Film Diary 2013: To The Wonder

Beginning with his take on the tale of Pocahontas in 2005, The New World was a thematic cousin to 1998's The Thin Red Line.  The Tree Of Life followed soon after in 2011, and now To The Wonder makes you think that perhaps now, aged 70, Malick has rekindled a dormant passion for film-making.  In some ways there's an avant garde experimental energy to To The Wonder closer to that of a recent art school graduate than of a seasoned veteran, an unabashed desire to try and, perhaps, miss the mark, rather than to stick to what might make for a more conventional picture.

Unfortunately the film sits in an uneasy middleground between being abstract and trite, nouveau cliché if you will.  The story centres on Marina (Olga Kurylenko) who is in a relationship with  Neil (Ben Affleck), we first meet them in France, heading towards Mont St. Michel on a romantic retreat and ambling around Paris with Marina's ten year old daughter.  Neil asks them to move to America with him and things begin to fall apart in their relationship.

Alongside this we occasionally flit to Father Quintana (Javier Bardem), preaching in the same town that Neil and Marina live in, he is going through something of a crisis of faith, a little timid around some of the inhabitants and the more broken parts of society.

There are arguments and affairs, but it's all told in a rather ambient fashion, perhaps with the hopes of allowing an audience to interpret the events on screen rather than to be told what's occuring.  Unfortunately there is very little of substance here, and at times the film is painfully naive and ham-fisted in its execution with scenes that border on a parody of what someone might consider a Terrence Malick film to be.  None of this is helped by the cyclical, stream-of-consciousness narration that is often labouriously pretentious, clumsy leaden poetry that smacks of sixth form introspection.

The film could quite happily end at any moment after it begins and you would leave the cinema with a similar sense of fulfillment as if it had played out its entire running time.  It's almost impressive, I've never seen a rhetorical film before.

It's not that I need a ticking clock or a sweeping romance to hold my attention, films such as 45365 present a documentary portrait of life in middle America and do so with a compelling abstraction, creating no through line, not even particularly asking any questions, just showing us life and letting it be.  Elsewhere the work of Ron Fricke can turn the world around us into something staggeringly cinematic, whether he's capturing ancient enduring rituals or factory workers.  Malick's attempts here to divine meaning from 'mundanity', the simple and complicated lives of people, of lovers, is frustrating and ill-conceived, and often feels like a collection of people waiting, and hoping, to capture lightning in a bottle.

It's one of those movies that might escape the wrath of many because it wraps itself up in a package that, much like the Emperor sporting his new clothes, gives an impression of finery and thoughtfulness.  However, whilst the film's intentions are grand, the end result is startlingly vapid.

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