“Every journey ends but we go on. The world turns and we turn with it. Plans disappear, dreams take over.”
Who knew Brad Pitt’s cringe-inducing Chanel ad was actually a teaser trailer for Terrence Malick’s experimental love story To The Wonder? Here, Malick goes one up on the actor. His latest movie is visually spectacular, esoteric, emotionally inaccessible and self-indulgent – Malick in self-parody mode.
Reigning in his thematic scope from the dizzyingly ambitious spectacle The Tree Of Life, Malick’s film is ostensibly about the tumultuous relationship between Parisian woman Marina (Olga Kurylenko) and American Neil (Ben Affleck). Javier Bardem also appears as a brooding priest, representative of a loss of faith. However, the characters are rendered largely inconsequential, as Malick eschews dialogue or coherent development in favour of endless heavily edited montages of the characters ponderously gazing at their surroundings.
Granted, these surroundings are jaw-droppingly vivid, painterly and romantically lit. As Affleck watches Kuylenko (repeatedly) frolic though an autumnal Paris, (constantly) dance through sepia-tinted cornfields or (endlessly) spin in sun-saturated rooms, the film’s ethereal, impressionistic beauty is radiant. But by failing to couple Emmanuel Lubezki’s stunning cinematography with any story, the images lack resonance, and become repetitive. Unlike Jessica Chastain or Brad Pitt in The Tree of Life, Affleck and Kuylenko’s characters aren’t given a grounding plot to act through and so remain inaccessible ciphers – a disservice to both.