To the Wonder (2013)

Terrence Malick movies can never be in just one place at one time. It must have its fingers in many different physical and temporal locations at once, and through these seemingly random and poetic leaps we are meant to infer some greater meaning. The good news is he usually makes this work, with the best example being The Tree of Life. There he took audiences on a journey through, oh, nothing more than the entire history of the universe and was able to create one of the most profound and ambitious films in recent memory. He normally does not truly craft his films until post production, and during principal photography he simply has his cast act out various scenes while the camera swirls around them. Only when all the footage is collected does he go fishing for something deeper.

The problem with that is it puts a great deal of pressure on the editing process. If you discover then that you weren’t able to find the transcendent moments you’ve been looking for, then you’re screwed. On that note, it’s kind of amazing that Malick’s newest film To the Wonder may be the first in which he wasn’t able to pull it off. There are still some great passages here and there—as with many Malick films it has absolutely nothing in the way of narrative—but too often his usual tricks were unable to connect with me. Occasionally I got a vague glimpse of what he went fishing for this time out, but I don’t think he caught it.

Malick is normally one to turn his camera on the past, with the only true modern scenes popping up in bits and spurts during Sean Penn’s portions of The Tree of Life. To the Wonder is all about the modern day, though Malick is still able to find his wheat field paradise every once in a while. In fact, this is a film that plays a lot with the contrast between modern civilization and what is left of the natural world. This is the rare film in which one scene will feature a character doing the most Malick-ian thing ever (example: worshiping the sun for no real reason) and another scene will feature an intense emotional moment taking place at a Sonic drive-thru. Yet even in the land of strip malls and fast food, Malick still feels entirely at home. Too much so, perhaps.

The “plot,” if you must know, focuses on the relationship between a man named Neil (Ben Affleck) and a woman named Marina (Olga Kurylenko). They meet in France, but when they fall in love Marina accompanies Neil back to the States with her daughter Tatiana Chiline. Their relationship has its ups and downs, and eventually another woman named Jane (Rachel McAdams) briefly enters the picture. And I mean briefly. Malick has a habit of cutting certain roles down to nothing to serve his purposes, and some of the most high profile examples can be seen in The Thin Red Line. (George Clooney and John Travolta just kind of show up for five minutes and then bail.) For To the Wonder, Malick allegedly shot scenes with Jessica Chastain, Rachel Weisz, Amanda Peet, Barry Pepper, Michael Sheen and others. I don’t know how that can possibly be true considering how bare bones this movie is compared to his other work, but it really makes one wonder what this movie was supposed to look like at first.

There is one supporting character who was able to survive the fire, and that is Javier Bardem’s Father Quintana. Like just about every Malick character in history he comes and goes almost randomly, but he eventually is able to become the movie’s soul. Up until then, I wasn’t entirely sure it had one. The final 20 minutes or so of To the Wonder is easily its best, as it turns much of its attention to Bardem and his struggles with faith, love, and just about every gargantuan theme that Malick has ever tackled. It breaks away from him once more in the final couple scenes, and not coincidentally they wind up being rather underwhelming. It’s no surprise that To the Wonder is wispy, pretentious and abstract, but this is the first recent Malick movie in which that’s been a vice rather than an asset. There’s something beautiful about the gall required to make a movie like The Tree of Life, but at least there the subject matter lived up to the usual pretention. The same cannot be said here.

This is mostly because Affleck’s two major relationships are never involving enough for the audience to care, and as a result much of the movie feels unusually empty. This is no real fault of Affleck himself, who is not given anything really interesting to do. He doesn’t even talk all that much; his dialogue is 15 percent English, 5 percent French, and 80 percent various grunts and chuckles. The much more interesting character is Kurylenko’s, and she turns out to be quite the perfect plaything for Malick. She is an expert at doing all the usual twirling and skipping through the fields required for such a project, and she records philosophical narration in foreign languages like an old pro. We actually get to spend some time with her and get to know her, and the same can be said (to a degree) about Bardem. Affleck’s character is just a blank slate.

Despite the dozens of problems with To the Wonder, Malick fans will still find plenty to like. He’s a filmmaker that can take just about any setting and make it beautiful to behold, even if the material just is not there. It certainly seems like the more experimental and prolific Malick gets, the less he worries about actually coming up with material. The difference between The Tree of Life and To the Wonder, though, is that the former at least had some idea what it was going for when it was being put together. There is no sense of that here. There is still plenty to love and absorb, but while the beauty abounds it never quite adds up to anything profound. Since Malick is a filmmaker that traffics in profundities, this is a problem.

Grade: B-