Hi, I’m Rafa, and today on The Long Take, we’ll be looking at a film by one of the
most distinctive and remarkable arthouse filmmakers America has ever produced. But despite the
stature that Terrence Malick has in the academic community, the general public, particularly
in his home country, has traditionally given his work a lukewarm reception.
For the majority of American moviegoers, accustomed to the traditional storytelling structures
and hallmarks of popular entertainment, Malick frustrates those expectations to an infuriating
degree. The further he has progressed in his career, the more he has abandoned the requisites
of good storytelling. Anything resembling a three act structure, a clear narrative,
and a character arc looks increasingly like a vestigial trait on an evolving organism.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the film generally considered to be his worst.
Case in point: this scene, in which Marina, played by Olga Kurylenko, learns she’s dodged
a bullet related to some medical complications.
[Doctor] What you, and your husband, need to consider is with the absence of the IUD,
is this a time that you may wanna think about children? Or is there another means for contraception --
[Marina] So I don't need to have a hysterectomy? [Doctor] That's the good news.
[Rafa] This is the first and last time we ever hear about her problematic lady bits, and it doesn’t seem
to add anything at all to our understanding of Marina’s character or her shitty marriage.
Or how about this sequence, in which we learn that Marina’s husband Neil, played by Ben Affleck,
is revealed to be some sort of environmental inspector, a fact that is never even tangentially
relevant to the story. This film is constructed almost entirely of moments like this, and
it’s easy to see why so many of Malick’s critics dismiss his movies as bloated, pretentious
nature porn featuring flat characters doing nothing at all.
But the key to understanding To the Wonder is not to view it as a drama, for in that
regard it surely fails as much as Citizen Kane fails to be a comedy. Malick is not a
storyteller, a fact that is made even more obvious by his filmmaking methods, which evolved
from massively editing the script after he shot it to not having a script at all, just
reams of notes. And I think it’s pretty obvious that this is a man who doesn’t use
storyboards at all.
Instead, like a poet, he begins with a complex idea or difficult question, places it within
a framing device (in this case, a marriage on the rocks), and “writes” on the fly,
whispering lines in the ears of his actors as they improvise scenes. His first draft,
in other words, isn't really on paper as much as it is on celluloid, and he sculpts it all
in post until, like a good poem, the film presents and examines its themes with an indirect,
delicate beauty.
His films are about people driven to seek some personal Eden or redemptive identity,
embarking on a search for meaning in a cruelly desolate yet stunningly beautiful world — a
world fundamentally intertwined with all human drama, yet entirely indifferent to it. In
Badlands, for example, Kit and Holly embark on separate journeys along the same road,
attempting to escape society in the hopes they’ll find their particular paradise out
in the badlands of Montana — for Kit, a world in which he can never be forgotten;
for Holly, a fairy tale romance that ends happily ever after. In a way, they each get
what they are looking for, but only by returning to the society from which their story began:
Kit is taken into custody as a criminal celebrity, and Holly marries the son of the lawyer who
defended her.
This circularity — fleeing from one world into another, idealizing that world, and then
returning to the place of departure and wondering just how different that other world really
was — is the fundamental structure of Malick’s films. The worlds are usually geographic,
like the primordial wilds of America and the sculpted cities of England in The New World,
but they can be temporal or conceptual as well, like 1960s suburban Texas as seen through
the lens of memory in The Tree of Life, or whatever this place is.
Of equal importance is Malick’s fascination with interrogating and subverting American
mythology. In Badlands, it was the fable of the lovers on the lam.
[Kit] Boy, if I could sing a song like that...
If I could sing a song about the way I feel right now...
It'd be a hit.
[Nat King Cole] The dream has ended, for true love died,
the night a blossom fell and touched two lips that lied.
[Rafa] In Days of Heaven, the agrarian paradise of the American west.
In The Thin Red Line, the moral righteousness of World War II.
[Soldier] Are you righteous? Kind?
Does your confidence lie in this?
Were you loved by all?
Know that I was, too.
[Rafa] In To the Wonder, the myths under scrutiny are the American dream and the sanctity of marriage.
Here, Marina, fresh off the boat, encounters a fantastical display of Americana.
But later...
At its most basic level, To the Wonder, like so many other poems before it, is about love.
Specifically, love as an act of faith. [Quintana] The husband is to love his wife as Christ loves the church.
and give his life for her. [Rafa] The priest and Marina are the central figures of the film, and their troubled
relationships, with God and with Neil respectively, are deliberate mirrors of each other. The priest, whose daily
work immerses him almost exclusively in humanity’s most desperate hours, struggles to cope with
the infinite silence from the God to whom he’s pledged his soul.
A silence paralleled in Neil’s aphasia.
Watch how Neil reacts when Marina confesses to her infidelity.
[Marina] Forgive me.
