To the Wonder -- Terrence Malick's eventually forthcoming romantic film with Ben Affleck, Rachel McAdams, and Javier Bardem

Richard Brody's "Catholicism vs Protestantism" read on it is characteristically overdetermined but at the same time it does get at something interesting about the film in its, I dunno, conflict between "duty" and "feeling."

Did love the prayer scene leading into that final (silent?) montage back in France. Felt like the movie was building to just that moment and feeling.

wish I could figure out what I find so compelling about that post-prayer montage too...it's somehow beautiful yet more distant than anything else he's done--it's like this yearning for transcendence but at the same time things remain stubbornly themselves.

it's really the only thing he's done that I'm tempted to compare to Bresson or Tarkovsky or Dreyer. (He's always been Emerson via Godard until now.)

ppl invoking Antonioni on this one which i don't quite see.

i was indeed irked by the Days of Heaven look to some of the rustling fields scenes. also a few too many 'goofy frolicking' Ben-Olga scenes.

I got Antonioni in some of the interiors with people subtly avoiding each other.

As for the rest: I guess what I'm saying is that following that urgently and terribly moving prayer you get...what exactly? An answer? God's silence? Funny given Malick's rep as woolly headed spiritualist that he puts forth such radical ambiguity at that moment. God, after all, never talks back in his films (except the rebuke quoted from Job at the beginning of ToL which boils down to "who are you to judge me?") and nature for all it's beauty presents itself essentially as a mystery without an answer.

I know it's inherent in the landscape of exurbia, but I thought the framing of (at least 3) scenes w/ banks in the background seemed significant.

oh I didn't pick up on that.

fwiw maybe he's repeating himself but it did feel like there was some deliberate callbacks to previous films. This, ToL, and the New World somehow seem a trilogy.

i liked this! more than anything else he's done since ttrl. i mean it felt 3 hours long and my attention wandered a lot, but it kinda worked for me. i hate to say that his films 'resist analysis' but it seems instructive that everyone ranks his shit totally differently... like his movies are so idiosyncratic that it's almost random which one an individual will respond to

olga doing her twirling (and there was a ton of twirling in the film, if you include acts such as skipping, frolicking, manically jumping up and down on a bed in that category, which imo is reasonable) in front of a Sonic almost felt like self-awareness on malick's part. also i loved that the second time they went to Sonic it was during happy hour - affleck's guy was fiending for that cherry limeade

very little dialogue, and the movie was indifferent to the dialogue that was there. almost any time someone started talking you could count on the movie disinterestedly fading out the audio on it. usually it was banal stuff but sometimes it was something i thought i wanted to hear and i'd start leaning closer to the screen to try and get it. some of the dialogue scenes, and scenes that were meant to dramatize a moment, were amateurish in an almost surreal way. there were a few parts where i felt like i was watching After Last Season:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7qCOe8WG4I

also, in the buffalo scene (those were some intense buffalos) theres some kind of birds squawking in the background, and then the movie embarks on a montage where the birds keep squawking over it for like the next 5 minutes

i was so smugly convinced that i had malick pegged that it opened me up to be surprised by this film, which i was. i didnt think it was gonna be the kind of movie where skinny pete from Breaking Bad has sex with olga kurylenko in an econolodge, but it was (spoiler). i didnt think OK and rachel mcadams were gonna get their sweater puppies out, but they did, and it was a cool thing to happen. i legitimately enjoyed the novelty of malick & lubezki shooting everyday scenes - i felt so numbed by the capital-b Beauty of ttol and tnw that it was cool watching olga just walking past a Golden Corral and through a grocery store aisle, skyping on her Macbook Pro. nobody owns televisions in the malickverse (i think affleck might have smashed a flat screen at one point but the camera was moving so fast that im not really sure)

its interesting that the movie seems mostly concerned with the feelings of kurylenko's character. the mcadams interlude didn't work for me at all. affleck's character is like this stony golem with no apparent interiority or personality. i guess that could be seen as an evasion, or as revealing in its own way

http://sphotos-b.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-prn1/p480x480/66671_10151308722151479_1061059852_n.jpg

