WONDER CON

You could never accuse filmmaker and master craftsman Terrence Malick of oversaturating the marketplace. There's never been any less than a five-year interval between the six films he's made in the last 40 years (and usually much longer)—until now. Hot on the sprockets of The Tree of Life, from 2011, comes Malick's latest, To The Wonder. And now we know once and for all why he should never, ever be rushed.

To the Wonder plays like a series of outtakes from the previous film. Once again, there is a young woman with lots of hair (Olga Kurylenko) given to twirling round and round bathed in sunlight, often with lengths of windblown sheer chiffon billowing across her face.

Once again, she is partnered by a stoic male presence (Ben Affleck), who, although less dangerous than Brad Pitt's father/husband in Tree of Life, gives every appearance of being quite the killjoy. Yet again, they are stranded together somewhere out on the lone prair-ee (in this case, suburban Oklahoma), trying and mostly failing to sync up with each other.

It's as if Malick didn't have time to invent new characters, so decided instead to recycle the same elemental female vs. uptight male dynamics from the last film. It's meant to be an impressionistic tone poem about the ebb and flow of love, I get it, but these cardboard figures in a landscape we know or care nothing about seem incapable of so strong an emotion.

(It's up to the stirring music of Henryk Gorecki and Arvo Part to provide any emotional context.) (Read more)

I still say Malick's 2005 film, The New World, was the best movie of its decade. But in that tale of English Puritan settlers and Native American tribal societies encountering each other for the first time in the first European colony in Virginia, the chaotic impressionism and interior monologue devices worked brilliantly. With two cultures unable to communicate with each other verbally, the viewer was plunged into the eerie strangeness of first contact, exactly as the people involved must have experienced it—sensory, frightening, rapturous and exalted.

In a modern context, like To the Wonder, when characters stubbornly refuse to talk to each other? Not so much. Such a disappointment.

SWEET MYSTERY OF 'LIFE'

Don't expect linear storytelling from Terrence Malick. His rapturous last film, The New World, plunged viewers into first contact between English Puritan colonists and native American peoples without a road map, or a translator, or any idea on either side of the customs and culture of the other. (Read my review here.) Audiences who expected conventional storytelling were dumbfounded; there was no way in except to surrender to the strangeness—as the colonists and tribespeople themselves must have perceived it—and let the experience wash over you.

Malick's new film, The Tree of Life plunges us into seemingly more familiar terrain—growing up in suburban Middle America in the second half of the 20th century—and turns it into something strange and mysterious, a metaphor for the eternal search for grace and meaning in life. Given the enormity of this theme, the results are somewhat less rapturous, but there are still moments of blistering power, and images of heartbreaking beauty, even if the case for absolute surrender isn't quite as compelling this time.

The plot is birth, death, and everything in between, from the formation of the cosmos through the dinosaur age to modern American family life, ca. 1950s. Malick's impressionistic storytelling keeps us mesmerized in his best scenes, the intricately observed minutiae of family life—love and rage, guilt and intimidation, rivalry and solidarity—as a father (Brad Pitt) strives to teach his three sons goodness, manliness, and the ways of the world, in lessons that are often harsh. (Read more)

I agree with critics who say the movie is too long; I was ready to doze off whilst slogging through the primordial ooze with the dinosaurs. And I hated what I first perceived as the overtly Christian symbolism of the shall-we-gather-at-the-river waterfront finale. In fact, I sat down to write a much crankier review than the one that eventually came out.

What changed was the more I thought about the movie, the more fleeting glimpses of amazing and haunting cinematic moments started coming back to me. Moments unburdened by any kind of rational explanation or justification (or even narrative thrust), but that somehow sing with their own inner truth. Pretentious? Self-indulgent? Sure, but isn't that where art comes from? That's what they used to say about Fellini, and they were often right, but even at his most self-indulgent, he was often wonderful. And he was always worth watching.

There's a thoughtful, European quality to Malick's expressionistic, stream-of-consciousness storytelling. Not many American filmmakers are making this kind of symphonic tone poem, at least not on such an ardent and delirious scale. It doesn't always work; I still hate that self-conscious, stage-manged finale, even though the film seems less formally Christian and more non-denominationally spiritual on second thought. But you don't have to love every nanosecond to respect Malick's painstaking act of creation. And it seems unreasonable to complain endlessly about stilted, formulaic Hollywood moviemaking, and then turn around and call someone who dares to break out of the mold "pap." I'm just saying.