Download PDF Version Revolt Magazine, Volume 1 Issue No.4

THE
CINEMA
VIEW
LOST IN WHEAT: Terrence Malick's
To The Wonder
BY DAN CALLAHAN
Video still, Terrence Malick's To The Wonder.
For both audiences and critics, Terrence
Malick has increasingly become a
point of controversy and contention.
“Badlands” (1973), his feature debut,
was acclaimed by most as an instant
classic about criminal love and
sociopathy, but his follow-up, “Days
of Heaven” (1978), was met with a more mixed
response. Some thought that that movie leaned far
too heavily on the merely pictorial beauty of Néstor
Almendros’s cinematography.
Malick withdrew from filmmaking for twenty
years, a leave of absence that has yet to be
fully explained. His comeback, “The Thin Red
Line” (1998), was met with both respect and
bewilderment due to its consistent staring at grass
waving in the wind, a visual pre-occupation that
came at the expense of the people on screen. We
only had to wait seven years for Malick’s next film,
“The New World” (2005), and that movie was the
site of an epic online battle between two critical
heavyweights: Matt Zoller Seitz, who defended the
movie as if it were a girl he was passionately in love
with, and Dave Kehr, who dismissed it with clinical
and well-earned authority.
Six years passed before Malick’s “The Tree of Life”
(2011). This has been one of the most divisive
of modern movies, championed by a small group
of supporters as a masterpiece on childhood
and grief but rejected in furious terms by Kehr, J.
Hoberman, Jonathan Rosenbaum and many other
of our finest film critics. “The Tree of Life” has been
taken apart limb from limb by Kehr and Hoberman,
both of whom expressed outright loathing for the
film’s flowing editing style, which Kehr judged the
result of a director who had shot miles of footage
and who could not be bothered to make firmer
decisions about structure and visual composition.
Many of these critics (not to mention generally
confused audience members), looked askance at
the film’s religious and spiritual yearning, which
was often categorized as lightweight New Age
malarkey.
“The Tree of Life” is the greatest American film I
have seen since David Lynch’s “Mulholland Dr.” in
2001. And so it is with a heavy heart that I must
now turn to Malick’s new film, “To The Wonder,”
a movie released practically right after “The Tree
of Life” if we are to compare his work rate to what
it has usually been in the past. Most alarmingly,
IMDb lists a further three films Malick has shot,
all in post-production! What is going on here? Why
is Malick suddenly so inspired to work and shoot
at such a rate? Since he does no interviews or
publicity, only rumor and hearsay can supply any
motive for this surge of creative energy. It might be
up to a later biographer to figure out just what goes
on with Malick, and this is sure to be a difficult
job, even if “The Tree of Life” seems like one of the
most autobiographical of films.
“To The Wonder,” alas, seems to me guilty of every
one of the faults Malick’s critics decried in “The
Tree of Life” and his past work, and a lot more
besides. It plays, in fact, like a parody of a Malick
film, all quivering wheat and whispery voice-over
and vague reaching for enlightenment. The film
centers on Marina (Olga Kurylenko), a Ukrainian
woman who moves to Oklahoma to continue her
love affair with Neil (Ben Affleck), a man involved
in some kind of environmental chicanery. Nestled
within the movie is another storyline about how
Neil takes up with a childhood friend, Jane (Rachel
McAdams), and has an affair with her.
Marina and Jane might as well be the same
woman as far as Malick’s camera is concerned.
Kurylenko looks and behaves like a fashion
model, and there are interminable shots of her
ecstatically throwing her arms around various
exteriors and interiors, until we get the sense that
Kurylenko hasn’t the foggiest notion what she is
supposed to be portraying. She’s just trying to
move in an interesting way for her director, who
seems entranced with her, but that entrancement
is a dead end. Malick views All-American blond
McAdams in exactly the same way, asking her to
roll around in the dirt, roll around in the grass and
be at one, presumably, with nature. Affleck is much
like Richard Gere in "Days of Heaven", a smarmy
model who also seems to have no idea what he’s
supposed to be doing. On the edges of the story
are people who do not look like movie stars, many
of whom are afflicted with impairments or diseases
of some kind, and Malick’s brief fetishization of
their difference in contrast to his tediously pretty
lead actors is borderline offensive.
The case for and against Terrence Malick is far
from finished. Maybe one of his next three films
will be another “Badlands” or “Tree of Life.” But
this new work, which might be dubbed “To The
Blunder,” seems to underline the value for him of
taking his time.