mecca of Austin, TX for maximum insufferability. Any hopes of Malick turning this into his own version of NASHVILLE are dashed the moment the film begins and it's the same kind of pained, whispered, emo journal entry voiceover by a dull ensemble of ciphers played by actors who, for some reason, still want to say they were in a Malick movie. If there's a central character--none of them are referred to by name--it's Faye (Rooney Mara), a waify aspiring musician who's seen onstage with a band a couple of times and seems to be friends with Patti Smith (as herself), but we never really see her working on music or practicing with the rest of the band. Faye's involved with Cook (Michael Fassbender), who's some kind of music industry A&R asshole (I guess), and BV (Ryan Gosling), another aspiring musician who doesn't seem to do much playing or songwriting and, like everyone in this film, appears to have significant disposable income. Faye drifts between both men, and during some downtime, the psychologically abusive Cook hooks up with teacher-turned-diner waitress Rhonda (Natalie Portman), and even coerces Rhonda and Faye to join him in a threesome. Faye also gets involved with Parisian transplant Zoey (Berenice Marlohe) and BV with Amanda (Cate Blanchett), while almost everyone gets their turn at center stage for some of Malick's signature vacuous ruminations of the privileged and aimless.  To wit:

• "I thought we could roll and tumble. Live from song to song. Kiss to kiss."

• "I love the pain. It feels like life."

• "I'm low. I'm like the mud."

• "Foolish me. Devil." 

• "I was once like you. To think what I once was. What I am now."

• "I played with the flame of life." 

• "I feel like we're so...connected. I can't really understand. It's like..."

• "The world built a fence around you. How do you get through?  Connect?" 

• "You burn me. Who are you?"

• "I need to go back and start over."

Malick should've taken that last sentiment to heart. Like KNIGHT OF CUPS, SONG TO SONG shows the revered filmmaker continuing his ongoing descent into self-parody. This does not look like the work of a 73-year-old auteur who's been making movies for 45 years. If this same movie was presented by a film school student, it would be dismissed as self-indulgent, adolescent drivel. But Malick's defenders continue to give him a pass and insist that his detractors--a contingent of former acolytes that's growing with each new Malick journey up his own ass--just can't grasp the level of genius that's being gifted to them. Bullshit. Malick was poised to stake his claim as the Greatest American Filmmaker when Stanley Kubrick died, and brilliant films like 2005's THE NEW WORLD and 2011's THE TREE OF LIFE certainly made a strong case for his inheriting the title. But over the course of TO THE WONDER, KNIGHT OF CUPS, and now SONG TO SONG, Malick has offered enough evidence to suggest that the emperor has no clothes, and rather than the new Kubrick, he's really just the American Jean-Luc Godard, another filmmaking legend who's abandoned any semblance of narrative cohesion and for whom any negative criticism is strictly verboten. Malick goes into these films with no clear vision, instead hoping it comes together in post with the help of eight (!) credited editors. And, as was the case with WONDER and CUPS, a ton of name actors got cut out of the film when Malick decided they weren't needed, among them Christian Bale, Benicio del Toro, Haley Bennett (THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN), Boyd Holbrook (LOGAN), and Angela Bettis (MAY), along with artists Iron & Wine, Fleet Foxes, and Arcade Fire (when asked about this film in a 2013 interview after shooting wrapped, even Fassbender said he wasn't sure if he'd end up being in it). Iggy Pop and John Lydon turn up in SONG TO SONG, along with Smith, who gives the film one of its few legitimately worthwhile dramatic moments when she fondly speaks of her late husband, MC5 guitarist Fred "Sonic" Smith. Alternating between wide-angle and fish-eye lenses and often using GoPro cameras to maximize the faux-experimental aura, Malick and renowned cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki did some extensive shooting at the 2012 Austin City Limits and Fun Fun Fun fests, which gave Fassbender a chance to wrestle with Red Hot Chili Peppers' Flea and let Malick waste some screen time on that. For all the impact that the Austin events brought to the film, Malick may as well have shot scenes at that year's Gathering of the Juggalos. Holly Hunter turns up briefly as Rhonda's mom and Val Kilmer does a walk-through as a wildman rock star, onstage with the Black Lips at the Fun Fun Fun fest, cutting off clumps of his hair with a Bowie knife and chainsawing an amp during a live show while yelling "I got some uranium!" Malick would've had a significantly more entertaining movie if he'd just followed Kilmer around and filmed him being weird for two hours.

