To the Wonder

Terrence Malick’s “To the Wonder” is a film that is radically empty. The film poses beautiful people against landscapes. Generally, the camera moves as if discovering the landscape, passing through (or across) an invisible threshold as the character moves into the terrain. In many instances, the actor is alone in the frame and back-lit. Often, images of landscape or atmospheric effects or empty rooms brooding in light that is intensely specific and individualized are inserted into the film. Editing is swift, fluent, and completely non-narrative: characters appear against the sunset on an open prairie; the next shot shows the same figures, but against an urban landscape. Sequences are edited with time-jumps: we see a woman dancing, then, another angle of her lying down in a forest or park, then, another shot of her running toward the camera in that same location. The film seems to involve complicated dialogue scenes, but the editing obscures the relationship between the figures speaking and the sound-recording makes it impossible for us to hear what is being said. (A peculiar opening title tells the DVD viewer to “turn up the volume”, but, I think, to no avail since you aren’t supposed to be able to hear most of the words spoken in the film.) The movie produces the effect of being more completely silent and visual than an actual silent film -- in silent films, intertitles explained the action to the audience. In “To the Wonder,” there is no explication of any kind -- we can determine approximately what is happening and there is a consistent “tone” or mood to the film, but there is no story, no exposition and no attempt to tidy up the imagery by reducing repetition or duplication of effect. Indeed, to the contrary, the film is obsessively repetitious -- the same thing seems to happen over and over again; we see the same locations in the same “magic-hour” light repeatedly; the Good Friday music from “Parsifal” is played not once, but three times, and, about a third of the shots in the movie, show a beautiful young woman, either dark-haired or blonde, spinning ecstatically. In Griffith’s films, his heroines, Lillian Gish and Mae Marsh, never walked through a shot -- the girls either pranced or skipped or danced through the image. Malick treats his actresses the same way -- they move like sprites, dipping, leaping, and spinning in circles. The movement of the women contrasts with Ben Affleck who is directed to move slowly, stiffly, deliberately -- clad in black, Affleck’s character is like a sullen, half-submerged boulder around which the women prance. The film is visionary and remarkable -- but it is also cloying and vacant. “To the Wonder’s” vacancy is akin to Ozu’s “empty frames” -- it is a philosophical stance and Malick completely controls this aspect of the movie; the picture is designed to obstruct its own narrative and to empty story and plot into a radiant void of pure light and color. The cloying aspects of the film feel like a defect and I think represent a weakness in Malick’s temperament with respect to the feminine -- the “Ewig-Weibliche” that provides the gravitational field around which the movie’s astounding imagery orbits. Some critics have declared the film insufferably pretentious -- this is unfair to the movie and untrue to the experience of watching “To the Wonder”. Pretentiousness requires ideas and, as I have said, the film is “empty,” a vessel for light and movement that is immune to concept. I think the most precise way of describing the film is in terms of the religious notion of “kenosis” -- that is, a “pouring out” or “emptying”: the movie establishes a sort of plot, a kind of vestigial romantic triangle and, then, empties that situation of anything like character, drama or narrative. Wikipedia’s entry on the movie describes a fairly detailed narrative -- but this narrative is not apparent to someone watching the film for the first time. A man falls in love with a woman in France and there are a number of travelogue-style images of Paris and Mont St. Michael. The man induces the woman to move to Bartlesville, Oklahoma, a small city that is strangely vacant, like a down-home De Chirico painting: small brick towers, vacant lots, immensely wide streets with no traffic, throbbing oil fields and refineries seemingly in people’s back yards. There is an immense golden prairie and a suburb under a huge sky with ominous pyramid-shaped roofs of the big houses looming over cul-de-sacs. The European woman (and her daughter) are lonely and there are bad fights with Ben Aflleck’s stolid, uncommunicative character and the family disintegrates. The woman and child return to Paris. The man meets an old sweetheart and embarks on an affair with her at a ranch where there are herds of bison. (This part of the film seems nakedly autobiographical -- Malick apparently reconnected with a high school girlfriend and married her in Bartlesville, his hometown.) The love affair with old flame also collapses and, then, the European woman moves back to Bartlesville. She and the man begin to fight and the same events that earlier ruined their relationship seem to re-occur -- this time, heightened by an adulterous love affair conducted in an Econo-Lodge to the strains of Wagner’s “Parsifal.” The man confronts the woman; they fight some more; he forgives her. But she flees again, once more returning to Paris. Intercut with these events is a story -- really, just a situation -- involving a lonely and tormented Catholic priest. The priest, played by Javier Bardem, is desperately seeking Christ in the world and he spends his time in a decomposing slum interacting with criminals, meth-addicts, teenage mothers, street preachers, and homeless people -- these scenes are very beautiful and the faces of the poor folks on the street, in psych-wards, and prisons are terrible and attractive, both sublime and hideous at the same time; there is a neo-realist glory about some of this footage that reminds me of Rossellini. The priest’s desperate search for meaning, for God in the world, seems to parallel the hopeless plight of the lovers who seek the divine and ecstatic in one another but are perpetually disappointed and wounded. Documentary footage showing the film being made suggests that the priest interacted with the tormented couple and, perhaps, even counseled them in the movie’s original design -- there are a few vestiges of this aspect of the plot remaining in the film, but those encounters seem to have been mostly edited-out of the movie. Instead, we are left with an almost purely abstract, contrapuntal organization to the film in which the search for erotic love parallels the priest’s search for divine love. The film was, apparently, shot like Griffith’s silent pictures without a script, improvised on location from a broad outline of ideas in the director’s head. “To the Wonder” is more interesting to write about than to watch -- in real time, the movie’s repetitive structure is maddening. It is an important movie, perhaps, a landmark, but also a creative dead-end -- visionary emptiness is beautiful and, I think, philosophically compelling but ultimately the ineffable can’t be photographed and so the movie, a structure of pictures, necessarily must fail. The film’s unique manner of failure is its importance. “Fail again,” Beckett wrote, “fail better.”