Knight of Cups (Terrence Malick, 2015)

 

Cast: Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Natalie Portman, Brian Dennehy, Antonio Banderas, Frieda Pinto, Wes Bentley, Isabel Lucas, Teresa Palmer, Imogen Poots, Ben Kingsley (voice). Screenplay: Terrence Malick. Cinematography: Emmanuel Lubezki. Production design: Jack Fisk. Film editing: A.J. Edwards, Keith Fraase, Geoffrey Richman, Mark Yoshikawa. Music: Hanan Townshend.

Two films kept coming to mind as I watched Terrence Malick's Knight of Cups: Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960) and Andrei Tarkovsky's Mirror (1975). Fellini's film because the journey of Malick's protagonist, Rick (Christian Bale), through the decadence of Hollywood and Las Vegas echoes that of Marcello's (Marchello Mastroianni) explorations of Rome. Tarkovsky's because Malick's exploration of Rick's life exhibits a similar steadfast refusal to adhere to a strict linear narrative. Most of us go to movies to have stories told to us. Our lives are a web of stories, told to us by history and religion and science and society, and most explicitly by art. We tend to prefer the old linear progression of storytelling: beginning, middle, end, or the familiar five-act structure of situation, complication, crisis, struggle, and resolution. But artists tend to get weary of the straightforward approach; they like to mix things up, to find new ways of storytelling. The modernist novelists like Joyce and Woolf and Faulkner eschewed linearity, and filmmakers have tried to take a similar course. They have the advantage of working with images as well as words. So Malick, like Tarkovsky and Fellini and others, experiments with editing and montage to meld images with language and gesture to probe the psychological depths of human character and experience. The problem with experimentation is that experiments fail more often than they succeed. Some think that Knight of Cups is a successful experiment, but most critics and much of the film's audience seem to disagree, to judge from, for example, a 5.6 rating on IMDb. Knight of Cups spent two years in post-production and there are four credited film editors, which suggests that Malick over-reached himself. For me, what was lost in the process of making the film was a clarity of vision. Granted, the lives of human beings are messy, loose-ended things, but what do we depend on artists to do but try to make sense of them. I think Malick lost sight of his protagonist, Rick, in trying to interpret his life and loves through the film's odd amalgamation of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and the Major Arcana of the tarot pack and then overlaying it with a collage of images provided by Emmanuel Lubezki's camera. We glimpse Rick through filters, grasping for moments that will resolve into something substantial about him, his problems with his family and with women. And for all the casting of fine actors like Bale and Cate Blanchett and Natalie Portman, the production negates their attempts to create characters. In fact, their starriness works against them: Instead of being drawn into the character of Rick or Nancy or Elizabeth, we're removed from them by the familiarity of the actor playing them. I understand what admirers of the film like Matt Zoller Seitz are saying when they proclaim, "The sheer freedom of it is intoxicating if you meet the film on its own level, and accept that it's unfinished, open-ended, by design, because it's at least partly concerned with the impossibility of imposing meaningful order on experience, whether through religion, occult symbolism, mass-produced images and stories, or family lore." But I wonder if that's enough to make an experiment successful. I came away from Knight of Cups knowing nothing more about its characters than I did before I met them.

Evil Is as Evil Does

Movie: Badlands (Terrence Malick, 1973) (TCM). 
Book: D.H. Lawrence, St. Mawr. 
TV: Station Eleven: Survival Is Insufficient; Goodbye My Damaged Home (HBO Max); Only Murders in the Building: True Crime (Hulu). 

Badlands is almost the only Terrence Malick movie I can watch without squirming (and sometimes snoozing). It was also his first, before he yielded to his inclination toward profundity and made movies like The Thin Red Line (1998) and The Tree of Life (2011), which take conventional genres like the war movie and the family drama and infuse them with metaphysics and cosmological speculation. In Badlands he stuck to the two main characters, the psychotic Kit (Martin Sheen) and his morally blank girlfriend Holly (Sissy Spacek), and left the philosophical import of their stories alone -- or better yet, left them for us to ponder. For the movie is in its essence a fable about the nature of evil. Kit is, in the cliché parlance, a "cold-blooded killer," one who doesn't reflect on his actions, whether it's picking up the girl he takes a fancy to, or casually gunning down anyone who stands in his way. There's mercifully little in the way of backstory psychology -- we take Kit and Holly for what they are. We can surmise about Holly's emotional blankness, since we see a little of her father (Warren Oates) who is an inept and even cruel parent (he kills her dog to punish her), but we see and learn almost nothing about what shaped Kit. The tendency of some would be to fault the environment in which the two grow up: the bleak, opportunity-starved small towns of the American heartland. But Malick lets his cinematographers -- Tak Fujimoto, Stevan Larner, and Brian Probyn -- seek out the spare beauty of the region. We're left to surmise that perhaps this kind of evil -- the kind we see often in the cruel gun stories of our day -- can find its nourishment anywhere. 

Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek in Badlands (Terrence Malick, 1973)

Two more Station Eleven episodes last night, one of them a continuation of the story of the Traveling Symphony, in which they meet up with the survivors of the Severn City airport and we learn that the Prophet (Daniel Zovatto) is Arthur Leander's son, Tyler, grown up. Whether he's good or bad is still up in the air. The more successful episode, to my mind, is the one that takes us back to the Chicago high-rise where the young Kirsten waited out the first months of the plague with Jeevan and his brother, Frank. Except that this time, the grownup Kirsten is present as a kind of interpreter of events, talking with her younger self, guiding her through her memories, which culminate in the young girl's putting on a play based on the Station Eleven graphic novel and with the death of Frank. This is a beautifully written and directed episode: I'd be surprised if it didn't win a lot of awards for  Kim Steele's adaptation of Emily St. John Mandel's novel and the direction by Hiro Murai and Lucy Tcherniak. 

I started Only Murders in the Building last night mainly because I was looking for something not overlong that would get me to my usual bedtime. A pleasant surprise: an intriguing story about three people (Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez) who discover they're all addicted to the same true crime podcast and wind up trying to solve a murder in their own Manhattan apartment building. I'll keep tuning in.  

 

The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011)

Jessica Chastain, Laramie Eppler, Tye Sheridan, Hunter McCracken, and Brad Pitt
in The Tree of Life

Cast: Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain, Sean Penn, Hunter McCracken, Laramie Eppler, Tye Sheridan, Fiona Shaw, Jessica Fuselier, Nicolas Gonda, Will Wallace, Kelly Koonce. Screenplay: Terrence Malick. Cinematography: Emmanuel Lubezki. Production design: Jack Fisk. Film editing: Hank Corwin, Jay Rabinowitz, Daniel Rezende, Billy Weber, Mark Yoshikawa. Music: Alexandre Desplat. 

I disliked The Tree of Life when I first saw it, finding it pretentious and overblown. Seeing it now, I can appreciate that there's a great movie tucked in among the pretentiousness, the reaching after some kind of metaphysical or theological statement. There's a gentle, subtle portrait of growing up in the film, somewhat akin to Richard Linklater's Boyhood (2014). I only wish that Terrence Malick had left the theology to the theologians, because what is overlaid on the story of the O'Brien boys and their parents is a muddle of cosmology, Judeo-Christian tradition, and a New-Agey view of the oneness of all life. Critically, the film was a huge success, winning the Palme d'Or at Cannes, getting three Oscar nominations (including one for best picture), and making several lists of the best films of the 21st century. It also features one of Brad Pitt's best performances, as the strict but loving father who suffers from disillusionment at the course his life has taken. I just wish more time had been spent on the backstory of Jessica Chastain's character, which is seen mostly from the rather Oedipal point of view of Jack, the oldest son who grows up to be Sean Penn. This is a very male-heavy movie. 

The Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick, 1998)

The Thin Red Line had been much anticipated because it was Malick's first film as director in 20 years, following the much-praised features Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1978). But it had the misfortune to come out only a few months after Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, whose portrayal of the actuality of combat on D-Day and after was hailed as landmark filmmaking. There are those who think more highly of Malick's film: Spielberg's movie, they argue, is weakened by his desire to celebrate the courage of those who fought in World War II, resulting in the gratuitous frame-story about the aging Ryan's return to the graveyard in Normandy, as well as in some conventional war-movie plotting. Malick's movie is anything but conventional: the well-shot (by John Toll) and -edited (by Leslie Jones, Saar Klein, and Billy Weber) combat scenes are accompanied by a meditative, metaphysics-heavy commentary supposedly voiced by the combatants themselves. To my mind, this mixture of war-movie action and reflective voiceover doesn't work. For one thing, much of what's said in the commentary sounds like the kind of poetry I used to write in college. Malick certainly makes his point about the existential absurdity of war, but he makes it over and over and over, to the expense of developing human characters. Sean Penn, who gets top billing, seems to have been designed to be the movie's central consciousness, but much of that function in the story got lost in the editing: The original cut of the film was five hours long, so it had to be reduced to its current three-hour run time, along with much of the substance of Nick Nolte's blustering colonel, whose motivations are simply alluded to in the voiceover and some of his dialogue. The editing also eliminated the performances of such major film actors as Billy Bob Thornton, Martin Sheen, Viggo Mortensen, Gary Oldman, and Mickey Rourke, while for some reason retaining the rather pointless cameos by George Clooney and John Travolta. The movie was nominated for seven Oscars, including best picture, but received none. It may, however, have siphoned away some votes from Saving Private Ryan, allowing Shakespeare in Love (John Madden, 1989) to emerge as the surprise and still very controversial best picture winner.