It's also nice to see Malick has entered his "pervy old man" phase, with lingering, leering shots of Mara and Marlohe caressing each other, Zoey kissing Faye's hand while she masturbates, and Cook in bed with two nude escorts in what looks like an outtake from the harrowing Fassbender sex addiction drama SHAME. It's easy to assume from his last few films that Malick has forgotten how people really communicate and interact and maybe doesn't get out much anymore, and from the looks of some of the more sordid scenes in SONG TO SONG, he's apparently just discovered Cinemax. It's possible that Malick is putting a stop to this myopic nonsense with his next film, the German-set WWII drama RADEGUND, due out later this year. It stars (for now) August Diehl, Matthias Schoenaerts, Bruno Ganz, and the late Michael Nyqvist, and by all accounts, it's actually Malick doing a commercial film with a straightforward narrative. It's about time, because SONG TO SONG is a fucking embarrassment. (R, 129 mins)

SALT AND FIRE
(Germany/US/Mexico/France/UK - 2017)

A companion piece of sorts to his 2016 Netflix documentary INTO THE INFERNO (which was shot second but released first), SALT AND FIRE provides further evidence that, much like his 1970s New German Cinema contemporary Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog's strengths no longer lie in narrative filmmaking.  A visionary German auteur and one of cinema's most beloved eccentric raconteurs, Herzog is a tireless workaholic whose curiosity of all subjects has led him to create some of the most captivating documentaries of the modern era, including 2005's GRIZZLY MAN, 2007's ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD, and 2010's CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS. He once made brilliant, groundbreaking dramas like 1972's AGUIRRE: THE WRATH OF GOD and 1982's FITZCARRALDO, but after his superb 2006 Vietnam POW drama RESCUE DAWN, his gonzo 2009 reimagining of BAD LIEUTENANT, and his experimental 2010 misfire (though it has its admirers) MY SON, MY SON, WHAT HAVE YE DONE?, Herzog's most recent forays into scripted cinema have fallen flat: his Nicole Kidman-headlined historical epic QUEEN OF THE DESERT took four years to get released in the US in April 2017, the same day as the shot-in-2015 SALT AND FIRE. MY SON, MY SON was bad, but SALT AND FIRE is easily the worst Herzog film I've seen, a deadening, ponderous slog with muddled, ham-fisted admonishments about environmental issues and filled with characters who never once speak like human beings who know how to interact with one another. Much of the dialogue sounds like stuff Herzog would've written for himself to narrate in a documentary and honestly, it would play significantly better coming out of his mouth instead of a monotone, somnambulant Michael Shannon, one of the great character actors around but who's having a really off day here. Imagine the curiously soothing tone of Herzog uttering such musings as "Truth is the only daughter of time," "Here lies a monster on the verge of waking," or "The noblest place for a man to die is the place he dies the deadest," and you've got a movie. But when those same lines are mumbled by Shannon, they sound like the pretentious ramblings of the world's most depressed Bond villain.

