To
The Wonder
French
birds…bit nuts, eh?
Bold.
Brave.
Beautiful.
Lyrical.
Soulful.
All
terms you’ll see repeated ad infinitum in the next few weeks as critics soak
their bibs with drool over Terrence Malick’s To The Wonder. And, if you want it to be, it is all of these things. To The Wonder is a hypnotic, sensual,
lushly beautiful, spellbinding exploration of love and spirituality that
unfolds with the feverish, dreamy intensity of a doomed romance.
It’s
also complete and utter tosh, an hour and 52 minutes of America’s Greatest
Living Filmmakerä scratching his beard ruefully while
muttering to himself in the barely audible whisper everyone uses in this film: “French
birds…bit nuts, eh?”
Parisienne
Marina (Olga Kurylenko) and American Mid-Westerner Neil (Ben Affleck) fall ecstatically in love in
France and spend their days skipping joyfully through the park hand-in-hand
with Marina’s ten-year-old daughter Tatiana (Tatiana Chiline). After visiting Mont Saint-Michel, where Marina’s voiceover
breathily informs us “We climbed the steps to the Wonder,” (apparently not the euphemism it cries
out to be), Neil asks Marina and Tatiana to return to the USA with him.
Once
in the USA however the cracks start to show. The kind of stereotypically kooky free spirit American filmmakers
believe all French women to be, Marina, who’s constantly whirling like a dreamy
dervish through wheat fields or dancing with mops dans le supermarché (gotta love those kooky French
chicks), just doesn’t fit in with the folks back home
and she and Tatiana find life tough in rural Oklahoma. Neil meanwhile seems constantly to be
working; an environmental investigator in a town that seems to rely on
fracking, he’s not winning many friends in the local community even if tar is
bubbling up through their patios, infecting their water and poisoning the
earth. As the relationship falters,
Neil encounters and reconnects with old girlfriend Jane (Rachel McAdams), entering into a romance with her when Marina’s visa runs
out and she and Tatiana are forced to return to France.
Meanwhile
the town’s mournful Catholic priest, Father Quintana (Javier Bardem) looks on ineffectually while
suffering his own crisis of faith, his vocation shaken by his lonely inner
turmoil and existential melancholy.
Almost
a companion piece to 2011’s The Tree Of Life, which like this was also an extended
exercise in Christian-inflected navel-gazing, To The Wonder is both beautiful and
aggravating. You’ll probably read
a lot of reviews which will tell you how intelligent and profound it is, that
it’s a deeply experimental love story, that it’s not really a movie but more of
a visual tone poem.
Horse
pucky.
To
The Wonder is
the distilled essence of cod-profundity with all the depth of a two-hour Marc
Jacobs fragrance commercial that’s likely to appeal most to teenage poets,
20-year-old film students and critics.
Look at Marina dance, she’s such a free spirited European Catholic while
Neil can only watch disapproving and perplexed like a stuffy Presbyterian at a
key party: NEIL IS
AMERICA! Look at the pollution bubbling
up out of the ground, how can their love took root and grow on poisoned
earth? MODERN AMERICAN SOCIETY
POISONS LOVE! Look at Tatiana’s awestruck wonder at
the choice and diversity on offer as she and Marina dance around the
supermarket: THEY DON’T HAVE SUPERMARKETS IN FRANCE! Admittedly, that last one is more likely to be a comment on
rampant consumerism and the USA’s culture of excess but you get the point.
The
script is sophomoric. Boy meets
girl. Boy loses girl. Boy finds other girl. First girl comes back. Complications ensue. Meanwhile local priest looks a bit sad
and wonders if God loves him (possibly voicing the audience’s fears or maybe
just Malick’s). That’s really
about it. There’s nothing
particularly experimental going on here, you’re not watching Last Year At
Marienbad. There’s no riddle to solve which will
impart some deep, profound secret about the nature of love, life and the
Universe. It’s just a fairly
conventional narrative with huge chunks of plot missing, a romantic melodrama
with most of the drama cut out.
Like most Malick films, the list of those who didn’t make the final cut
is longer than the list of those who did.
While he excised completely from The Thin Red Line the likes of Bill Pullman,
Billy Bob Thornton, Martin Sheen, Gary Oldman, Viggo Mortensen and Mickey Rourke, missing from To The
Wonder are Rachel
Weisz, Amanda Peet, Barry Pepper, Michael Sheen and Jessica Chastain. And, if we’re being honest, the contributions of both Rachel
McAdams and Javier Bardem, not to mention that whole environmental pollution
storyline, feel a little, well, truncated, as if Malick merely lost interest in
them in favour of shots of Olga Kurylenko dancing with a chicken. Or a mop.
There’s
little real dialogue (Affleck’s lucky if he gets 10 lines) and what there is,
is mostly voiceover; Marina breathlessly ruminating on love in French, Father
Quintana’s tortured internal theological debate in whispered Spanish. There’s a lot of whispering in To
The Wonder. That said the portentousness of the
voiceover is aided immensely by being delivered in breathy French by Kurylenko
who manages to lend Malick’s high school poetry depth and meaning while the
teenaged musings on God and faith benefit from Bardem’s Spanish. There’s little one can really say about
the performances, the actors feel more like movable pieces of very pretty
landscape Malick can control: Gaze
into the distance. Squint into the
setting sun. Look perplexed. Look soulful. Laugh. Caper
with that mop. The male actors in
particular are ill-served by Malick.
Affleck is called upon merely to look puzzled and perplexed, like
someone who’s just passed gas and is wondering if they’ve accidentally soiled
themselves, while Bardem’s performance is reminiscent of one of those depressed
lions you see at the zoo who dimly remembers the veldt but knows he’s never
going back. Kurylenko and McAdams
at least manage to hint at the performances they may have given; Kurylenko is a
sensuous, vibrant presence you ache for when she’s not on screen, McAdams a
vulnerable, wounded creature you ache for when she is. It’s unfortunate that the only
performer who matters is Malick.
Ultimately,
for all its meditating on the nature of love and romance, the deepest question
is one To The Wonder fails to ask: If you’d snagged Olga Kurylenko and were blissfully
happy in Paris, why the Hell would you move to Oklahoma? But then, given that Malick was an
American living in France who married a French woman (degree of kookiness unspecified)
and dragged her back to live in Oklahoma only for the relationship to break up
and for him to then marry his alleged high school girlfriend, well, maybe To
The Wonder is
just free therapy for Malick, the cinematic equivalent of a Taylor Swift or Adele song.
And
yet…
To
The Wonder is
undeniably, breathtakingly beautiful.
It’s gorgeous to look at.
Kurylenko is captivating.
Scenes unfold with the hallucinatory, half-remembered intensity of a
fever dream that take root in your memory. It’s quiet.
It’s a film that gives you the space and distance for reflection,
something rare indeed in modern cinema.
It’s unfortunate then that, upon reflection, there’s no real satisfying
emotional or intellectual substance to the film. But damn, is it pretty!
David Watson
Written and
Directed by:
Terrence Malick
Produced by:
Starring:
Ben Affleck,
Olga Kurylenko, Javier Bardem & Rachel McAdams
Genre:
Arthouse
Romantic Drama
Language:
English/French/Spanish/Italian
Runtime:
112 minutes
Certificate:
12a
Rating:
3/5
UK
Cinema Release Date:
Friday
22nd February
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