Film Review: To The Wonder

Grasping for Meaning, Love

There’s a shot in the middle of Terence Malick’s new film “To The Wonder” that lingers for a moment -like many of its images- that partially captures the ever-reaching essence of a Malick film. To the right of the screen, a backyard with fertilized lush green grass, children skipping and swinging from a play structure, contained by a large wooden fence. To the left, a barren wasteland of dead, faded weeds that stretch for miles into the dusty, flat infinite. The camera sits in the middle, its liminal placement a recurring theme for a story based on both its lasting, transient imagery and characters constantly on the verge, hesitant, and primarily silent, whose looks are filled with feeling.

Far be it from Malick to guide you into a coherent narrative that explains its themes through comprehensible dialogue. His transcendent, spiritual Tree of Life almost two years ago offered little in terms of linearity, spanning over four billion years, including a brief dinosaur age, while mostly settling into 1950s Texas full of crew cuts, dresses, and dry, sun-drenched earth. Malick continues his journey into the sensory pleasures in To The Wonder but creates a less grandiose vision of existential questioning, voice-overs, and God-seeking. This film is much simpler in its narrative, but just as emotionally complex and fulfilling.

It begins and also ends in an environment similar to the Tree of Life’s conclusion, a muddy shore where intermittent waves skim the surface in varying degrees, erasing footprints in the ambiguous meeting point of earth and sea. Instead of an intentional metaphorical place of heaven, Ben Affleck and Olga Kurylenko wade in the squishy waters beneath Mont St. Michel, the island abbey off the coast of Normandy. They play Neil and Marina who are shown to be deeply in love in a cloudy Parisian backdrop. She has a daughter Tatiana from another man, and Neil constantly aims to earn both of their French affections. But this is not his home, and so, accepting his request, they leave Paris for Neil’s Oklahoma housing development, an area vast with big blue sky and golden dry grass, its telephone poles stand-ins for skyscrapers.

Neil is an environmental inspector, and migrates to different homes, testing water and soil while being confronted by angry townspeople about their living conditions. Details are kept at a minimum. Affleck never looks fully content and sputters but several lines the entire film, most coming through breathy voice-over narration pursuing love’s meaning, asking questions of “why?” That is how we hear Marina’s thoughts as she at once finds herself reclusive and mesmerized by her new world. Love has brought her to a land “so honest and rich,” but her life in Main Street Middle America feels empty and stifling, especially for her daughter, ostracized by a language and emotional barrier. In one scene she stands on a football field sideline frozenly observing a high school marching band rehearse, springing instantly to Neil’s car as he pulls in to pick her up.

He sends them back to Paris, in part for Tatiana’s well being and because Marina’s visa is expiring. Neil almost instantly rekindles an old relationship with Jane (Rachel McAdams), presumably a former girlfriend. Their attraction grows and Neil regains some joy again, unburdened by continental divide, now infatuated with a blonde country girl. There is a way Malick, who reteams with cinematographer Emmanuel Lubzecki, captures a raw beauty in McAdams with an Andrew Wyeth “Christina’s World” sensibility that follows the two through the chest high wheat fields with his stylized intimacy.  She is authentically American, but a perceived spiritual connection turns into an exercise of lust and pleasure, which none are ready to accept.

The weaving, creeping, and revolving camera does more than just follow the two couples; it interacts with them. It is Malick’s signature, transforming static relational energy with movement, a way of bridging his nearly silent, orchestral film with emotional glue. It’s only in the cracks that we find real dialogue, or even snippets of passing conversation. They predominantly come from the local priest Father Quintana (Javier Bardem), a man Marina grows closer to as he drifts farther from his own Catholic faith. “Jesus says you must choose,” he preaches to a handful of parishioners. “The man who hesitates is nothing.” His sermons feel intended for Neil, but they are also personal reminders, caught in the in-between, hanging on to a God, a love that has no evidence of its past presence. His black collar is the lone hope for so many of the town’s forgotten, physically and mentally damaged poor and jailed, living under tin roofs and regret, clinging to repentance. Quintana must give but he struggles to find his own fulfillment.