As SALT AND FIRE opens, scientist Dr. Laura Sommerfeld (Veronica Ferres) is on a UN fact-finding mission in South America with two colleagues--horndog Italian Dr. Fabio Cavani (Gael Garcia Bernal) and stoical German Dr. Arnold Meier (Volker Zack Michalowski)--to look into an impending ecological disaster at the Diablo Blanco salt flats (played by Bolivia's Salar de Uyuni). They're left at an abandoned airport and abducted by armed, masked men and taken to an undisclosed location where Sommerfeld is granted an audience with mastermind Matt Riley (Shannon), the CEO of a mysterious corporation known as "The Consortium." While Cavani and Meier are sidelined in the shitter for the rest of the film after secretly being given a powerful laxative (one of the film's several ill-advised attempts at levity; c'mon, Herzog...you're better than poop jokes), Riley and his chief associate Krauss (theoretical physicist Jonathan Krauss as himself) take Sommerfeld into the middle of the Diablo Blanco, where Riley informs her that a lake that was there just a few decades ago is gone and that expanding Diablo Blanco threatens to reactivate a long-dormant volcano that could obliterate mankind ("It could be 20,000 years or it could be 20...but it will happen"). After confessing that it was his company's unethical, careless practices that brought this certain disaster on the world, he abandons her in the desert with two blind children, for whom she quickly adapts to the situation to be a protective mother figure while trying to ascertain the exact of Riley's actions. Ferres and Shannon aren't given characters to play but rather, talking points to recite, with Shannon's Riley coming off as particularly hectoring in a way that borders on mansplaining, considering Ferres' Sommerfeld is the top ecology expert in her field. Popular German actress Ferres delivers her lines in a stilted, halting way that sounds like she looped them in post-production, while Shannon comes off as so lifeless that you might think Herzog pulled a HEART OF GLASS on him. SALT AND FIRE is anti-entertainment of the highest order, a film that opens as a straightforward hostage drama and flirts with becoming a disaster movie before turning into an overbearing, finger-wagging lecture, and finally, an examination of a career woman finding her true inner self when, like the volcano, her long-dormant maternal instincts are reawakened (it's mentioned that Sommerfeld has a estranged daughter who's in the custody of her ex), along with signs of a budding romance with her kidnapper. It speaks to how random and disjointed SALT AND FIRE is that it's no less than three movies before it finally settles on being a fourth with a clumsy attempt to link motherhood with nurturing Mother Earth, a metaphor that's so ineptly handled by Herzog that it comes off as a passive-aggressive, context-free rebuking of the life choices of a world-renowned science professor that also has her succumbing to the charms (?) of her creepy, morose abductor. Herzog's rarely been as wrong-headed as he is here--he should've just made a documentary about the Salar de Uyuni salt flat and everything would've turned out better for everyone. (Unrated, 98 mins, also streaming on Netflix)

On DVD/Blu-ray: KNIGHT OF CUPS (2016) and 45 YEARS (2015)

KNIGHT OF CUPS
(US - 2016)

Terrence Malick makes movies for no one other than Terrence Malick, and by this point, you're either onboard with his improvisational, self-indulgent, stream-of-consciousness journeys up his own ass or you're not. So if you've been open to his increasingly prolific output in recent years or found him stretching well beyond the point of myopic self-parody, KNIGHT OF CUPS isn't going to do a thing to change your opinion. Similar to 2013's ponderous misfire TO THE WONDER--notable for being the first instance of some of his most devoted acolytes finally having the stones to admit he kinda lost them with this one--Malick continues to move away from the concept of narrative altogether in his presentation of Hollywood screenwriter Rick (Christian Bale, who worked with Malick on 2005's significantly better THE NEW WORLD), a man hopelessly lost in a suffocating malaise of L.A. ennui. No, KNIGHT OF CUPS isn't one of those bile-spewing insider takedowns of Hollywood but that might've actually been preferable. There's lots of scenes of Rick walking and driving around various obligatory recognizable locations (other than Bale, the most screen time goes to the 405 and some Death Valley wind turbines, and yes, at one point, he engages in some thousand-yard staring at the nearly bone-dry concrete of the L.A. River, whose appearance in a Los Angeles-set film is apparently required by law) and replaying the bad decisions and lost loves in his life. It's all accompanied by the expected ponderous, insufferable, pained-whisper narration by various characters that's become Malick's trademark (note: these make even less sense in context):

•  "Fragments...pieces of a man...where did I go wrong?" 

•  "I want you. Hold you. Have you. Mine."

•  "All those years...living the life of someone I didn't even know."

•  "You gave me peace. You gave me what the world can't give. Mercy. Love. Joy. All else is cloud. Be with me. Always."

•  "We find me."

•  "Oh. Life."

•  "Begin."