good post h4a
yeah i really liked this too. it's kind of a great position to go into it from, anticipating the montage of twinkling sunlight that people described it as, because it isn't that at all, really. thought malick had a really great understanding of contemporary american scenery, the allure of a supermarket to a child, the kind of egglestonian radiance of an econolodge car-lot, the bare texture of flat pre-fab homes, the possibility of ditching a bag in the sidewalk greenery of an empty street. & sunlight's part of the guy's license to depict these places meaningfully - it isn't that there aren't twirling-in-cornfield-scenes, because there are, but it's that it's a film about western kansas (right?) & couples in the early days of relationships, & setting their time against these backdrops, where they could take a walk and where their meaningful interactions are foregrounded against these urban & natural scenes, like ours constantly are, it's a way to attach an appropriate sense of significance to these fixtures. that they're beautiful. i have had beautiful times looking across parking lots in the evenings. i guess i find it really appealing that the guy's mandate extends in this textural way to try to link the individuals' lives to our constant attachment or lack of attachment to our scenery - to walk around trailing fingers against the walls of a new home is the same as watching the caged horse try to follow its kin running, somehow, like it's some of what conditions our mood, it's to some degree representative of who and where we are & what we can occasionally feel akin to & at other times fail to even register. the artforum argument that it attempts to inject profundity into each scene seems really cynical to me; i don't know that as a film it differed radically from a contemporary ozon or hansen-love flick, tracking an unspooling romance, only that it was so progressive in its choice of what to depict - the non-verbal weight of relationships, the meaning of touch and space, the reality of relating to somebody in every moment, not just the grandstanding speechifying ones - & that it was committed to looking at light, yeah.

really couldn't believe how strong the ontological, documentary scenes of the village in this were - the priest's conversation with the guy cleaning the window, anything with badem on the road, all of which could have veered into directorial-affleck's cheap ethnography but which was done with such a clever, open, kind of holy eye. malick at the supermarket, with the marching band, watching kids race around, stray cops and criminals just rooted to their spots in the town streets. it made me want just malick's video diary of going to disneyland or something.

& yeah i liked the affleck performance. seems strange to report on this as he barely has ten lines when he's playing ... a guy who is conspicuously quiet & not at all overbearing, a marginal, reticent figure in his own life.

nice post. and agree with a lot of it.

need to see this again but it sits very fondly in my memory. maybe my fav since TTRL as well.

i keep thinking about this. it made the last couple of days richer to have seen it, i think; it is newly spring or summer or you know is bright, here, & people are around doing stuff and in your field of vision. it made a lasting impression in thinking about space and the connections you feel, i think.

another thing that seems interesting about the film, with reference to it being, in a bunch of ways, malick's modern film, is how it compares & differs from a couple of other ostensibly comparable things. when i look at how it's different from a mia hansen-love film that thematically works around the same narrative, there are these differences in approach, style i guess, and when i pitch it against something maybe similarly expansive, like post tenebras lux, it seems to have this kind of traditionalism that makes it seem distinctly unmodern. it has the tradition of being more straightforwardly enamoured with its female lead. i read some things, maybe in this thread?, about how malick doesn't seem able to attach any character to his female characters, & it didn't ring true, to me - i think specific character is something he isn't interested in across the gender spectrum. but at the same time he's happy & intent on celebrating women the way films sometimes have, as their illuminate leads, for these displays of femininity, as radiance. the leads are bacalls & the guys are bogarts, only these leads are nervous & mute, or they don't need to talk to promulgate their traits. it's tradition but rethought, to me; there is an ordinary narrative arc but one rethought to incorporate a camera that approaches subjects in an evocative way, cuts that mimic our gaze and attention instead of forcing it. i don't know. i like it more and more the more i think of it, anyway, &'ll probably catch again to see what else i pick up, of everything it dropped.

i was gonna see post tenebras lux last nite (w/reygadas Q&A) but i couldnt find parking and said fuck it and got a hot dog instead

I liked it a lot, though I can't think of anything to say as it was a month ago. Mont St Michel was a nice choice of location. My friend and I were having a laugh at the huge gaps between his films and suddenly in his sixties he's blasting out the films. Especially given the fact he appears to have bunch more in the pipeline, including this for 2014:

Voyage of Time: an examination of the birth and death of the universe.

iirc voyage of time is a kinda imax spin-off of tree of life? i don't know that that clarifies anything but just fwiw.

wish you'd caught PTL, h4a, I loved it. I saw him do a q&a for battle in heaven with its nervous lead actress & he was v compelling, looked like Godard. satisfying.

more and more I think a big part of this movie is about the paradox of sacrament--and that's an especially apt thing for a Malick movie, themselves so intent on the production of feeling through the "techne" (forgive the term) of cinema, to be about.