Malick is not a director who lends himself to escapist filmgoers. He requires attention and thought but never a direct response, except maybe to watch with an innocence and sense of awe. You can approach this film with the mentality of “getting” it, but that might be the wrong course for a healthy viewing experience. That isn’t to say that Malick doesn’t tempt us with images to search deeper, but they in certain ways exist like Marina’s childlike spirit, ephemerally charged and fleetingly passionate, like incongruous spurts adding levity to the deeply melancholic existential journeys the film’s characters take.

The disconnect that gradually forms between Neil and Marina is a slow and arduous ordeal that can seem both frustrating and authentic. The refined beauty Malick captured in Jessica Chastain in Tree Of Life is again posited on Olga Kurylenko, a woman who indeed embodies Marina’s conflicting sentiment that there are “two women inside of me.” Her pliable spirit is in constant search of a higher power with no answers.

Underneath the Oklahoma white noise of summertime crickets and locusts is a silent town. Backyards are kept green by constant nurturing, but when untended devolve into the barren wasteland held permanent beyond property lines, leaving no trace of its previous fertile state. There’s a reason Neil and Marina have so much fun together wading in the muddy tide pools of Normandy and why Malick keeps coming back to that environment. For a moment they live in an ambiguity, a love without delineations. To The Wonder, for its sometimes artsy esotericism, shines, or more appropriately sinks in, during these moments, happy to bask in Mother Nature’s own momentary, beautiful hesitation before its tides make their decision.

4/5

 

Film Review: Zero Dark Thirty

Eyes on the Prize

Zero Dark Thirty, the brilliantly and intensely crafted film from director Kathryn Bigelow, opens with a black screen and a mosaic of panicked voices. They are from September 11^th, 2001, cluttered screams and calls that both set the mood and the motivation for the entire film.  It is a deftly and passionately handled chronicle of the hunt and raid of Osama bin Laden, the man largely responsible for the loss of over three thousand innocent lives that fateful day. But it is also prominently about the woman, the CIA operative Maya, in charge of the hunt, and her tireless effort to find and kill the world’s most wanted terrorist.

The very next scene begins in 2003 in a torture room, in which a man with potentially useful information is shackled with his arms stretched out. He has bloody marks on his face and his treatment is gruff, brutal, and severe. The main interrogator Dan (Jason Clarke) uses simulated drowning and locks his prisoner in a small crate as part of his “enhanced interrogation,” a kinder, political term to clean it uglier cousin “torture.” This depiction of course has caused its own kind of interrogations from government officials and media, whether practices like that existed and if their purpose actually gleaned elemental information.

Thus, there is a tendency to look at both of Kathryn Bigelow’s films, this and 2008’s Oscar winning The Hurt Locker, as either bold forms of propaganda, or at least morally biased depictions of war. But these films, especially this one, are not meant to end discussion; rather, they invite even more ethical questions about this specific ten-year period of war, and the United States’ current presence in the Middle East. This, in effect, is a bold and daring piece of cinema that can disappointedly only be compared to a few other historical pieces of fiction, which includes her last feature.

It is a narrative though, how could it not be? Accordingly infused with documentarian feel, we follow Maya (A powerfully refined Jessica Chastain), and her emotional journey through a job that requires emotion to stay dormant. Bigelow, who teams up again with Hurt Locker writer Mark Boal, subtly tells us that’s a lie and that our hunches, our sometimes impenetrable consciences, require a faith and hunger that by-the-book logic overlooks.

Her hunch lies on a man named Abu Ahmed, an Al-Qaeda courier she believes, through many other testimonies and witnesses, works and carries out messages for bin Laden. It is a long and arduous process, filled with governmental speed bumps and other, more assured opinions, some from an eventual, rare female friend Jessica (Jennifer Ehle). Resistant opinions also come from her boss Joseph Bradley (Kyle Chandler), who has his own dilemmas between weighing initial domestic safety and Maya’s requests for bigger-picture enforcements (Chastain’s performance is punctuated with her aggressive yelling of an ultimatum to Jonathon to get her more intelligence).