Many familiar faces drift in and out throughout, some playing characters (Cate Blanchett as Rick's ex-wife; Natalie Portman, Imogen Poots, Isabel Lucas, Freida Pinto, and Teresa Palmer as various lovers; Wes Bentley as Rick's brother, who commited suicide; Brian Dennehy as their dad; barely visible bits by Nick Offerman, Jason Clarke, Clifton Collins Jr., Joel Kinnaman, Dane DeHaan, Shea Whigham, and Kevin Corrigan as Rick's buddies or colleagues) and others playing themselves in what amounts to an arthouse ZOOLANDER 2 (Ryan O'Neal, Fabio, Joe LoTruglio, Joe Manganiello, Thomas Lennon, and Antonio Banderas, who offers this bit of sage relationship advice to Rick: "It's like flavors...sometimes you want raspberry and after a while, you get tired and want strawberry," in a way that sounds like Antonio Banderas imitating Chris Kattan imitating Antonio Banderas on SNL). TO THE WONDER was terrible, but at least it captured the beauty in the bland sameness of middle America in a vividly Antonioni-esque, RED DESERT fashion. With KNIGHT OF CUPS, shot way back in 2012 and endlessly tinkered with by its dawdling maker, Malick and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki don't even find a unique visual perspective of Los Angeles, mainly because we've seen all of these places in 50,000 other movies and Malick, currently American cinema's top auteur who doesn't seem to get out much, has no new perspective to offer. Sure, Malick injects some personal pain into the story--his own brother committed suicide--but does it matter when his writing has regressed to the level of an angsty teenager who's just had his heart broken for the first time? Do we need another movie about depressed and loathsome L.A. dickbags and their first-world problems? The Malick of old could bring a singularly original perspective to this tired and played-out concept, but all the Malick of today has to offer are sleepy, enigmatic voiceovers and more California cliches than a Red Hot Chili Peppers song. Look, film snobs. Let's just cut the shit. Stop giving Malick a pass simply because of your fond memories of what he once was. (R, 118 mins)

45 YEARS
(UK/Germany - 2015)

A quiet and low-key character piece that subtly grows more tense and uncomfortable as it goes along, 45 YEARS is also a showcase for a pair of late-career triumphs for stars Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay. Rampling received an Oscar nomination for her performance as Kate Mercer, a retired schoolteacher in a small, rural British town. The film follows Kate and husband Geoff (Courtenay) over the week leading up to a swanky party with all of their friends--the Mercers never had children--celebrating their 45th wedding anniversary (a party was planned for their 40th, but Geoff's heart attack and bypass surgery led to its cancellation). On Monday of that week, Geoff receives a letter from Germany informing him that the still-preserved body of Katya, his German girlfriend who died over 50 years ago, was found in a melting glacier where she fell into a crevasse while they were mountain climbing in Switzerland. Memories from a half-century ago come back to haunt Geoff, and while Kate is initially supportive of the wave of grief overcoming her husband, she grows increasingly concerned over the week as long-buried details of his relationship with Katya come to the surface. He was contacted because the initial report listed him as her next-of-kin, which leads Kate to think Geoff and Katya were married. He insists they weren't, only that they pretended to be since it was a much more conservative era. After a failed attempt at sex due to Geoff's mind being elsewhere, she catches him rummaging around in the attic in the middle of the night, looking for pictures of Katya. Geoff starts smoking again, tries to back out of a lunch with some old work buddies, and even their friends remark that he seems distant, agitated, and preoccupied. He starts reading up on global warming and Kate finds out he's been talking to a travel agent about booking a trip to Switzerland. While Geoff is out one afternoon, Kate goes through his old photos and notebooks in some boxes stashed away in the attic and finds something that makes her question everything about their 45-year marriage.

Based on David Constantine's short story "In Another Country" and written and directed by Andrew Haigh, who cut his teeth working on the editing team of several Ridley Scott films (GLADIATOR, BLACK HAWK DOWN, KINGDOM OF HEAVEN), 45 YEARS is a fascinating, unsettling, and often deeply moving meditation on marriage, trust, love, and the disturbing realization that no matter how long or how well you've known someone, you'll never know everything about them. Kate was aware of Katya's death when she met Geoff, but it never occurred to her just how much of a presence the memory of Katya was in her marriage to Geoff, or the ways in which Katya has been the driving force in many of Geoff's--and by association, Kate's--decisions over the years. Haigh doesn't ask the audience to pick sides--indeed, there are times when Kate seems insensitive to Geoff's grief, but Geoff doesn't make it easy, yammering on about "my Katya" in ways that sometimes seem like an inadvertent slap in Kate's face. There's no doubt that Geoff loves Kate dearly, but it's just as clear that Katya has always been on his mind. In their best roles in years (probably decades for Courtenay, who's been nominated for two Oscars and was big in the mid '60s but seemed to consciously avoid the commercial pursuits of his British "angry young man" contemporaries like Richard Burton, Albert Finney, and Peter O'Toole), the two living legend stars are just superb, their body language and mannerisms expertly conveying decades of lived-in familiarity and shorthand communication, culminating a long, static shot near the end that up-ends all of that in a devastating portrait of ambiguity and uncertainty. (R, 95 mins)

