2015
Writer/Director: Terrence Malick
Maybe old Terry Malick needs another few years hiatus. His pace of new output seems positively frenetic compared to the work of years past (6 years for The Tree of Life, 7 years for The New World, 20 years for The Thin Red Line), and Knight of Cups was shot simultaneously with the upcoming project Weightless. Both shot around 2012, this film then spent about 2 years in post-production, being edited then re-edited before receiving its premiere at the Berlin Film Festival in 2015, to mixed response.
This is undeniably Malick’s most experimental film yet, a lush audiovisual poem of loss and alienation within the glossy, glassy excesses of Los Angeles. Christian Bale plays a depressed screenwriter Rick, filling the emptiness in his life with affairs with various women and finding temporary solace at glamourous parties and on the simulated worlds of film sets. Relations with his father (Brian Dennehy) are strained, and his brother (Wes Bentley) remains unhinged and reckless following the death of another sibling. But any solid foundations of a plot are tantalisingly, almost frustratingly absent. Structure is of no interest to Malick, instead preferring the effervescent aura of mood and tone. This is his search for the soul of the frustrated artist, an odyssey into the turmoil at the heart of a modern metropolis where simple sensual and romantic pleasures are routinely displaced.
Rick’s various relationships with women, displayed unchronologically under the sub-chapters of various tarot cards (The Hanged Man, The Hermit, The High Priestess), attempt to present his search for the physical and emotional sensations that he feels are lacking. Endless walks along the beach in the golden hour of sunset, disjointed Hollywood pool parties, silky fumbles in bed. Many of Malick’s trademark tropes are present – magic hour scenes, fluid and loose camerawork, an existential and philosophical approach to characterisation and scenario, whispery voiceovers. Yet the near-simulacrous Hollywood setting of glass mansions and sun-draped boulevards feels at odds to Malick’s approach, proven to be more suited to the uncomplicated and feasibly more poetic lives of ordinary small-town Americans, as seen in Badlands, Days of Heaven and The Tree of Life. It’s a setting I couldn’t really imagine Malick having any great interest in, beyond the clichéd approach of the film industry as hollow commerce. Bale’s Rick, supposedly the ill-fitting centre of this catwalk show, is left so blank and unknowable that it feels impossible to marry the gorgeous shots and whispery quotes to Rick’s feelings and thoughts. He barely speaks, instead looking perplexed in various locations.
It comes as completely no surprise that Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography is absolutely eye-swimmingly gorgeous. I could happily watch it for hours – smoothly freeheld cameras glide and whip around the onscreen players, often nauseatingly so. From sunkissed and sharp garden parties, to the lush neon of probably the most tastefully filmed strip club ever, mesmerising submerged shots of dogs playing in a swimming pool filmed from below, and the vast jagged Nevada deserts, it is undeniably the most beautiful film I’ve seen this year – every scene made me want to dive into the clear clean streets of LA, which presented a tantilising contrast to the tonal message of dissatisfaction Malick was trying to present. This married with Malick’s indubitable soundtrack choices, often repeated across the film to create a deeper thematic consistency, helps make this a wonderfully absorbing audiovisual feast.
The problems for me occurred at about the hour mark. After 60 or so minutes of this, I was beginning to get bored. Malick’s dedication to his near-unknowable poetic stance is admirable, but I found it too transient and too transparent to engage with on a deeper level. The one scene that had resonance with me was Bale’s with Cate Blanchett playing his ex-wife, their obvious shared connection with each other providing a viable character basis that much of the film is lacking – especially the scenes with his family which cannot display their animosity beyond abstract shots of arguments.
At times I was almost laughing at the sheer deadpan pomposity of the film – whispery voiceovers quote The Pilgrim’s Progress, whilst Bale looks pensively offscreen, intercut with sweeping shots of deserts and giant houses as scantily-clad women play around a pool, it often felt like a parody of a Terrence Malick film. It is obvious Malick and Lubezki have a vision, a revelatory and mesmerising one at that. I just couldn’t help but feel that the displacement of focus from character onto the auidovisual poetry ultimately made this a hollow experience for me. It was a delicious exercise in visual pleasure, but also a deliberately alienating study of an alienated man that proved too distant to be nothing more to me than a passing fancy, a brief affair.
Musings from a Darkened Room 