The Wonder of Malick

Among cinephiles, the question always seems to be what different thing Terrence Malick will do next. After all, his films break, in both style and topic, most every movie-making convention. The new film, awkwardly but aptly titled To the Wonder, proves his most experimental and is just downright gutsy. Yet again, it seems—and to a greater extent than ever before—Malick pushes hard on notions of what movies can (and should) actually do. Here, for example, the central character, Neil (Ben Affleck), an environmental monitor of some sort, says hardly anything at all in nearly two hours of movie. Though dominating screen time, he says no more than perhaps fifty words, and not all of those are consequential. When he and his girlfriend quarrel, we watch but don’t hear—at least not well enough to grasp their issues. And throughout, far more words come in voiceover than in dialogue. Settings seem incongruous, opening with Paris and Mont Saint-Michel and then shifting to Oklahoma flatlands. As always with Malick, an intense visuality dominates. The camera leaps, floats, and jams, at once disorienting and enveloping. Constant montage wrestles up close with splendor, or terror, that everywhere hides in plain view. And he is really adept at all of this, dazzling both fancy critics and quite typical college students.

Still, however virtuosic and daunting these strategies may seem, they compare hardly at all to the singularity of the stories they serve. With To the Wonder, as throughout his whole long career, Malick freely mixes the romantic and, for lack of a better term, the numinous. Here two very different women, a French Roman Catholic mystical type and an Oklahoma evangelical, both love silent, indecisive Neil, and he them (probably). Now that is a triangle never seen before. And hovering about the edges trying to sort out his own and others’ love problems is haunted cleric Father Quintana (Javier Bardem). Malick handles all these matters reverentially, as if they were of gravest concern and sympathy. That was true in The Tree of Life (2011), a harrowing tale of family love and tragedy, and before that, The Thin Red Line (1998), an intermittently grueling and quietly exultant war film. Whatever the topic, glib or derisive Malick is not. Rather, he is everywhere dead-serious about capturing the extravagant beauty of this world, those plentiful co-existent horrors, and how the divine mixes up in all.

Exactly how serious he is about the last does, as might be expected, take all sorts of folks by great surprise, and none more so than film critics and academics, who have heretofore greatly esteemed Malick. Enchanted, even enthralled, Salon‘s Andrew O’Hehir nonetheless seems incredulous that someone of Malick’s brain-size and talent could actually at this late date engage “directly with Christian theology, without ducking or apologizing” (April 11, 2013). For those old enough to have absorbed Bergman and Tarkovsky, like David Denby, now of The New Yorker, the matter is simpler: The Tree of Life (2011) achieves “lyrical and metaphysical revelation” (April 15, 2013). Not bad.

That perplexity, however, seems more than understandable. Malick was indeed an unlikely candidate to become the first American filmmaker to be so very overtly religious and, simultaneously, substantively philosophical. Others, like Schrader and Scorsese, have it in them, as did John Ford, but none has laid it out nearly so directly as Malick. Still, the wonder is that this comes from Malick. After all, before turning filmmaker, Malick graduated from Harvard with a degree in philosophy and did doctoral work at Oxford before bailing. One measure of his philosophical cred is that in his mid-twenties he translated Martin Heidegger’s The Essence of Reasons (1969), and not even God understands Heidegger. And rumor has it that during a 20-year hiatus from filmmaking, 1978-98, Malick spent at least some time teaching philosophy at the Sorbonne. Given this heady background, he would not seem the sort to make films fixed on the origins and cogency of religious belief and, at that, of an orthodox Christian sort. Then again, for that matter, neither have Christians been quick to note the resplendent vision afoot in Malick’s stories. Rather, Malick’s prism on this world has pretty much flummoxed just about everyone. And well it should.

After all, save for a few poets and mystics, not many see life itself, human and otherwise, as wondrous and dazzling. For Malick, life ceaselessly exudes, and sometimes flares in, an extravagant delight-fullness, an efflorescent “glory,” shines in “all things,” as Guadalcanal soldier Witt puts in The Thin Red Line (1998). Malick expands on that—indeed, displaying it everywhere—in The Tree of Life. There Mrs. O’Brien (Jessica Chastain), a small-town 1950s Texas housewife, exults in her sense that a resplendent, consuming “love is smiling through all things” if we but pause to see. Her prayer for her children, rendered by Malick with his own rhapsodic glee, is that they “Help each other …. Love every one, every leaf, every ray of light …. Forgive.” Moreover, making Mrs. O’Brien’s claims visually compelling and cogent seems the prime impetus that shapes Malick’s restless stylistic improvisation. At one point in The Tree of Life, pubescent Jack, for the first time asking hard religious questions, prays “to see what You see,” and the same perhaps explains much of Malick’s visual (and musical) strategy—to display the physical world, people included, with the same love and delight with which God relishes all. This doxological amazement intensifies in To the Wonder, where amid the blitz of romantic love the smitten Marina (Olga Kurylenko) wonders, “What is this Love that loves us?” This reiterates a notion that has shaped Malick’s films since his return to filmmaking: what might we propound about a world that so bathes all in mystery and splendor?

Malick’s relentless cinematic prodding on this question would seem Pollyannish, if not delusional, were it not for his complementary somber reckoning with unceasing, ravening evil, both natural and human. It is present everywhere in his films, graphic and emphatic, from serial-killer Kit (Martin Sheen) in his first film, Badlands (1973), to the malign father (Brad Pitt) in The Tree of Life. Everywhere Malick resolutely depicts evil in all of its manifest horrors, expending as much visual energy to it as to his portraits of rapturous beauty. In The Thin Red Line, war itself is akin to a crocodile, the film’s opening image, a devouring monster that indiscriminately kills and consumes whatever comes its way, good and bad alike. Indeed, the good die young and the evil flourish. And in war the smartest are the guiltiest, the military brass, who see “their” war as the opportunity to polish careers, no matter the fate of the ever-disposable GI. The spectacle so embitters the tender-hearted Sargent Welsh (Sean Penn) that he advises numbness as the only alternative to despair.