Ok, you get the point. Now, while we watch Ben do his best Ryan Gosling impression, I’d
like to mention something that I don’t really have time to get into, but deserves your attention.
Malick is an intensely elliptical filmmaker, cutting out traditional dramatic information
in favor of allusions and implications. Here all Marina says is “forgive me” and “please,”
and it’s not even clear if she said that aloud.
In situations where most directors would do this:
Malick does this.
Anyway, back to the point. Perhaps God and Neil can’t express their love in ways that can be easily understood,
or even perceived.
[Janitor] I can feel the warmth of the light, brother.
That's spiritual. I'm feeling more than just natural light. Feeling the spiritual light.
[Rafa] Or perhaps that love was never really there to begin with, and the ephemeral, haunting
beauty of the world is just as devoid of meaning as a relationship that never had a leg to stand on.
[Marina] He's killing me!
Want me to die? Here!
Both the priest and Marina, in committing to their respective covenants, are making a leap of faith.
[Quintana] You have to struggle with yourself. You have to struggle with your own... strength.
The relative lack of distinctive qualities in these characters is a deliberate choice,
not a mistake. In stripping them of individuality, they blend into each other rather than distinguish
themselves, connecting them all to some universal soul, or universal experience.
So let’s go back to this sequence for a moment. Here’s Neil listening to some citizens who
are affected by the environmental damage in their community.
[Woman] This is our property, can't we do what we wanna do with this?
I mean I tell my husband to get us out of here, but where we gonna go?
[Man] ...they had these big time lawyers, you can't get no help.
Even the dog actin' funny.
[Rafa] And here’s the priest, listening to the troubled souls of his parish.
Neither of them has the answers, nor has the power to fix anything. The most Neil can do is poke
the ground with a stick, and the most the priest can do is nod his head and touch people
with his hands while looking pious.
While some of his followers seem to think that this is enough,
the priest clearly doesn’t think so. He never says as much, but it’s written all
over his face.
Marina doesn’t seem terribly convinced, either. Yet still she presses on, submitting
to the belief that everything will work out — Neil loves her, this country loves her,
God loves her — and she risks everything on that belief.
It’s no coincidence that Jane, Neil’s other fling, experiences the same circular
journey that Marina does, beginning as a single woman suddenly smitten by Neil...
[Jane] You make me laugh. You make me happy.
committing to a relationship fueled by faith, and ending once again as a single woman facing a daunting
reality check.
[Jane] I thought I knew you.
Now I don't think you ever were.
[Rafa] Marina, the priest, Neil, and Jane: all members of one big soul,
and yet unable to coexist, despite a profound belief that they can.
Faith — not faith in any particular thing, but faith itself — is one of the constant
themes in Malick’s work. Light, that ancient metaphor for Truth, wreathes his characters
as they endlessly reach for it, spilling from windows, diffusing in cloth, refracting in water.
Some critics have misread this as some sort of religiosity, mistaking the often tragically
deluded or naïve musings of his characters as Malick preaching through them. The manner
in which he elegantly channels and limits light belies this, presents Truth as Moby
Dick: caught only in glimpses, pursued at your own peril. But rather than presenting
his Ahabs with a cynical solipsism, the sheer splendor of Malick’s imagery suggests that
these often doomed endeavors are precisely what he finds so worthy in humanity. Perhaps
it is our willingness to endure tragedy for the hope of an answer to our deepest questions
that defines the soul of our species, the thing that separates [O'Brien] the way of nature
and the way of grace.
[Rafa] More than poetry, Malick’s films are also elaborate, evocative dances — a language
of bodies in motion expressing things most other filmmakers would put only in words.
Words are deceptive in Malick’s work. As we saw in this clip, he often detaches words
from the people speaking them, transforming communication into a barrier against understanding.
Ironically, the more his characters seem to understand each other’s words, the less
they seem to understand each other. So instead, he seeks the truths our bodies cannot hide,
through movement and music: the languages of the heart.
I could talk about this and the seemingly endless list of themes in his work forever,
but we can’t spend all day on YouTube, so instead I’ll just say this: Marina is the
only one who appears to find that light of Truth — at the very end, with the dreams
of America and a happy marriage forever shattered, the landmarks of her journeys haunted by the
ghosts of her past.
Perhaps she’s realized that there’s no ultimate purpose or divine
plan to which moments like this belong, and come to accept life as the enigma that it
is, a journey in which we make the meaning for ourselves. Or, maybe, God has finally
revealed himself to her.
In these last few moments, we witness a transcendent culmination: silence, movement, light, and
the poetic closing of a circle. Mont Saint Michel, the ancient monastic fortress where
the film began: the end, and a new beginning.
So it looks like y'all really like my Godzilla essay,
so I think I might stick to comparison formats for the time being.
If the stars align, the next essay should be a face off between Star Wars and Star Trek,
so stay tuned for that.