I really like how he reads it through one angle as the tribulations of a romantic relationship and through the other as an explicitly religious commitment that's gone "cold," so to speak. In so many other Malick films, even the relative darkness of circumstance that surrounds TTRL, there's an effusiveness that irresistibly bursts through, but here it's clear he's working for it. the movie is in so many ways about achieving a relationship of feeling with others and the world, a relationship that's not always present for the individual characters in earlier films but does seem taken for granted by the film as a whole. and there's something beautiful about the comparison of a failing relationship and a crisis of faith--and how both are organized around desiring infinity, or projecting a desire into a void. either those final moments are impossibly generous (like the end of The New World, say) and thus brought into life by a private prayer or they simpy represent a quiet expectation. either way it's devastating.

also im borderline angry about some of the critical dismissals of this movie.

the lazy ones, that is. of course everyone is entitled to hate it--just tired of the condescending and cynical approach to reviewing films. Malick really brings out the worst in some critics.

Yup.

http://vimeo.com/65398956

A+

this film is such just a total profound masterwork & like nobody cared, except i guess richard brody, richard brody cared, thank god richard brody is attentive enough to care

there was a nice film comment article, recently, using this & the shane carruth movie to talk about ~complex modern films~, & it frustrated me to reach the end & read the author kind of plump for upstream color as preferable on account of it being the more 'modern' of the two, which i can kind of understand it appearing to be, for carruth scoring it with very au courant minimal synth music, feeding into it various voguey buzzwordy motifs, some guy playing a synth in a farmyard, people wearing shirts, being transported while wearing headphones, &c. but i think the most striking thing about to the wonder is its totally assimilated, unsuspect modernity, all phrased quite classically, just of content; it is a movie that starts with cellphone footage, realistically uncomplicatedly without weird zig-zag-line-superimposed-tv-effects skype conversation (with the hang-up blooping noise), a film with sections in which somebody talks through having an iud removed, it's the first movie i've seen in a long time featuring any kind of real-feeling cross-section of society, there are the recipients of charity, i don't know when i last saw a film passingly featuring anybody with down's syndrome, it's razor sharp, set against traffic islands, ugly new manicured housing complexes, wide american streets, flatscreen tvs. like it's crazy the disconnect between the film we watch & the way it was received, described. malick's treatment of love, & his vocabulary for showing it, is just so stirring & fresh & so fucking crazily economical. THIS FILM SURE HAS SOME TWIRLING, HUH! is just ex-communicatingly reductive, to me. more than anybody i can think of he's just so dedicated to this really elemental view of what male & female physicalities are like - a kind of platonic, exploded sort, sure, like old greek statues or whatever, but still something sort of familiar & archetypically-applicable & rich. that female beauty is this thing the guy can't not reach for, pull at, put his hand toward the chest of, drag close, & which twins with some kind of grace that frustrates his clunky alternative. & that the guy is this just solid stoic frown. affleck's so good in this! he reminds me of this guy who sits near me at the library, sometimes, comes in just so well dressed he mustn't even know it's cold outside, removes with one sweeping gesture his armour of correct clothing & then surveys the powerpoint slides at hand seemingly without distraction (i think he actually studies something eco-related). he's like some handsome guy you see buying shit at ikea. peacoat. goes to fix something, fixes it, has this single strain of attention. shot close-cropped so you just feel his kind of rushmorian bulk, the reassuring solidity of the planes of his face. it's like any recent michael fassbender performance, only better for having the dignity not to pretend that such handsomeness is sexy. & the film is just so bold. the phases of the relationship we see them in are so quickly, sharply rendered. A Scene At Which The Couple Suppress Their Unresolved Frustration While Eating With A Wholesome Family Whose Perfection Prompts Shame. light falling on a superior paterfamilias's face with oppressive beauty. a scene showing the time when you have to try to mutually handwave away the legitimate outbursts of an angry child rejecting an awkwardly-unmonikered-stepfather as if it's just generic, baseless childhood tantruming. all the scenes of a woman framed by a man's gaze, kind of moving, just remind me of ways i looked at people or what sex felt like. the models involved aren't really important, it's like Bresson, but at the same time a lot of the lazy criticisms - why are they in a field; ben affleck has no personality - are answered by the screenplay: they live next to the meadow; he is described as a man who doesn't say much. the hybrid of malick's explicit focus on beauty, which was i think indulged more unapologetically in the last film, with an incorporation of the actual built urban environment, feels so powerful, here. the leaves are whipping beautifully across the park but that's because a dude is walking around blowing the leaves with a leafblower. light is refracting beguilingly through a glass bulb that feels like the most generic windowsill ornament of a well-lit but generic new home. i watched this again & felt so taken with it - how perfectly composed it is, using a mix of ordinarily-wrung-dry classical standards with evocative natural sound, visually edited to just actual perfection, every segue flowing like dance - i really can't understand what feels like a kind of rejection of it. was it really the twirling? did people hear there would be twirling in it, watch it, see those parts & mistake that confirmation as a signal of something insufficient?

yes! lovely post.

