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

 

Midnight in Paris Review: A Lovely Nostalgia

Woody Allen’s latest endeavor Midnight in Paris economically speaking is his best movie to date, two months in theaters, and 42 million in the bank. Yet, stylistically and cinematically, Allen fans may find this to be his most charming production. It contains all the remnants of a classic Wood-man film, multiple loves, a beautiful city, and plenty of humor. In this summer of  monster, alien, and robot blockbusters, Midnight offers a breath of small budget fresh air that is just as fulfilling.

The film follows Gil Pender (played by the quirky Owen Wilson), and his fiance Inez (Rachel McAdams) as they vacation to Paris before the couple’s future wedding. A hollywood screenwriter in the midst of writing a novel, Gil is enthralled within the city light of Paris. His penchant for strolling the streets with baguette under his arm and desire to live in the rainy days of 1920s Paris bursts out among his day-to-day schedule, strictly controlled by Inez and her tag-along parents. He has, what snooty visiting friends Paul (Michael Sheen) and Carol (Nina Arianda) call, Golden Age syndrome, the exaggerated belief that something used to be substantially better than it is now. This typically is expressed with bitterness about one’s present condition, and Gil’s solemn dislike for Inez’s big shot Paul contributes to his negative current standing.

Allen makes Gil and Inez’s dissociation highly noticeable, not only in Gil and her in-laws differing political views, but also in Gil’s free-spirited spontaneous musings that get trampled by his bride-to-be’s strict plans, coordinated by the too-knowledgeble Paul and his insolent, brassy comments on everything art. Gil’s escape from the materialistic mustering of Inez comes one midnight when he gets lost on his daily stroll. The clock strikes 12 and strangely an old-fashioned collector’s car rolls up the hill and some finely dressed champagne holding passengers grab Gil into the car. Unbeknownst to him, Gil enters the 1920s, sits down and converses with a Mr. Ernest Hemingway and tosses drinks back with F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda. He emerges from bed the next morning dazzled by the night’s happenings and is assured its reality when he visits the same spot that night.

Gil enters his fantasized Golden Age, talking with the likes of Picasso and Dali (exuberantly played by Adrien Brody) and even handing off the draft of his novel ironically about a 1920s memorabilia shop to Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates) for review. The Parisian nights suddenly turn into “guess the artist” for the bewildered Gil. Things then get romantically complicated when one of his nighttime adventures leads him to Adrienne (a seductive Marion Cotillard), the part-time lover of Picasso, who finds herself falling for this blonde haired struggling writer. Past and present collide and now complicate Gil having the time of his life.

The need to explain this magical portal is unnecessary as Cole Porter’s  swinging tunes revive the Jazz age. The illogicality of the movie doesn’t make us inquisitive of its plausibility, but rather we feel moved to accept the strange time leap at midnight with its charming way of explaining its rational unimportance to Gil’s plight. Zelda Fitzgerald feels cheated, F. Scott is hopelessly in love, and Hemingway speaks in perfect prose, all infecting their new friend Gil amidst his passionate love for Adrianna, who has some nostalgia of her own.

In the 2oo8 film Vicki Cristina Barcelona, Allen’s cinematic genius was portrayed not just in the story, but in the gasping shots of Spain’s countryside and marvelous tourist city. His shots make each city he films dazzle with color and life, even the dark alleys and side streets. MIP’s opening credits alone offer a beautiful, unpaid advertisement for the city of love, if it needed one already, every corner glowing its Parisian hospitality. Allen’s other genius lies in his Larry David-like ability to connect every little subplot. His seamless infusion of golden light in direct accordance with Gil’s golden age desire warmly touches every inch of the screen. Gil’s own novel centers on a nostalgia shop of the era he currently walks in, something that puzzles Ms. Stein but nonetheless makes her more curious of this awkward looking gentleman.

That is an appropriate descriptor of Gil, who refers to his own poetic dialogue as simply babbling. However, Owen Wilson’s crooked nose and un-tourist-like reveling of back streets  musters the sweet swagger only a struggling novelist might acquire. His sympathy is acquired mainly from Inez’s cold unwillingness to acknowledge anything her husband-to-be feels like interjecting, making each night out more refreshing simply by elimination. Of course, McAdams must work for her acquisitive nature, and her now golden locks remind us of her paralleling role in Mean Girls, the hot blonde that was far and above the high school wannabe’s. Every one of her meaningless insults pushes us closer to gaining favor with Wilson’s witty reveling, tacky blazer prowess.

Gil writes about memorabilia, the memories that frozen objects contain. Yet it’s the memories that ultimately connect us with others, and instead of living them, they must be enjoyed in our present. When they are not, they lose their past spark, and we float away never satisfied, only searching for their unobtainable figment of timely content. Paul speaks about people’s passions for the past and explains the present’s illusive way of satisfying us. The present has this self-defeating state of unworthiness that disallows us to compare or give current moments and people the credit to challenge equal historic legends, when indeed the credit is often deserved. We look negatively at our current status and positively into our previous history and yet never become aware of it in our busy lives. Tea-partyers, the group of people used in Gil’s insults toward his potential in-laws, have a similar problem, wanting America to go back to the good ol’ days of the 1950s and 60s. Yet they forget the negatives of people living in the present that time, the wars, the absence of women’s rights, and that blaring racial divide.

Gil’s thrust into 1920s nostalgia holds less of an impact but sends just an equal message. Witty, clever, and yes, charming, Midnight is a mesmerizing flick, especially for the  literary astute. It makes living in present Paris a pretty positive place, even when it rains.