To The Wonder

    365 Films

Entry #72

To The Wonder (2013)

Directed by Terrence Malick

I need to begin this post with a disclaimer that I’m only seven hours removed from my first viewing of To The Wonder and the film is still coarsening through my veins.  I know what I saw, I was deeply moved, and yet it seems nearly impossible to encapsulate quite what it is that the film is up to.  To put it in a more succinct way, I’m not entirely sure what that is either.  The film ostensibly tells the story of the fluctuating romance between Neil (Ben Affleck) and Marina (Olga Kurylenko) when they meet and fall in love in Paris only to re-locate to Neil’s hometown of Bartlesville, OK.  It would be useful to point out here that none of this information is conveyed whatsoever by the narrative, and that for all intents and purposes these people are Man #1 and Woman #1.  One of the amazing things about the film is how gracefully Malick dispatches with pointless scenes of exposition but keeps the viewer firmly aware of what is going on at all times.  Granted, you have to pay attention, but shouldn’t you be doing that in the first place?  Anyway, the plot thickens (as much as it can) when Marina seeks solace in the comforting tones of Father Quintana (Javier Bardem), another European outcast and going through his own crisis of faith.  She then learns that her visa has expired and she must return to Paris causing Affleck to chase after another romantic partner in the form of an old flame from this past, Jane (Rachel McAdams).  Naturally, trouble will ensue whenever a love triangle is introduced (but even that is not at all what the film’s about).  Again, I can not stress enough how little of this is conveyed in the sort of machine-processed spelling everything out screenwriting method that way too often passes for cinematic storytelling these days.  In as much as The Tree Of Life was an experiential piece, To The Wonder is the natural and in a lot of ways masterfully amped up extension of that technique.  Dialogue is half whispered and often drowned out by an elegant combination of wild sounds, classical music, and Daniel Lanois’ experimental ambient drones.  The camera is ceaseless in its quest for capturing the purity of human movement and it only rests for the characters themselves to realize the enormity of their surroundings.  To put it in a more accurate way, your eyeballs will be zig zagging all over their sockets during this film in a vain attempt to capture every single frame of every single image conjured up by Malick and Cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki.  Speaking of which, if you’ll indulge me for a few sentences here, I cannot think of a more rewarding pairing of DP and director in the last twenty years than Lubezki and Malick.  He has shot the last three Malick pictures and is currently credited as shooting the two films of which Malick just finished back-to-back production.  The camera work in this film is simply a marvel to behold and one that will almost certainly be forgotten come awards season.  I’m still smarting a little bit from Lubezki’s snub for The Tree Of Life but on good days like today I can remember that Awards are usually forgotten the day after they are announced while great films can last as long as they need to.  I cannot implore you enough to at least give Lubezki’s work the respect it deserves by seeing this film in a theater on the most enormous screen possible.  Regardless of what you think of the film, these are incredibly unforgettable images.   Another revelation in the film for me was how graciously Malick captures the tone and tenor of this town in Oklahoma without once ever stooping to the usual folksy, Hollywood condescension.  A good part of the picture consists of Father Quintana roaming the streets of the downtrodden and the destitute, seeking to comfort those in need of God’s love.  We meet convicts, meth heads, and the chronically ill and Malick presents it all with a compassionate, unblinking eye.  For someone who is considered by many to be a control freak, I was completely caught off guard by the way he allows so much of life and the world around him to flood the images on screen.  It was at this moment and many others during this film that I realized that there is simply nobody else in contemporary cinema operating anywhere near the level of ambition that Terrence Malick is.  Obviously, that’s not to say he is the greatest, or most consistently successful or blah blah blah.  I merely stand to reason that Terrence Malick is pursuing his own form of filmmaking and that he is (aside from his collaborators) completely alone in this pursuit.  As far as I can tell, he is trying to cinematically express that which makes the amorphous experience of life so profound.  The memories, the epiphanies, and the constant search for the profound amongst the mundane, these are the some of the most deeply felt yet impossible to describe sensations that we encounter on a daily basis.  Yet, when we go to the movies, we are meant to disassociate ourselves from those experiences (I suppose that’s why “escapist” is such a commonly used term in Hollywood cinema).  My belief and the reason I will always respond to his work, is that Terrence Malick believes there is no difference between the life we live and the life we experience on screen.  It’s all part of the wonder.