In Theaters/On VOD: TO THE WONDER (2013)

TO THE WONDER

(US - 2013)

Written and directed by Terrence Malick.  Cast: Ben Affleck, Olga Kurylenko, Javier Bardem, Rachel McAdams, Tatiana Chilline, Romina Mondello, Marshall Bell, Charles Baker. (R, 109 mins)

After taking a 20-year sabbatical between 1978's DAYS OF HEAVEN and 1998's THE THIN RED LINE, Terrence Malick seemed to inherit the "greatest living American filmmaker" title with the 1999 passing of Stanley Kubrick.  All of his films, from his 1973 debut BADLANDS to 2005's THE NEW WORLD and 2011's THE TREE OF LIFE, are works of stunning beauty that are the singular and unique voice of a true auteur.  Terrence Malick films are distinctly his.  No one else makes Terrence Malick films the way Malick does, though some have come very close (Andrew Dominik's THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD is a brilliant example).  And indeed, other than Kubrick, it's possible that no other living American filmmaker is as universally lionized as Malick--even guys like Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg aren't immune to criticism.  With THE THIN RED LINE and particularly with the divisive THE NEW WORLD, to criticize Malick was to insult the very art of film itself.  It was just not allowed, and anyone who didn't find Malick brilliant simply didn't "get it."  Malick's fan base is one of the most fervently devoted in all of cinema, and if you spend enough time on film discussion boards, you'll inevitably see a Malick argument break out, with many of his base taking criticism very personally.  In an era where film criticism is gradually being replaced by snark, nitpicking, and hate-watching, few other filmmakers inspire that level of undying devotion.  On one hand, it's nice to see that kind of passion and thought-provoking discussion, but on the other, there's a fine line between sticking up for your guy and sticking your fingers in your ears and yelling "La la la! Can't hear you!"

Having said that, early responses to Malick's latest film, TO THE WONDER, seem to indicate the first sign of trouble in paradise for the director and his fans.  Since returning to filmmaking, Malick's work has become increasingly abstract and less character and plot-driven.  Beautiful visuals accompanied by ethereal, whispery, stream-of-consciousness narration have always been a distinct Malick trademark, but with TO THE WONDER, his focus is more on these sorts of dreamlike ruminations and it's only a matter of time before he abandons plot, characters, and actors altogether. 

Olga Kurylenko stars as Marina, a Parisian in a whirlwind romance with American Neil (Ben Affleck) as the film opens.  There's very little dialogue spoken directly by the actors--almost all of it is past-tense narration.  When we first see Neil, Marina, and her daughter Tatiana (Tatiana Chilline), who, unless I'm mistaken, is the only character referenced by name, Marina's narration states "Newborn.  I open my eyes.  I melt.  Into the eternal night."  As they walk through the streets of Paris, Marina's voiceover continues: "Love makes us one.  Two.  One.  I in you.  You in me."  This goes on for most of the film, though it quickly relocates to an anonymous suburb in Oklahoma, where Neil lives.  Marina and Tatiana have a hard time adjusting to America, though Marina never seems to stop dancing and frolicking in the backyard, in the streets, or at the supermarket.  Eventually, her visa expires and she leaves the unwilling-to-commit Neil, who reunites with his ex-girlfriend Jane (Rachel McAdams) for a short romance before Marina returns, without Tatiana, who's living in Paris with her father.  Neil and Marina marry.  Meanwhile, melancholy local priest Father Quintana (Javier Bardem) has a crisis of faith and tries to re-establish his connection with God, a theme touched upon by the devoutly religious Jane, and also explored by Marina and Neil, who begin searching for their spiritual side when their marriage starts to crumble. 

