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 Notes: To the Wonder opened in limited release and on VOD on April 12th. For an additional perspective, see Ronan’s review. If you’ve already seen the film we’d love to hear your thoughts on it, or if you’re looking forward to seeing it this weekend, please tell us in the comments section below or in our new Next Projection Forums.
To the Wonder is the latest effort from former MIT philosophy professor-turned-filmmaker Terrence Malick. The film centers on the tumultuous relationship between Neil (Ben Affleck) and Marina (Olga Kurylenko). They meet in Paris, he bonds with her daughter Tatiana (Tatiana Chiline), and he asks them to move back to the U.S. (Oklahoma, apparently, though it could be any Midwest state). They agree, and what began as something that could be everlasting love fades, and when Marina’s visa expires she goes home with Tatiana. Neil runs into Jane (Rachael McAdams), an old friend that he has not seen in a long time and they strike up a romance. She too had a daughter, but the child died leaving her emotionally shattered. She latches onto Neil and when she says she wants to marry him, the relationship falls apart. Marina comes back to the U.S. without Tatiana, who now lives with her father, and marries Neil. Things dissolve again and an infidelity occurs, ending the marriage and sending her back to Paris again. Also focused on, in an adjacent—sometimes intersecting—story is Father Quintana (Javier Bardem). He is the local priest, but he is going through a crisis of faith. He believes God is around him, but he does not feel that God is listening or understand why he seems so absent.
These simple plot structures hold up what is largely an impressionistic film which relies so little on dialogue that it could be a silent film. Malick employs voiceover for Marina, Jane and Father Quintana to let us into their thoughts, but everything is fractal. The images and glimpses into their thoughts are shown to us as if we were looking through a lens designed to simulate a spider’s vision. We see images of happiness, sadness, anger, elation, despair, confusion, heartbreak and many other emotions along with juxtaposed shots of calm and beautiful landscapes or water, either on a beach or in a lake (water factors so heavily in Malick’s work that it would take an entire paper just to try to work out its meaning in any and all of his films, so I will not attempt to do so here).
Malick leaves us to fill in the blanks of a story we know so well from years of films that spell out every detail and our own life’s experience. We don’t need to know why they are fighting, just that they are. We don’t need to know what he said to make her fall in love with him and vice versa, they just are.
What Malick achieves with To the Wonder is complexly simple beauty and chaos. By eliminating the dialogue we would normally have in a film, witnessing the ‘meet-cute’ and the burgeoning love and listening to all the platitudes that Neil was undoubtedly lavishing upon both Marina and Jane and the arguments in detail, what they were about and why they started and so on, Malick leaves us to fill in the blanks of a story we know so well from years of films that spell out every detail and our own life’s experience. We don’t need to know why they are fighting, just that they are. We don’t need to know what he said to make her fall in love with him and vice versa, they just are. We know Neil works, what difference does it make what he does? Malick uses dialogue where it is needed, like listening to Father Quintana give homilies while simultaneously contemplating if God is really there or not, or when Jane tells Neil she loves him and would like to be his wife and he leaves it out so we don’t hear Neal’s response, we see Jane’s reaction to what we know was said without hearing it.
To the Wonder is a tone poem of epic proportions. We get everything we need to know about the characters from how they move, respond and live within the story. When Marina or Jane or Father Quintana give their voiceovers, they are a sentence long. None of them give broad, long speeches inside their heads, they say one sentence at a time. Those sentences are so full and resonant they say more than most speeches ever could. They convey direct feelings of isolation, loneliness, love, devotion, fear and confusion. Malick’s influences are on full display throughout the picture. First, he employs Ozu’s technique of what I call a palate cleansing shot. The effect is that, once a scene of intense emotion occurs, Ozu would cut to a scene with nothing happening—say a hallway—so we can reset and prepare for the next scene and the next barrage of emotions. Malick uses that technique with his achingly beautiful vistas and shots of water or horizons. Cutting to these static shots gives us a chance not only to recover from the emotional explosion, but to process the last scene. Malick is giving us a chance to keep up with him during his film. He realizes what he is putting forward is difficult and requires thought, so he gives us the time to briefly reflect.
Orson Welles also appears to have had a deep impact on Malick. His use of deep-focus is the best used by any filmmaker since Welles and he uses it to create breathtaking vistas as well as visually keeping everything clear to us. While the emotions are being conveyed, he does not let one person go out of focus so we can put our attention to someone else. Conscientiously doing this forces our minds to realize that no one is the primary person to pay attention to: we must take it all in because each part of the shot is important to the whole of the scene and the film. There are times in films that there is what is called racking focus. This is when one character is in the foreground, another in the background; the character in the foreground is in focus, while the background is out of focus, and suddenly when it is the person in the background’s time to talk, the focus shifts and the background comes into focus while the foreground goes out of focus. This is a director’s visual cue to stop focusing on the foreground and to now focus on the background. Malick uses no such ploy for attention. To him, everything bears equal weight and therefore focus should be everywhere at once.
To the Wonder is a tone poem of epic proportions. We get everything we need to know about the characters from how they move, respond and live within the story.
Another clear influence on Malick for this, and his full body of work, is Russian montage, created by Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudvokin and Dziga Vertov in the early days of cinema. Not a Rocky-style training montage designed to condense multiple scenes into one neat and tidy sequence, this editing style uses juxtaposition of shots in relation to the narration, such as a character’s voiceover stating turmoil while we see a shot of a calm beach or horizon, or Father Quintana narrating that God is all around while he walks through the slums and visits drug addicts, and the hospital where he sees a cancer patient. These juxtapositions only reinforce the characters feelings as they are conveyed to us and give us a deeper understanding of how they feel. Combined with a Godard-like editing style of short cuts and sometimes repeating shots, it enhances the fragmentation inherent in memory and our own emotional understandings. Short, rapid cuts, handheld cameras swooping around the characters and getting close to them without us feeling that we are near them help to show us how life never stops moving for us to take it in and make sense of it. We are here and we must deal with it.
Through it all, Malick does not make To the Wonder a slice of life; he makes it an impression of emotion. These characters’ lives are impressed upon us in ways that no other filmmaker could achieve simply by giving us the heart of the matter, not the constant jawing and elaborate dialogue that is often given to us in adult dramas. We don’t have Neil explaining why he loves either woman, or Marina weeping out a story of how much better he is than her ex-husband. We have raw human emotion expressed in raw form. The film is difficult and will be faulted by some who want a more cohesive and straightforward narrative and who do not want to do the work of understanding what Malick has given us to ponder and is certainly not for all tastes. I do not think that a film should do all the work for us. We don’t need every question answered and every action justified. Like the philosophy texts that Malick once taught, To the Wonder is at once open to interpretation by all who see it while at the same time leaves conclusions inescapable. To the Wonder is a stunning piece of filmmaking by America’s prodigal genius of cinema.
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