Her struggle is depressing, scarring, and real. Maya has no real backstory, no explanation to her training or past experience. This is her first big job and her only one, and in this is a symbolic humanizing that lifts her into a rootable figure- containing a refined swagger that is tested to crumbling heights.  She finds death’s door always lurking, near roadside bombings and breached doors. She tells a Navy Seal in the midst of mission gone wrong,  “A lot of my friends have died trying to do this. I believe I was spared so I can finish the job.”

Chastain’s performance is slowly calculated and masterfully designed, portraying a woman whose character is split into thirds following significant events of this hunt. In that first scene, she supplies Dan with the water for the man’s torture, slowly accepting her duty with trembling hands. As time progresses, so does her spirited self-esteem, intensity, and willingness to grab answers from hesitant mouths. After crucial moments of gunfire and death, she loses her stateside innocence altogether. We gravitate to her bridled confidence, her tempered self-assurance and sit in awe.

In the current string of television, Clare Danes plays a similar CIA operative on Homeland, searching for a terrorist nearly her whole time at Langley, Va. Bigelow’s film dwarves this largely dramatic serial not necessarily in its content matter, but by its main character’s ability to deflect any punishing and lustful vices. Both women however are triumphs and torchbearers of the intensified hunch and the never-ending pursuit to obtain its veracity. In a male dominated landscape, these women have the strenuous effort of not only following their leads, but fighting for their ability to have them. We see in both, though, the darker moments of their similar missions, the physical and mental expulsion and draining required in capturing their targets.

Bigelow proves this alternate reality once again in the otherworldly surroundings of life in the Middle East, and its stark banality back at home. In The Hurt Locker, her main character temporarily back from war stands and stares in a grocery aisle, puzzled and immobile at the infinite bright-colored cereal brands. It is all at once a commentary on PTSD and human life, a dichotomous image that cries for a country’s wartime introspection. This type of reflective, iconic moment permeates throughout Zero Dark Thirty as well, a film detailing the idiosyncrasies Maya found that ended up being so vital. Bigelow captures the small things in her frame, a desktop background, an unresponsive instant message, and fills them with power.

We aren’t concerned as much with yarn and push pins as much as we are with Maya’s personal journey. Strategy is referred to but, unlike Homeland, we don’t examine round the clock surveillance teams at work and the logistics of putting cameras and microphones in hidden corners. These things are inferred, much like the torture. Instead, we become immersed in the field and in the plight of a woman hardened early by the brutal interrogations. We become immersed in the necessary ground components of a mission, tag-team phone relays and small bribes that all factor into the monumental equation.

Bigelow separates this ten-year journey with chapter cards, slowly evolving into the decision to infiltrate the white washed mansion in which Maya believes Bin Laden resides. This is a longer process in which conjecture must be strong, because it was stronger for Weapons of Mass Destruction the many higher-ups nervously posit.

The final raid on bin Laden’s high-walled fortress in Abbattobad is one of the most riveting final thirty minutes of film I’ve seen. The swarming of Navy Seals (most notably played by Chris Pratt and Joel Edgerton) from their helicopter journey to their night-vision, green-lit raid is a master course for inducing suspense. At over 150 minutes long, this is the fastest and most unnoticeable “long” movie this year, a testament to the film’s moving arc.

Again, the level of torture has spurred debate. It happened, but to what extent? Would it have mattered if things were conducted differently? That is then the next question, something only a parallel history could tell. But Bigelow also asks us the more important question of “where do we go now?” It’s the last line of the film directed at Maya. The decade-long hunt, the lives lost, all of it now completed with a few bullets, and yet we march on, but where? All that tension built up and contained, now expelled. What’s the next move? This is the existential question more than just Maya must face.

5/5

Film Review: Lawless

Bootlegging Brothers Mixing up Trouble

In Lawless, an explosively feisty flick set in prohibition 1930s Virginia, three notorious brothers run their own moonshine bootlegging business. It’s a lower class operation compared to the established gangsters of the area, and by established I mean that they wear nice suits and open machine guns in broad daylight. They have power, and they also control the fear, which is a lethal combination to have, especially in the wooded, main road town in which the film takes place.

