Review: To the Wonder (2012)

Cast: Ben Affleck, Olga Kurylenko, Javier Bardem
Director: Terrence Malick
Country: USA
Genre: Drama | Romance
Official Trailer: Here

Editor’s Note: To the Wonder opens in limited release April 12th.

Not since the 1970s has a decade seen the release of more than a single Terrence Malick film; the infamously sporadic auteur, known for his laborious years of work in the editing room, offers with To the Wonder an uncharacteristically rapid follow-up to 2011’s The Tree of Life, and a film even further removed than that from the convenient framework of familiar narrative. It would be worthless to paraphrase the synopsis circulated by the marketing department, which—unlike the film—reveals the character’s names and backgrounds; Malick here continues his nascent quest to forswear dialogue and communicate story and theme through the impressionistic intersection of his transcendental visuals and whispered voiceovers, less concerned with these figures as people with personalities than he is with them as physical manifestations of incorporeal concepts.

From the monumental Romanesque backdrop of Mont Saint-Michel at which the film begins to the white picket fence contextualisation of its midpoint, To the Wonder continually resituates and reconsiders these characters in search of some understanding of love and its evolution across time.

Much as Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain played not Mr and Mrs O’Brien in The Tree of Life, but rather Malick’s dichotomous notions of nature and grace, Ben Affleck and Olga Kurylenko are less Neil and Marina here than they are anthropomorphic renditions of love, in all its many states. From the monumental Romanesque backdrop of Mont Saint-Michel at which the film begins to the white picket fence contextualisation of its midpoint, To the Wonder continually resituates and reconsiders these characters in search of some understanding of love and its evolution across time. How can passion, once burning so brightly as almost to sear, fade to such coldness? How is it that we can carry on unhindered without the feelings that formerly seemed the source of all our strength? And what truth can there be in our own emotion, much less the world at large, when unbearable longing fades so indiscriminately to abject apathy?

Counterpointing the cosmic juxtaposition of The Tree of Life—with which To the Wonder feels all the more of a piece as it progresses—Javier Bardem’s tangential role as a local priest invokes a theological twist, Malick’s developing religious tendencies finding their most direct avenue yet in this transposition of the digression of Neil and Marina’s relationship to a spiritual scale. His links to those characters—and thus to the film’s nominal story—are tenuous indeed, imposed only by the briefest of confession scenes that acts more as the passing of a narrational torch than anything else. That narration, as with Kurylenko’s before, is rendered in native tongue; Bardem expounds his crisis of faith in Spanish, the introverted monologue attaining in the naturalism of his speech a hypnotic quality to match the entrancing nature of Malick’s intransigent visual effulgence. Echoing Days of Heaven in no uncertain terms, he and Emmanuel Lubezki craft with the Oklahoman plains and the gentle embrace of the setting sun a gorgeous portrait of Americana that once more posits them as the country’s premiere cinematographic pairing.

A paean to the complexity of humankind Ben Affleck is not, and in every scene his face bears the discernible discomfort of a man keeping silent against his will; his own emergence as a filmmaker with style so diametrically opposed to Malick’s is perhaps responsible for the visible resistance of his grimace. This is less the countenance of a conflicted Neil than it is of an awkward Affleck, pushed in a direction in which he is not wont to go.

If we’re to accept the age-old adage that cinema is a medium whose merits are to be measured in purely aesthetic achievement, then To the Wonder sees Malick—as ever—earning his film a place among the all-time greats. His every shot, whether soaring through wheat fields in pursuit of a vibrant Marina, chasing rapid tides as they flood French shores, honing in upon Neil as he reconnects with the very essence of America, or observing the simple small talk of a priest and a window cleaner, gleams with beauty pure and simple. If we’re to protest, to make a case for other forms of filmic expression, then To the Wonder poses altogether more of a problem. It’s a film that will alienate most, and not unduly: Malick is immovable in his commitment to this means of visual elucidation, steely in his resolve to refute any inherent requirement for dialogue. As successful as such an approach has come to prove in the past, he finds greater difficulty here, primarily with this particular combination of story and star. A paean to the complexity of humankind Ben Affleck is not, and in every scene his face bears the discernible discomfort of a man keeping silent against his will; his own emergence as a filmmaker with style so diametrically opposed to Malick’s is perhaps responsible for the visible resistance of his grimace. This is less the countenance of a conflicted Neil than it is of an awkward Affleck, pushed in a direction in which he is not wont to go.

As aptly evidenced by the wealth of articles which emerge around the release of each subsequent project, Malick’s penchant for cutting entire performances from his films suggests such an expanse of basic narrative material as to offer any number of independent plots to be forged. Here, the ties that bind the disparate strands of Affleck and Bardem are more inference than implication, their connection drawn of the willing participance of the viewer and not—at least not in this edit—of Malick’s construction. In that transcendent confluence of Douglas Trumbull’s stunning visual effects and Zbigniew Preisner’s soaring “Lacrimosa” lay the essence of The Tree of Life. In the third-act marriage of Malick’s minor army of editors’ montage and Bardem’s beguiling rendition of the “Lorica of Saint Patrick” lies that of To the Wonder. Here is a film that not only explores faith—faith in God, faith in love, faith in America—but actively asks it too. It doesn’t all add up, doesn’t succinctly summate its own statement on life and love, doesn’t even manage to quite congeal to a tonally and thematically unanimous viewing experience, but Malick works in mysterious ways, and—if only fleetingly—he has given us here a glimpse of cinematic heaven.

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