I have a hard time fathoming the rejection of it. I am weirdly protective of malick even tho my main argument for his films is that they are formally and intellectually rigorous and really the naive vulnerable things they appear to be and even tho malick is prob hella smarter and tougher than I'll ever be. at the same time, despite all that, his films *are* vulnerable and naive and serious and rigorous. I really cherish them, even and especially when they feel awkward. feels like a privilege to be addressed in that way--to have your own inner life and the life of these characters (and presumably malick's own) cherished in that way.

really *not* the naive, etc.

yeah absolutely. i think i was thinking of this through the lens of true detective criticism; that there's a compulsion to handwave anything that shoots to consider things philosophically as sophomoric, mainly just because it's satisfying to elevate oneself uncredentialed to being in a position to diagnose that. like the thrill of getting to pft-. & then conversely i feel like with the parts of this that aren't, visibly, ~philosophical~, that are elemental & immediate, instead, it seems to miss the point to take issue with them intellectually when they're often just kind of light & motion you're meant to be responding to. what i'm saying is that i'm pro-twirling.

to have your own inner life and the life of these characters (and presumably malick's own) cherished in that way

also - yes!, absolutely. i remember when i saw tree of life, finding it so wild to feel like my suburban northern english '80s childhood was being rendered so faithfully on-screen in ~50s west texas. & the distillation of like sense-memory-familiar romance in this, its understanding of the various faces of being in a relationship with somebody, intimate in this kind of just animals-close-together way, was so powerful.

It was Reverse Shot's number 1 of the year: http://reverseshot.com/article/reverse_shots_best_2013

that's a p good top ten, ty

i wasn't entirely intending to press the self-aggrandising ~am i the only connoisseur in the building~ angle, it obviously doesn't matter what attention it got, but it does just feel like a kinda conspicuously good film in a landscape that doesn't seem so attentive to it, doesn't seem to be rippling in its aftermath the way we actually do seem to be existing in at least an occasionally-mentioned-wave of post-upstream color zeitgeist shaping or whatever

malick came to mind a few days ago because I was reading about the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch--and while that bit is literally all I know of Bloch that won't stop me from saying that he'd love malick intensely because while his films are sometimes undervalued by criticism that proceeds from an (often unacknowledged) materialist/realist bias they are sorta profoundly materialist in a holistic blochian kind of way. thin red line especially, but in all his film you see a sense in which life persists only at the expense of other life, that Anaximander kind of process of exchange.

sorry, dithering a bit here.

I think if you don't like Malick, his films increasingly lend themselves to the criticisms that you'd probably have had 12 years ago. To the Wonder didn't even have the hooks of CREATION OF THE UNIVERSE/TRUMBULL/A FILM ABOUT THE ENTIRETY OF EXISTENCE that probably gave Tree of Life a lot more critical leeway than it would have otherwise received. Now he's dealing with some silent mopey dude at an Oklahoma Sonic so the levels of "pretension" that people saw in his work already are doubly as offensive.

iow people tutting, rolling their eyes and mouthing "y so serious"

ryan dither at me, my subsequent wikipedia rollercoasters are the best exercise i get

& yeah i kinda see that, gukbe; i can kinda see that whatever notebook-esque aesthetic salad dressed this film on posters, &c, might not usefully prepare people to be open to it. but i do feel kinda frustrated by the reach for pretentious when it's mainly, to me, a very kinda immediate, sensory, enveloping film. it really is pieced together like dance. even the cuts between some static exterior shots are really breathtaking, to me.

realised, yesterday, that i'd been meaning to read more about the last shot. is there a good kinda kent-jones-on-tree-of-life piece about this all, anywhere?

i kind of wanna just look him up, call &: kent you're leaving me hanging whatdymake of it

I can't remember if this was "good" but I certainly remember it being "long": https://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/conversion-experience-terrence-malicks-to-the-wonder

anytime I get started on a unified theory of malick I catch myself coming up short because his relationship to signification is always so tenuous. in that respect Tree seems like better comparison to Upstream because of it's hermetic and kubrickian "meaningfulness," even if that meaning is hard to assign at times. the other films are somehow more open, as content to be as to signify. or better: to signify by being; Peircean icons that have to be determined and in being determined escape meaning. but again all this feels reductive to me ultimately.

