Movie Review: To the Wonder
What We Liked
What We Didn't Like
One would never accuse famed press-shy, prodigal film genius Terrence Malick of being hurried in either his storytelling or his carefully chosen, infrequent projects. Known in shorthand as the young 1970s turk who followed that decade’s downbeat, existential turn in American cinema to its lowest pulse rate in the meticulous classics Badlands and Days of Heaven – films without a specific cause to rally the hip; merely philosophical glimpses of doomed men shot with an elegiac beauty borrowed from the innovations of Stanley Kubrick and the European feel for shooting the human soul on film. In that recalcitrant, searching decade, Malick was justly heralded for poetically dispensing with strong narrative, leaving the eye to take in his real subject: awe – awe at all there is to behold in a world too big to get on film. The last two Malick opuses, Tree of Life and the new To the Wonder, have attempted to do just that with varying degrees of success.
We don’t go all the way back to prehistoric times in To the Wonder – the timeframe is expansive but concise as opposed to the 2001: A Space Odyssey ambition in Tree of Life (the whole universe might be contained in that promised five-hour cut). The director’s previous four features have all been set in a past moment (excepting the modern Sean Penn scenes in Tree of Life, we have surveyed the Pacific Front in WWII, mid-west America in the 1950s, sharecropping at the turn of the nineteenth century, and Jamestown colony in the seventeenth); Malick’s seeming disengagement with the contemporary world may make his pictures appear distanced and quaint to those who view him as a nostalgist or even a Luddite. Set in our moment, To the Wonder makes moving, but oblique points about our increasing disconnect from one another, distressing doubts in religious solace, and the industrial corrosion of the natural environment, but does so with the kind of plain-faced, optimistic belief in rebirth and renewal present in all of Malick’s work. His work gives a feeling of elation, rather than engaging with depressing details.
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Since he ended his silence in the film world, Malick has met the internet age – relentless in its pursuit to end his self-realized, humble anonymity in a world of chatter; he has even been mocked in the same fashion that Mr. Kubrick has eventually come to be due to peculiarities that seem to some like a lavish episode of Hoarders; Malick’s greatest sin seems to be not being immediately available to questioning to satisfy an increasing demand for instant clarity in movies; the last film required notices posted in theater lobbies defending the idea that movies are sometimes a purposefully challenging art offering few pat answers because people seem to walk out of them like impatient children, demanding their money back and re-affirming that narrative is king in America. Yet, To the Wonder will be frustratingly under-realized even to those prepared for more of Malick’s symphonic, contemplative approach due to its thin character sketches and minor dramatics.
Opening in the breathless splendor of France’s Mont Saint-Michel, the first section of the film is the most involving as it sets up the bare plot of a young couple (Ben Affleck and Olga Kurylenko) finding love amongst the ruins and poetic structures to the tune of gorgeous, omnipresent classical music, quickly-edited, constantly moving shots, and almost no dialogue other than whispered voiceovers. They come back to a Midwest America that is all flat land and low structures; the European woman longs for a way of life that the old country represents – culture, history, social options that are harder to locate in the efficient, well-stocked commercial grocery stores and low-level track housing of her new suburban life. The couple argues in undetailed flashes, until she leaves him only to return if they agree to marry. While she is away, the man reconnects with an old flame (Rachel McAdams) and ends it with her before we even have a sense of their dynamic or any traditional opportunity for drama. But, in true Malick fashion, there are indelible images (like a huge field of grazing buffalo) that tell a more inclusive, larger “life” story which is harder to interpret but is richer than a common relationship drama under Malick’s sensitive and sensual gaze. It is rather telling that he could abandon all human characterization and still convey to us how erotic and youthful he finds the natural world, promising that there is primal beauty to be found in all corners of life.
Ben Affleck and Rachel McAdams in “To the Wonder.”
Photo by Mary Cybulski – © RedBud Pictures.
Even the empathic priest played with real warmth by Javier Bardem feels like a character made of scrapbook pieces from similar characters (I am reminded especially of Benicio del Toro’s role in 21 Grams) but he makes the most direct points about American poverty and spiritual corrosion yet with the same floating inconsequentiality that keeps To the Wonder from drawing a distinct line of purpose in these chaotic, fraught times. The priest seems to be in a more interesting film than the couple, but gets little time to resolve his profound observations of the rural poor and the philosophically destitute because we have to get back to more images of Olga Kurylenko looking mystically gorgeous and telling us very little. I never thought I would say this, but if Terrence Malick had further slowed his notoriously lengthy editing process, he may have found a better film than the ambitious, rapturous, but dramatically-lacking To the Wonder.
Gregory Fichter
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