It took almost 10 years, but Terrence Malick has eclipsed the fractured promised reaches of The New World. To the Wonder feels fully realized, without moments of incoherency pepperng the exciting sequences of The New World. It is a story of romantic love as essential and necessary as the Gospel. Is it really so long to wait 8 or 9 years for a great film? It is, but that is because I feel as though I'd been waiting forever. And what is To the Wonder about? It's actually about waiting....(wait for it) ...for a sense of personal happiness and true freedom. It is also about how time can both shove and pin us down.
Malick's movie is the best film I nearly never saw last year.
As cinephiles the first half of our lives are marked waiting to see certain films. A pickle gone by the wayside now, post internet. In my preteens and teens it was Malick, Truffaut, Warhol, Godard, Franco, Resnais, Ferrara, Scorsese and Ashby. In my twenties it was Rivette, Ruiz, Hou Hsaio Hsien, Zulawski and a zillion other films not defined by their filmmakers; my scope widened considerably. It goes further than waiting for certain films. Movie lovers covet the unseen, the wait for the golden chalice; their Out 1, Last Movie or Hardly Working. People who love and seek out movies and prints (singular movie experiences) are people looking to fulfill a promise less reachable in our personal lives.
The eventual theatrical opening of The Thin Red Line was a major event. I was barely alive that year, yet I managed to see it opening day in Washington, D.C. I saw it at the historic Uptown. This one was more of a stunner to me. It was more difficult to nail down and explain. It was the first Malick I saw which began to match his hype. It demanded repeated viewings and was experimenting with something new. And it was, in moments, ecstatic.
I loved The New World. Seeing it in the front row of Union Square was a top experience of 2005.
The mythic Malick movie you wait for had finally arrived: poetic storytelling and technique finally married with the content of the story..about newness and narrative of the formation of a physical place into a theoretical one.
Tree of Life seemed more magazine fashion editorial than a movie. I couldn't permeate the gloss.
So I frittered away awhile before sitting down for To the Wonder. His particular sound design no longer confused; it persuasively cohered. Shortcuts, also used in earlier pictures like Tree, pare down storytelling in choppy visual supercuts that border jumpcuts for the speed in which they run through events. We are watching a love story in leaps and bounds, all in the opening moments. We understand, even without the subtitles translating the French.
The film opens with the
arrival of a lifetime of want and of not having. It is the first Malick scene in which I recognize the person in the frame...a starved person; here is the meal I dream of. And by the movie's end, the same woman looks back and recognizes me as the shadow of a human she has become. Do I know anything about these characters backgrounds or if they'd ever had love before? No. What we experience in this opening is ..the end. A woman has reached her penultimate happiness. She spins through life. Everything is beautiful, everything and everyone is connected. She is in love. She is radiant and she beams outwards to others.
It is just about halfway through the film when she is, in some ways, replaced and cast aside. She stops spinning through the frames. Her voiceover tells us she is lost, and she is walking around alone, not knowing where to go but to go home and collapse.
She tries to kill herself. She returns to him. Her voiceover remarks that it is only the Weak who never take a stand (by ending a relationship I presume.) Her world turns dark and her spirit is in crisis.
We get used to waiting for things that never come.
We then attain things, decades of knowing they'd never come, and then, without surprise, we just lose them forever.
How could her lover not see how earth and soul shattering the withdrawal of his romantic love would be? Her love for him was devotional, religious, and eternal.
It sounds pious to say, but when the Priest showed up I could see that this is the OTHER side of falling in love onscreen. The love she experienced was Holy. Without that miracle she is equivalent spiritually to the junkie, the criminal and the laborer who need Bardem's Priest. She is alive but she is an empty shell; nothing is inside of her. She is "in between"; she is without love. It is the wait...IT IS THE WAIT that is the other storyline. The one that crisscrosses as the French bride falls in and out of her rapture. She is back in Paris. She is alone on the subway. She no longer dances to transport herself from place to place. She walks with her head down, and she stares unhappily on the Metro.
It is the wait for the new great drug, for the new 12 step fellowship to save your life and rebuild your spirit, for that one person in the world who finally came along to your best friend and one true love and then leave you forever. This is what Malick's film explains. The wait is worth it, win or lose.The wait for that next great film to give you life as a cinephile.