These are all set pieces, cliched parts to the outdoor gangster film, filled stock full with standard shootouts and conventional characters. But Lawless, directed by John Hillcoat and written by Nick Cave,  and based off Matt Bondurant‘s real-life novel, blends them together with surprising grit and passion. Bondurant tells his family story, a tale of three brothers, bootlegging their way through violent competetion and corruption. Hillcoat, without burying the plot in complex, heavy thematics, still adds an ominous visuality with a dark, musty lens. This is both an indicator of the Virginia wilderness and also homage to gangster classics that fed off  stark contrasting hues, often signifying life in front of and behind closed doors.

The brothers are Howard (Jason Clarke), Forrest (Tom Hardy), and Jack (Shia LaBeouf), oldest to youngest, but it’s Forrest who’s in charge of the operation. Played with powerful subtlety by Hardy, Forrest contains both the dialect and notoriety of Jeff Bridge’s Rooster Cogburn, known by many, understood by the closest listeners. He grunts and groans, passes judgment to Jack in growling counsel, all under the infamous guise that he is incapable of being killed, a farcicle tale of mortality. This is a threatening epithet for some and a challenge for others, but somehow his body is on a mission, which is impressive considering the film’s violence meter raises steadily, catering to a possible tagline as “I see your physical defamation and I raise you some bullet wounds.”

But Lawless emotionally is told from Jack’s perspective, the “good” one in which Forrest is wary of letting into the family business. Jack’s only contributions come from driving the moonshine from place to place, but his ambition is to move from the driver’s seat to the passenger side. He is unphased by death but still marvels at rifle shells, especially ones that come from established mobster Floyd Banner (Gary Oldman). Attempting to prove his worth, Jack starts to run the business on his own after Forrest is physically unable. LaBeouf is less angsty and screamy, but he commands screen time with veterans, that although have less instrumental roles, still emit an undeniable, overshadowing presence.

One of these other veterans is Guy Pearce who plays a Chicago policeman named Rakes, looking to eradicate the bootlegging industry. His greasy cowlick is a glaring divider for a head that seems to be screwed on too tight. His polished gray suits stand out amongst the dirt ridden locals, making him an object of envy and outsider loathing. Pearce speaks with squeaky conviction and corrupted confidence, handling a gun too easily, brutally beating others like his routine. His maniacality comes in little things, like slowly pocketing his white laced gloves.

It is a brutal world but Jack wants a part of it. Paralleling The Godfather and Goodfellas in this manner, proving oneself becomes an overambitious attempt to gain instant credibility. Balancing Jack however is bootlegging partner in crime and friend (Dane Dehaan) and a tender love interest (Mia Wasikowski). She is the town preacher’s daughter, with a father that is weary of his lingering, courting presence. She brings a lighter, naturalistic side to both Jack and the film, as does Jessica Chastain, who magnetizes Forrest with her refined beauty and bare-skinned presence. Provocative, enticing and a former dancer, her pastel dresses and red hair literally and figuratively add color to the Bondurant’s headquarters in which she serves coffee.

This is a man’s world however, or at least a violent one. I screened this shortly after the Aurora shooting and it seems this film, like Gangster Squad, could have easily been pushed back a few months as well. The gun powder becomes desensitizing as it reaches its climactic end, a chilling mob and police revolutionary era standoff. In this case, the performances, the sum of the parts, can overpower the whole, which lacks a certain gravitas and weight. In this type of film however, illegal alcohol can still taste mighty fine.

3.5/5

The Debt Review: The Gritty Nature of Guilt

How is justice attained properly from someone whose evil is immeasurable? This question, like many posed in The Debt, subjectively tries to pinpoint a moral restitution for certain unspeakable atrocities. The film attacks this blurry premise with a gritty ebb and flow, a suspenseful web of conflict and ethical dilemma whose darkness gets illuminated by special individual performances.

