Remember when Terrence Malick used to wait seven-plus years between pictures? Not anymore. Nowadays he's churning them out like he's under contract at Paramount: Two films in the last two years, and he has three more in post!
His making up for lost time is not necessarily to the viewer's benefit: he seems to be using each project to experiment with his cinematic technique, and the further he goes with each new film, the more he leaves this viewer--and coherent storytelling--behind.
The interior monologues that so enriched the latter parts of both "The Thin Red Line" (1988) and "The New World" (2005) were effective as a respite from the story. As if Malick were saying, "let's stop the film and let these characters reflect on their situation." Coupled with his always lush cinematography (courtesy of longtime collaborator Emmanuel Lubezki) and constantly moving camera, these interludes were lulling and entrancing. Imagine an entire movie like those segments -- you don't have to if you saw "Tree of Life" -- and you may get frustrated. That's how I felt at times during Sean Penn's ramblings during that film, but I still consider it a near masterpiece (#9 on my Top Ten List!)
Let's just say "To the Wonder" does not have a levitating Jessica Chastain. Like "Tree of Life," it is autobiographical: the director met a woman in Paris, married her; they moved back to the States (Austin), where he rekindled a friendship with an old flame, and the couple eventually divorced. (I learned all of this after the fact). That is a surprise, since the movie is told almost exclusively through the eyes of the woman, Marina (the lovely Olga Kurylenko). The man in the relationship (Ben Affleck) is so lacking in substance, he might as well be a nonentity.
I cannot blame Ben Affleck for his character not registering at all, because the camera is fixed constantly at the back of his neck, and I think I heard perhaps three lines of dialogue from him in the whole movie. (When Rachel McAdams shows up as the other woman, she is a veritable chatterbox by comparison). If this reminds you of Brad Pitt in "ToL," the father in that film was a a complex,at times terrifying mystery to his family and to us. Here, in a film that incessantly takes the perspective of the woman who loves him, you would think we would see more of him than the back of his head!
Poor Javier Bardem suffers a similar fate, as a priest. He wanders in and out of the movie like a refugee from another film. His presence is baffling, in that he seems to have no connection to the main couple, other than a common ZIP Code.
People in Malick films don't have conversations with anyone but themselves (none that we can hear, anyway). Instead, they constantly move around each other. Marina, in particular, is in constant motion: dancing around empty houses, open fields, Normandy beaches--she just can't stop! But what do we learn from all this movement? The ending reaches for a depth akin to ToL, but it feels unearned (looking up at the sky is supposed to be spiritual?).
All that said, this work is miles ahead of the other movie of the moment that will supposedly "revolutionize cinema": I'm speaking of the film school pretensions of Shane Carruth's "Upstream Color." For starters, the camerawork is exquisite. These guys can make Mont St. Michel and an EconoLodge in Bartlesville, Oklahoma equally beautiful. But this line of dialogue, from Marina after she returns to France, was too much: "Paris is dreadful. I want to come back to the States." (and she is talking about OKLAHOMA!)