I mean malick's movies are emotionally moving to me every time I watch them, but the moments at which these feelings occur are often changing. sometimes a shot *clicks* and your destroyed; other times it just drifts by.

I am bad at grammar today.

also malick is reliably great at big moments in his films but the prayer at the end of this film just kills me. maybe it's my own unhappy atheism reflected back at me but it feels like a great big sad hug and a sigh.

also as I write this I am staring out over the Pacific Ocean so...yeah.

Love Malick, yet haven't seen this. But may see this.

Netflix instant

The way it was meant to be seen.

so wait do I have to see this? I have been dreading it.

This was definitely unfairly received, and still probably my #1 from last year. Only sequence I felt was lousy was the visit from the Italian friend.

the only time that Dostoyevskyian ranting thing has totally worked was the thin red line. It's in all the later movies tho, even briefly in Tree.

I mean malick's movies are emotionally moving to me every time I watch them, but the moments at which these feelings occur are often changing. sometimes a shot *clicks* and your destroyed; other times it just drifts by.

― ryan, Sunday, March 9, 2014 3:48 PM (6 hours ago) Bookmark

yeah i never have this response to his stuff (except TTRL last time i saw it; maybe revisiting them is key). i respond to something like TTW like i do to a lot of herzog's narrative features (esp of recent vintage), where there's enough fascinating images in it for me to go 'well that was worth my time' but im not like, stirred by them or anything

also as I write this I am staring out over the Pacific Ocean so...yeah.

― ryan, Sunday, March 9, 2014 4:53 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ha i loved this
& yeah absolutely; i mean it's a strange film to feel defensive about in some ways, because i'm begging everybody else to share my exact personal relationship history so as to be able to inhabit it as intensely. but i think that's why it's meaningful, for him having kinda committed to that poetry that isn't born of like her's generic relationship stock imagery of like Sad Dude Staring From Window. i just take its most specific moments as being circuitously universal; the really beautiful quick fragments of some kids talking about clothes, the window cleaner shooting the shit with the priest, &c. & i actually loved the friend being in town, the distance between them. one of the kind of unexpectedly modern tonalities of the film for me was this kind of semi-~illicit~-seeming tendency the characters had, pronounced against the backdrop of the small town; there is this totally physical, sexual strand to a lot of it, there are - seriously it totally wasn't just me - so frequently scenes like on the train or when they're at home where the frenetic editing cuts around the guy going down on the woman, or scenes when she's at the grocery store kind of playing with the guy's conservative inappropriateness threshold of what would be too much, scanning around for people pushing trolleys & pulling up her shirt. it just locks so precisely into so much life. affleck doing this kinda non-commital hangdog face while the daughter is like are you gonna MARRY my MOM. it isn't ~characterisation~ but it's totally redolent. & the scenes with the friend are really good in a similar way. she's the embodiment of the stiflingly residential neighbourhood, not just in like actually calling it out & seeming to pop from it but for actually seeming too loud, malick putting you in the lead's shoes & watching her friend say do you think i'm a monster. i wasn't re-watching so attentively, this time, & the prayer you talked about wasn't the thing that popped for me like i can imagine that it might at other times (though badem's just downbeat anomie really did touch). but i think that's part of the film's richness. there's just so much available. re: H4A i don't think you necessarily have to be reeling to this personally but it can still be just so involving and connective throughout.

btw ryan, which peirce is this?:
Peircean icons that have to be determined and in being determined escape meaning. but again all this feels reductive to me ultimately.

I still have a screener for my second viewing to come

re-scanned the thread again to see what you thought; Enraged is a good look on Affleck, tho, esp when he lets his mouth hang open, cavemanlike, first is otm!, & i want to tether it to the description of each lead inhabiting sorta platonic male/female roles, as well as being more specifically drawn, modern, &c. curious what you think seeing it again. i've only seen tree of life once.

schlump, do you think you could use line breaks? it's hard to read your posts.

(shrugs)