This story is largely conveyed visually, with frequent nonsensical narration ("Enter me.  Show me how to love you" and "What is this love that loves us?"), that would be completely laughable to English-speaking audiences were it not mostly in French (for Kurylenko) or Spanish (for Bardem) with English subtitles (maybe French and Spanish audiences will find it just as terribly-written).  There's no denying that TO THE WONDER is a visually stunning film.  Malick and his NEW WORLD/TREE OF LIFE cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki achieve a very European view of suburban America, almost in a Michelangelo Antonioni or Wim Wenders way.  They and the constantly moving camera manage to find the visual beauty in fast-food restaurants, laundromats, appliance stores, Wal-Mart, and Walgreens, and even in a polluted lake or with the buzz of fluorescent lights and the hum of central air units.  In a way, I think this is partially Malick's homage to Antonioni's 1964 film RED DESERT with its depictions of human alienation and loneliness in an increasingly industrialized world of homogenized familiarity.  It's set and shot in Oklahoma but with the chain stores, fast-food joints, gas stations and Econo Lodges all over, it could be anywhere.  Thankfully, Malick doesn't work in texting or Facebook, but that's probably because he isn't aware of those things.  With his increasing disdain for characters and plot construction, it doesn't seem like Malick knows how people talk anymore.  Malick's going to be 70 this year and the writing in TO THE WONDER sounds like he plagiarized the tear-smeared scribblings in an emo kid's journal.  And it's even worse in the rare instances where there's actual spoken dialogue.  Witness the scene where Jane's Italian friend (Romina Mondello) visits her in Oklahoma:  she speaks and behaves like no human being would and it's the film's strongest indication that, like latter-day Kubrick, Terrence Malick probably doesn't get out much.

I get what he was going after with the "together yet isolated" thing.  The religious stuff seems a little wedged in, but hey, whatever, it's his movie.  A lot of TO THE WONDER looks like it was shot on the fly (there's a few instances of passersby glancing at the camera) and Malick didn't really know what he wanted until he started putting it together.  TO THE WONDER was shot in 2010 and 2011 and it took Malick plus five credited editors to put it all together, with the narration (mostly Kurylenko and Bardem) then used to advance the "story."  When other filmmakers display an over-reliance on voiceover, it's a desperation Hail Mary move, but if you listen to Malick fans, when he does it, he's reinventing the rules of cinema. 

Regardless, even the most slavishly devoted Malick apologists seem to be rejecting TO THE WONDER, the general feeling being that Malick is simply going too far in his abandonment of conventional narrative.  He doesn't seem to know what to do with his actors:  Of the major stars, Bardem probably comes off best since he gets to play the closest thing resembling a well-rounded character.  You could make a drinking game out of how many times Kurylenko dances, turns and looks at the camera, and does another pirouette.  McAdams isn't in it enough to really make an impression, and Affleck, who had most of his dialogue cut, just looks confused, much like Sean Penn in the present-day scenes in THE TREE OF LIFE (it's worth noting that Penn later said he had no idea why he was even in the finished film).  Young Chilline turns in the most natural performance, since Malick mostly lets her simply be herself.  Jessica Chastain, Rachel Weisz, Amanda Peet, Barry Pepper, and Michael Sheen all had co-starring roles in principal photography--all were left on the cutting room floor, further evidence to support the idea that Malick was just pulling the completed film out of his ass.  Sure, they got paid, but who wastes the time of five name actors?  Of course, like any piece of art, a film can evolve from its inception to completion, but if you're completely cutting people like Chastain and Weisz out of the film, then you simply didn't know what you wanted when you finished shooting, let alone started.  Malick also assembled star-packed casts for three subsequent films that are in various states of post-production (KNIGHT OF CUPS, due out later this year, plus VOYAGE OF TIME and a still-untitled third film), indicating an uncharacteristic burst of productivity for the notoriously sporadic director.  But who knows how many of those performances will get axed before the films are eventually released?

TO THE WONDER is a breathtakingly beautiful film, no question about it. When it hits DVD and Blu-ray, it'll be interesting to see if playing the chapter stops at random makes the slightest bit of difference.  My advice:  wait and watch the Blu-ray and hit the mute button. I have nothing but respect for this one-of-a-kind cinematic figure, but it's disheartening to see Terrence Malick making what looks and feels like a parody of a Terrence Malick film.