That's Why Darlin'...it's Incomprehensible (Panning and Scanning: To The Wonder)

On April 6^th of 2013, the late, great Roger Ebert posthumously published his final review, that of Terrence Malick's To The Wonder, which he more-or-less adored.  While the film failed to receive a wide release, perhaps for some of the reasons I outline below, I was fortunate enough to catch a screening of it at the local university's Cinematheque in Mid-July, predicated on that very review.  

Over the course of nearly two hours in that darkened theatre, it dawned on me that I simply couldn't agree, even remotely, with the esteemed critic's final opinion.  This was far from unprecedented, of course, and having spent most of my adult life arguing with anyone and everyone unfortunate enough to fall into my web about the merits of this film or that, or the art of filmaking in general, the close of Ebert's career has inspired me to start writing about film myself, instead of just idly talking about it as I've been for the last decade or two.

Even disregarding my no doubt numerous shortcomings as a writer and critic, I'll be content to leave becoming "the next Roger Ebert" to someone else with the education and drive that I lack.  However, while my critical faculties, writing experience, general coherence, knowledge of film, and ability to accomplish anything on a deadline may all fall far short of Ebert's five-decade career of near-daily film analysis (the man won a Pulitzer Prize for it, for fuck's sake...), hopefully my sharply-worded dissent, and rambling missives to follow, will add some small contribution to this planet's cinematic conversation, or, failing that, at least provide an entertaining and amusing footnote to our collective film experience.

With the passing of Roger Ebert, we have the end of an era, and the start of, no doubt, a far less significant one.  So here, as they say, goes nothin'...

Some garlic and a crucifix would serve Olga
Kurylenko well at this point in time.

Terence Malick's most recent film, To The Wonder, starring Ben Affleck and Olga Kurylenko, is an intensely, maddeningly frustrating cinematic experience.

The film is beautiful.  Ravishingly, excruciatingly beautiful.  Every frame is dripping with sumptuous, glowing colors, as if lit by ample sunbeams just peeking over a horizon.  In cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki's expert hands the camera is in nearly constant motion, whether careening majestically over sweeping geographic panoramae or encroaching relentlessly on its theoretically human subjects.  Visually, the film is pockmarked with an orgiastic series of awe-inspiring images.  

And, ultimately, this is a terrible, terrible thing.  What makes this visual splendour so exasperating is that, despite the abundant and undeniable display of talent just behind the camera, the filmmakers have squandered their considerable efforts on something so fundamentally devoid of character.

 

An inordinately large portion of To The Wonder's 113-minute running-time consists, perhaps unsurprisingly to those familiar with the director's small but much-lauded body of work, of gorgeously photographed and assembled yet sterile montages of what appear to be emaciated fashion models doing little of consequence before an array of scenic backdrops.  Frequently-oppressive music and amateurishly pretentious poetry posing as voiceover-narration accompany these scenes, doing little to assuage suspicions of hollow spectacle.

As the film begins, Ukrainian-French single-mother Marina (Kurylenko) is in the midst of a rapturous love affair with visiting Oklahoman Ben Affleck.  When his vacation ends, she follows him to the desolate wilds of the American southish, where she has little to occupy her time besides spinning about ecstatically in tall grass.  Malick hovers around his photogenic leads as the nature of their relationship changes capriciously; to say it "evolves" would be a gross misuse of the word.  The thin plot, where indicated, touches on infidelity, alienation, abandonment and emotional distance while carefully justifying none of these.

Ostensibly a romance, To The Wonder is undercut throughout by a conspicuous lack of comprehensible narrative and characterisation.  While Hollywood is falling all over itself to scramble aboard the 3-D bandwagon, Malick continues to experiment with the advanced motion-capture technology required to make his nameless, faceless characters at most one-dimensional, sapping any potential interest in watching the malnourished and unlikeable heroine's aimless meandering through a nightmarish suburban hellscape.  Marina's emotional state pitches dizzyingly throughout, flitting from ecstasy to discomfort to ennui to depression without warning.  Any impulse for these swings of emotion are carefully occluded by, one presumes, being left on the floor of the editing room.  The amorphous editing leaves instability as her defining characteristic.

While Affleck's character is similarly unformed, it should be noted that Malick skillfully plays to the actor's limited strengths by giving him almost no dialogue and nothing to do, barely even showing us his face.  That his character even has a name is an epiphany reserved for the end credits.  For what little is required of him, his two hours of inexpressive brow-furrowing is perfectly adequate.

If this seems like scant sustenance to maintain a feature-length film, rest assured that two major subplots fail to provide the necessary roughage to salvage it.  During a short interlude in which Marina's middle-class middle class malaise drives her to retreat to the safety of her previous life in Europe, Affleck rekindles a relationship with an old love interest (Rachel McAdams), a rancher who largely differs from Marina in hair color; in a bizarre cinematic example of the conservation of angular momentum, she even takes over the picturesque spinning motions while Kurylenko is offscreen.  Her brief interest in Affleck almost threatens to put a second side on the possible love triangle, but ends just as suddenly as it appeared, any ramifications of Affleck's dalliance dissipating without a trace.  Let the moping resume. 

In another barely-connected subplot, priest Javier Bardem is experiencing an anaemic crisis-of-faith so poorly developed that I imagine it could only captivate the sort of people who would be inherently predisposed to be fascinated by the topic, of which I amn't.  While the characterization of the leads could perhaps be best described as “insipid,” Bardem's ministrations introduce a gratuitous array of tokenistically diverse minor characters (nonwhite, poverty-sticken, disabled, drug addicted, imprisoned, etc.) who fare even worse; most of them are lucky if they actually get a complete line of dialogue.  I can only presume the intention was to contrast the leads' privileged bourgeois suburbanity with a colourful cast of more naturalistically portrayed people (with, you know, real problems), and perhaps even to provide grist for the priest's internal crisis.  However, Malick's oblique approach, in which these characters have neither agency nor impact, paradoxically manages to render any biting observations on the human condition simultaneously hamfisted and toothless.

Much has been made of the purported spirituality of Malick's filmmaking.  Roger Ebert, for example, described him as "surely one of the most romantic and spiritual of filmmakers."  By all accounts he's striving to say something, on the cusp of his eighth decasde, about connections to some ineffable thing greater than ourselves.  Unfortunately, his latest outing serves as a stark example of just how little substance this provides to hang a film on in the absence of anything meatier.  It's perhaps ironic then, that even someone so secular as I can tell that, in a picture that fails to make any of its characters remotely relatable, To The Wonder's greatest failures stem from what is, in the end, a lack of soul.