Terrence Malick
To The Wonder

Before I delve into any (attempted) description, it's best to make one thing clear: I don't consider myself a detractor of Terrence Malick; at least not of his entire body of work. Because while it's true that he has produced undeniably fascinating films of rare depth in the past (The Thin Red Line is what I remember best and most fondly), I don't feel the same way since he returned to the scene a couple of years ago with the acclaimed yet much-discussed The Tree Of Life, which earned him the Palme d'Or at Cannes.

It's a film-experience that left me with strongly ambivalent feelings from the very first viewing: Malick's work has become primarily a cinema of images, exquisitely subjective, ambitious in both technique and content, I might say hypertrophic in its attempt to attract and involve the viewer in the director's worldview. Deconstruction and visual power are the essence of The Tree Of Life; and yet, while the macro-universe is exposed so suggestively, I cannot say the same for the micro, represented by an American family whose puppet-like characters did not awaken the slightest empathy in me. Pained looks, maidens twirling through fields, repetitive and improbable situations, tedious reflections on nature and God presented in persistent whispering voice-overs, and so on to a conclusion I found lacking to say the least. All things considered, I think I would have been better off watching a direct documentary on the origin of the world.

In any case, much to my surprise, less than two years after the aforementioned film (and that's very soon, considering his pacing), Malick has returned with a "new" title. Quotation marks are necessary: the impression is that the Texan director has gotten a bit carried away after his triumph at Cannes and decided to lazily settle into his own stereotypes (increasingly grotesque) and musings (increasingly flimsy), thus extending an already overstretched premise. To The Wonder is in all respects a superfluous appendix to The Tree Of Life: the calling card is the same, the director's imprint unmistakably unchanged, but the entire work is presented in such an affected and absurd manner that it left me both disgusted and amused. Here we are again faced with an impressive sequence of dizzying shots and breathtaking panoramas, a sumptuous backdrop draped over nothing. The weakness (such an understatement!) lies not so much in the absence of a genuine plot (even my favorite film isn't eventful), but in Malick's attitude, an old windbag now dabbling in reflections on a theme perhaps as vast as existence itself: love, treated on one hand with self-indulgence and on the other with a scarcity and evanescence of ideas.

And even though Malick fans will feast on this colossal spillage of voiceovers reciting assorted banalities reminiscent of fortune cookies ("my sweet love", "what is this love that loves us?", "my heart!") or mystical deliriums ("Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ in me, Christ to the right, Christ to the left, Christ in my heart"), I think it's impossible to overlook the fact that, once again, characters come and go like simulacra (not to say mindless) in implausible and irritating on-off situations. It's really hard to attribute a minimum of depth to Ben Affleck, who manages to be unbearable here while acting like a mute scarecrow; to Rachel McAdams, the ethereal blonde buffalo-attractor who leaves no trace in her 15-20 minute appearance; to Javier Bardem, who, in the role of a priest, constitutes yet another sporadic and insipid presence in the drama, perhaps inserted to curry favor with a share of Republican viewers; or to the bewildering intervention of a Romina Mondello (who??) grappling with dissertations on the futility of material goods; or worse still, to Olga Kurylenko, who spends all her time twirling foolishly everywhere she goes, even in the supermarket. The use of multiple languages (English, French, Spanish, Italian) throughout the film adds just the right touch of pretentiousness to the whole, as if its message (if there is one) needs to be universally received.

Mention deserves what is, in my view, the cherry on top of this sickly-sweet cake, namely a succession of charity scenes that seem lifted straight from an 8x1000 commercial; it's difficult to convey the embarrassment. Whereas regarding the rest, there's little else to say: churches, fields, trees, flowers, twigs, skies, light, love, God, in short, a dreamlike carousel of wonders that is already showing its wear.

To The Wonder thus sinks into a sea of clichés and self-parodies (impossible to list them all), and its viewing cannot simply be justified by the concept of "cinema of images": however aesthetically satisfying, making a collage of wonderful shots (which, to be honest, aren't all that wonderful) put together without a logical thread is not, in my opinion, a sufficient reason to create a film of nearly two hours. It will surely remain an unmissable gem for all those pseudo-intellectuals and aspiring philosophers who regard Malick as enlightened or something similar, and those same people will be even more delighted to know that the director in question already has three or four more masterpieces in the works for them; but as for myself, this is pure, genuine trash. If there still exists a cinema worthy of being called such, I will seek it elsewhere. As long as it's far from here.