Terrence Malick is a director whose style has become so distinct and defined that, in some circles, his filmmaking has become the butt of jokes. You know that his movies are going to be light on dialogue, that his characters are going to feel some sort of connection to nature, that most of the scenes are going to be shot during twilight, and that there will be lots of shots of wind blowing through tall grasses, no matter what. His latest film, To the Wonder, sticks to these conventions. There’s no surprise there. You know what you’re going to get, content-wise. What’s never exactly certain is how one is going to react to a Malick movie though. Despite the fact that they share themes and imagery, fans of his work can argue over which of his films are his lesser works and which are his masterpieces, and those who generally don’t respond to what he does still often have one or two that they like despite themselves.
For me, a cinema fan who generally starts Malick’s movies dazzled by their visuals but eventually turned off completely by their lack of a traditional narrative and their ambiguity of meaning, I found To the Wonder to be one of the more palatable of his works—probably even my favorite since the days of Badlands and Days of Heaven—and that’s largely because of its simplicity. Malick’s wandering camera follows two narrative threads, that of a young couple (Ben Affleck and Olga Kurylenko) first falling in love in France and later moving to Oklahoma, where their relationship struggles, and that of a transplant priest (Javier Bardem) struggling with matters of faith in that same Oklahoma town.
All of these characters are very clearly yearning to make a connection with something outside of themselves. For the young lovers it’s a romantic connection with a member of the opposite sex, and for the priest it’s a connection with a power that is higher than himself. Malick spares us the particulars of their situations or a spelling out of what is causing the difficulties that are keeping them from connecting, and he instead focuses on their emotional states as they reach out and find what they touch wanting. The actors here aren’t playing characters, so much as they’re playing states of being. Affleck’s Neil is a stoic portrait of repressed and logical masculinity. He speaks very rarely, gestures even less, and when we see him he is generally building or tinkering, exerting his will over nature. Kurylenko’s Marina, conversely, is a portrait of vulnerable and emotional femininity. We view this world through the lens of her poetic narration, when we see her she is constantly moving, spinning, gesturing with her arms outstretched. Instead of trying to conquer nature, she plunges into it, lets it engulf her, and loses herself in it. Given their fundamental differences, the question is raised of whether they will ever truly feel connected to one another.
Bardem’s Father Quintana, similarly, seems to be trying to make a specific connection in places where he is never likely to find it. He’s seeking out the transcendental truth and beauty that must come from feeling the presence of God, but instead of looking for it in places that are beautiful, where people are happy, he tries to find it in the faces of people who are suffering—in the faces of the poor, the sick, and the imprisoned. Perhaps predictably, the only things he manages to encounter here are nihilism, pain, and cynicism, which leads to questions of how God as we understand him can allow things like this to exist.
The film’s simple focus on these three characters and their search for connection, and its resistance to pulling in larger, vaguer, tougher to suss out thematics like Malick’s work often does, makes To the Wonder a fairly simple and pleasant pill to swallow—but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t stumble in places as well. The biggest problem with the film is that, given Malick’s penchant for cutting dialogue and story in favor of evocative imagery, it can get a little boring at 113 minutes. One gets the feeling that, had it been around 15 minutes shorter, it could have been simple, light, and beautiful. As is, it’s a little bit unwieldy, and it’s not too hard to pick out the material that should have been cut. At one point in the story Affleck and Kurylenko’s characters have separated, and Affleck starts to see another woman, played by Rachel McAdams. Not only does McAdams’ character and her romance with Affleck end up going nowhere, to the point where it eventually gets tossed aside, but McAdams ends up being the weak link in the performance department as well. Affleck, Kurylenko, and Bardem all seem to be comfortable just embodying broad traits, living in the moment, and allowing Malick’s camera to capture what it will, but you can sense a struggle from McAdams—a confusion about who her character is and what she should be doing—and her inability to fit into the larger picture makes for the weakest moments in the film. You get the impression that Malick might have included her rancher character just as an excuse to film his actors standing out in picturesque plains full of buffalo.
Which gets to the heart of why I have trouble connecting to Malick’s work. He’s clearly a filmmaker who approaches his films as an exploration, who writes them more in the editing room than he does on the page, and while that often tends to result in the creation of sublime moments that probably wouldn’t have otherwise existed, it also results in messy movies that don’t quite come together as a whole. There are reports that big name actors like Rachel Weisz and Jessica Chastain filmed scenes for this film, but found themselves cut out of the final edit completely. This points to the possibility that Malick didn’t fully understand what he was trying to accomplish when he set out to make To the Wonder, and that he must have discovered that the Affleck and Kurylenko relationship was the heart of his film somewhere along the way. If a focus had been chosen a little earlier in the process, like in the screenwriting phase, one can’t help but feel that this film could have ended up being stronger, tighter, more resonant. As is, it’s largely Kurylenko’s absurd beauty that keeps the long stretches of the film where characters are wordlessly frolicking through fields engaging.
All joking about Malick’s sensibilities aside, it’s gotten to be enough with the windblown fields and every scene being set during sundown. At one point in this film Affleck’s character is picking a little girl up from school, and the sun is already almost down, just so Malick can give the scene that ethereal glow that he loves to see through his lens. When logic gets thrown out of the window just so a filmmaker can indulge in his particular fetishes, it’s inevitable that their work will begin to resemble self-parody—and that’s a critique that has already been leveled at this director’s work as of a few films ago. It’s hard to argue that getting something new from Malick would feel like a real breath of fresh air at this point. Whether that would mean him changing up his style a bit, or perhaps lending his perspective to a work that started off as someone else’s vision, could be debated, but—for the love of God—no more windswept grasses and constant sunsets.
