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

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)

ryan, which peirce is this?

Charles Sanders Peirce. certainly a major figure for what max calls that tradition of "great American weirdos"--along with the the likes of Emerson and perhaps Jonathan Edwards--to which malick seems to belong to more than any continental tradition (ie, Heidegger).

also that reminds me that I wish malick would do a movie about the life of a saint. like Porete or someone like that.

sorry not a saint! she was burned at the stake. a mystic!

I think the facts that

1) in his 20s Malick translated some Heidegger lectures into English
2) a few semi-quotes from Heidegger in voice-over of Thin Red Line

has led some critics to assume that Heidegger is somehow the "master key" to interpreting Malick's films. Which seems wrongheaded to me. Not just to put Heidegger in the center, but to assume that the films can be fruitfully interpreted as "illustrations" or even "wrestlings with" another philosopher.

I found "Tree of Life" half awe-inspiring and powerful and half an embarrassment, and from the reviews it always seemed that "To the Wonder" basically isolated most of what I found embarrassing about "Tree of Life" and amplified it. Which is why I've stayed away. I can already tell that my tastes in cinema (and how one might discuss it) differing from what I grasp of you folks from this conversation...

building on what I said earlier I think what's most precious about his movies for me is that they eschew a lot of that intellectual armor we wear when we talk about big meaningful things. things like losing a child or a sibling; mom and dad; fear of death; the passing of a relationship. somehow there's nothing didactic about how these things are presented. they are, to borrow schlump's wore, immediate and then you see/hear the characters working those things out intellectually after the fact (but then always falling short: not for nothing do his films seem to end in silence quite often).

there's a bit in the thin red line that always slays me. the "we were a family" monologue and then it cuts to a human family, a chicken and it's chicks, and then, miraculously, a group of coconuts! I think many people will (possibly rightly) see this as a kind of "do you see?" type of moment but it always feels amazing to me because in the context of the movie it doesn't feel like a cute analogy but a very earnest search for the meaning of family. it's like a beautiful and fanciful passing thought that's promptly forgotten.

ams I think it's that embarrassment thing--it's a risk that either pays off for the viewer or it doesn't.

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

(shrugs)

― espring (amateurist), Tuesday, March 11, 2014 5:35 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ha- the real defence here is that i'm trying to cultivate a similarly fresh & overwhelming orthographic style, form resembling content. but sure, i will try. they will just be arbitrary spasmodic raps at the return key but okay. i always liked your film posts. i am kinda bristling at you talking about ~your tastes~ jarring with the vibe we are grasping at, here, though. i think having that not-unusual-ratio of liking & disliking a malick film in equal measure is okay, this almost proven by how much less satisfying some other, ostensibly-not-dissimilar films are for not traveling quite as far out. like i'll take really enjoying 40% of a malick film over feeling just boringly embroiled in the hazy premise of upstream color. finding tree of life half embarrassing isn't a problem. & there are lots of ways to discuss cinema. i'm reading nice things by richard brody about this & they are all just straining to get at the space it works around.

& hm i haven't seen the thin red line for so long, & never the director's cut.

I'm enjoying what you guys are writing about To The Wonder here, and I usually don't like reading about movies. I watched this very late into the morning a few weeks ago and it's stuck with me. I'm going to watch it again soon. For the longest time, The New World was my favorite Malick, mostly to just watch the images wash over me. But To the Wonder has the beauty of images and a elemental story that I connect with more.

no directors cut of TTRL. I wish!

maybe I wouldn't argue it's his best but it's def my fav for personal reasons. also it's the closest he ever got to a genre film. action scenes! plus caviezal just nails that "Christ responding to the Grand Inquisitor" thing.

oh! perhaps i just meant some of the excised footage; isn't there that whole story about rourke's career best performance, cut, & then languishing as a dvd feature.

but i'll check it again. i saw so much stuff, like love streams & a bunch of ozu, when i was too young to really click with it, & i think this was back then, too.

yeah there's a legendary first cut that supposedly went 6 hours. there's some of it on the criterion but I never get too interested in extras unless malick was gonna so a commentary track. can you imagine.