That might be the sort of thing one might expect in a war zone, but the same destructive rampage thrives amid the quiet domesticity in The Tree of Life. Nor does it stay back where it started. Decades later, the loss and conflict of his youth hound a depressed and despairing Jack O’Brien (Sean Penn), an enormously successful middle-aged architect. Back then, despite the ministrations of his protective, exultant mother, Jack’s father relentlessly “shamed” his three sons with the purpose of making them tough enough to survive in a hard world. In response, the father gets visceral hatred and self-destruction, one of the three dying when only nineteen, although the film does not indicate the manner of his death (Malick’s own brother committed suicide while studying with guitarist Andrés Segovia). It is more than fitting, then, that the epigraph to Tree quotes Job (38:4, 7). So, amid Malick’s insistent claims and displays of encompassing beauty, there also abounds a profound relational discord that ravages and devours, a mysterious tireless malice in the inmost fabric of being.

In his new film, Malick offers a complex and starkly realistic rendering of both the glories and the vagaries of subjectivity as a means of apprehending and sustaining relational or religious “truth.” Both start in wonder before a beneficent multi-sided mystery, and here Malick probes relationships, once full of elation and love, that slowly turn fraught and riddling. That search for profound connectedness, romantic and religious, dominates throughout, but permanence in either is by no means certain. And loss is eviscerating, no matter of what kind, something Malick portrays at length and with great care.

At the start, in France, Neil and Marina bask in their new love, content and complete, so much so that she and her ten-year-old daughter Tatiana accompany Neil when he returns to Oklahoma. Not all goes well, however, for their relationship seems to leap from consuming tenderness to dire quarrels. Here characterization mimics the broad strokes of Robert Bresson’s portraiture. Neil’s the contained stoic sort, skittish around intense emotion, and Tatiana knows no calm middle, twirling one moment and sulking the next. As the local parish priest, Father Quintana, observes late in the film, “Love that is mere feeling can unite the most unsuitable people.” To be sure.

Quintana preaches a lot on marriage and the love of God, even as the contours of his own relationship with God are shifting: God now seems to “hide” from him, an absence that has turned his calling into something dry, cold, and hard. Though steadfast in seeking out the “least of these” among the dying, poor, and imprisoned, he himself finds neither surcease nor mercy for his aridity, petition though he does. The best he can come up with, it seems, is that genuine love transcends feeling, though emotion remains a valid index in religious experience and understanding. He preaches to his largely empty church that Christ simply commands love, and in that there is no choice—one must love, especially in marriage. As for human thirst for ecstasy or solace, well, those are “perhaps waiting to be transformed into something higher.” Himself thirsty and dispirited, Quintana asks God to “teach us where to seek you,” and he vows to continue to do so in whatever far-flung place his duty takes him. That Quintana’s Christ goes everywhere is made clear in the priest’s aching recitation—or is it hopeful confession?—of St. Patrick’s prayer that Christ be everywhere.

Out of this thicket of longing, love, and emptiness do come measures of light, different though they are for each person, and deciphering their meanings in the usual messiness of being alive is daunting, a fact that comes as no surprise to anyone. The expectation that movies, or any other art form, should nail everything down into a tidy cinematic bumper sticker is silly, and Malick, for one, refuses to diminish the pervasive mystery of things in general, and most especially the radical surprise of being itself. Not all the intellectualist exposition in the world will distill or put a fence around it. It is that mystery, after all, that points to the essential otherness of the Other, and nowhere more so than in the recognition that this world, for all of its Darwinian ferocity and pain, means well and good for all creatures. Light does shine still, in and through all things, and the darkness has not overcome it, though it often seems a close contest. The inescapable currents of delight and splendor abound in the ceaseless, plural fecundity of life, from mating to music and sacrament, if indeed they are not all one and the same. The only question seems to be Marina’s “What is this Love that loves us?” To that, before theology or philosophy, the film’s final words direct us: “Thank you.”

Malick, though, is not so intent upon answering questions as displaying the conditions that give rise to them, good and bad alike. And the way to do that is to immerse viewers, body and soul, in lived experience. His films have increasingly tried to do so, as does all good art, and especially religious art. To do otherwise is to drain “the juice and the joy” from those central mysteries (Hopkins). After all, how to distill manifold echoes of divine presence in even an avalanche of words? Or, as Malick suggests with his constant and fitting use of classical music, ranging from Mozart or Gorecki, into verbal or laboratory formulas? One critic confessed to consciously putting aside meaning and theology to sit in thrall to the replete wonder of the moviemaking—and the world Malick depicts. If we are lucky, or blessed, we not only hear the music but “are the music while the music lasts” (Eliot, “Dry Savages”). That movement might best explain Malick’s desire to provoke wonder at wonder itself. In ways enticing and mystifying, then, in what may be the longest experimental film ever made, To the Wonder perhaps brings viewers, finally, to “arrive where we started and know the place for the first time” (“Little Gidding”).

Roy Anker is professor of English at Calvin College. His most recent book is Of Pilgrims and Fire: When God Shows Up at the Movies (Eerdmans), and he’s working on a book-length engagement with the films of Terrence Malick.