In charge of coherently putting these pieces together is director John Madden who creates a cinematic spectacle on-screen. Along with his team of writers, they remake a 2007 Israeli film but add a few layers this time. It spins an espionage thriller into the throes of a compromising love triangle while tampering with realities of truth and their timely consequences.

The film begins in Tel Aviv in 1997 where a congratulatory book release party is being held. The book tells the tale of three Mossad agents who went undercover in 1966 East Berlin to kidnap Dieter Vogel, a Nazi doctor who inhumanly performed monstrous medical experiments on the Jewish population during World War II. The undercover trio consists of a young woman Rachel Singer, her hard-nosed admirer David Peretz, and leader of the group Stephan Gold played by Jessica Chastain, Sam Worthington, and Marton Csokas, respectively. Rachel’s older self is played by Helen Mirren who mothers the book’s author, her thirty-year-old daughter Sarah, who heroically categorizes the agents’ mission. Sarah’s father is the older Stephan (Tom Wilkinson) and though he is not married to Rachel, is still a member of the Mossad. Unable to make the current reception is David (Ciarán Hinds), whose absence is illustriously explained throughout the past and late-nineties present.

The narration seamlessly fluctuates between Cold War Germany and present Israel, retelling the trio’s mission and experiences while combatting the agents’ future predicaments. The former covert mission pits the three into a small, leaky apartment, the operating grounds for which to plan the kidnap that must be initiated by a young Rachel. She visits the gynecologist, now the guise for the evil Vogel, and courageously poses as an inconceivable wife to execute their plan.

The action predictably begins to crescendo as does their emotional and ideological distances. The all or nothing operation creates a strain between Rachel and David’s love kindling and more blatantly between he and Stephan’s outlook on their covert jobs. The kidnapped Vogel’s sadistic mannerisms create a boiling chemistry of tension that when cut is spewed through each performance. Jessica Chastain, who has broken out this summer, spews a fight and fervor through her nervously brave demeanor. Her pale features illuminate her pure face (soon to be scarred as seen through her older, wrinkled cheek), caring and gentle but with an ability to kill. Worthington demonstrates his acting ability this time against real people, not Navi or Robots, and connects. His ideological persistence and dedication creates a pounding presence, providing vulnerability in his strong-minded desire for Vogel’s public humiliation. Jesper Christensen‘s manipulating presence as Dieter Vogel is also spellbinding, his words inciting inter group conflict that feeds fire to his captors’ abrasive qualities in duress.

The young and old duo of Chastain and Mirren, though lacking a similar semblance, characteristically creates continuity. Mirren stylistically continues the emotional arc of Rachel’s inner turmoil. Her strong-willed exterior masks her foreboding detached self. The book shares glory, but its authenticity ominously begins to creep away. Madden becomes masterful in his approach, toggling between old and former selves with innovative editing and resourceful uses of sound and suspense. Lingering tones from the score bleed the anxiety into the next scene, keeping the gritty nature of secrecy even in sun soaked settings.

In the book and now upcoming movie Moneyball, Billy Beane, the General Manager of the Oakland Athletics tells his colleagues about his refusal to actually watch the games his team plays. Putting passion into the stresses of  nine innings tends to create a partial view of his players. For Beane, the best way to handle business is by taking emotion out of the equation. The Mossad agents lack this despondent yet sometimes favorable quality within their mission. The little machinations each character possesses in Berlin begin a butterfly effect, emotion-filled decisions that overcome biased barriers and infiltrate the systematic details of a plan that should be devoid of subjectivity. Madden translates these mistakes into their eventual elder state, credited and guilted into holding back their first-hand knowledge of a foiled operation.

The realism in each character’s decisions creates a dark but forgiving tone. Stephan tells Rachel under stress that sometimes the truth is a luxury, that it creates another set of problems ready to unfold at a moment’s notice. The moral ambiguity is almost overplayed, but it tries to answer its posed questions profoundly. Belief or truth? Madden crisply attacks this slight difference ending with Mirren’s Rachel, a woman still haunted by her past with enough hunger to liberate herself, one way or another.

Related articles

• ‘The Debt’: History’s Burden, And A Moral Calculus (npr.org)
• Review: The Debt (canada.com)