REVIEWS
To TheWonder Reviewed by Lee Marshall
After The Tree Of Life, Terrence Malick continues his slow wade into the mystic swamp in To The Wonder, shedding vain and distracting directorial possessions like character, dialogue, acting and story along the way in order to focus on the cosmic universals — though this time with a more overtly Christian flavour. It may be that we are being taken into a dream life of remembered fragments here, or perhaps a series of flashbacks in the instant before death, played in extreme slow motion. The problem is that Malick’s dream of life, with
its narrative core of a weak man with a paralysing fear of emotional commitment, just isn’t that inter- esting or original. The pictures are pretty, the music is pretty, the existential voice-overs are pretty: but after almost two hours of wistful, mes- sage-larded prettiness, Malick’s latest visual sym- phonic poem has us squirming in our seats. More booed than applauded at its Venice press
premiere, the film will struggle to match the respectable arthouse and urban miniplex world tour enjoyed by The Tree Of Life. One problem is that it is, essentially, more of the same — not so much The Tree Of Life 2, as The Tree Of Life Redux — and as the end titles reveal, Malick even re-uses footage from his previous film. Another snag is that if the performances of Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain gave an edge to that fitfully engaging cos- mic ramble, the same cannot be said of the name cast of To The Wonder — though it is perhaps not Ben Affleck and Javier Bardem’s fault if they never
n 14 Screen International at Toronto September 7, 2012
SPECIAL PRESENTATIONS
US. 2012. 113mins Director Terrence Malick Production companies Film Nation Entertainment, Brothers K Productions International sales FilmNation Entertainment,
www.wearefilmnation.com Producers Sarah Green, Nicolas Gonda Executive producers Glen Basner, Jason Krigsfeld, Joseph Krigsfeld Cinematography Emmanuel Lubezki Editors AJ Edwards, Keith Fraase, Shane Hazen, Christopher Roldan, Mark Yoshikawa Production designer Jack Fisk Music Hanan Townshend Main cast Ben Affleck, Olga Kurylenko, Rachel McAdams, Javier Bardem, Tatiana Chiline
take off. It feels as if Malick has told them just to wander around looking pained. Playing out like a short treatment, the story
opens in France, where a couple whose names we never learn (unless we read the pressbook) are cap- tured, via impressionistic, jump-cut fragments, in the throes of first love. They are played by an affect- less Affleck and Ukrainian-born French actress Olga Kurylenko, whose look-at-me mannerisms are a distraction to all but the worshipping camera. She turns out to have a 10-year-old daughter,
Tatiana (Tatiana Chiline, in one of the film’s only really convincing performances) who gets on well with her mum’s new boyfriend. After a visit to the island monastery of Mont St-Michel — which, as we are not informed, was once known as ‘La Merveille’, or The Wonder — they relocate to some- where in the Mid-West (actually Oklahoma), where Affleck’s character seems to work as an environ- mental engineer for a mining company (we see him wandering over slag heaps and being cornered by residents angered by the lead and cadmium lev- els in their backyards). The honeymoon phase soon wears off — for the
woman, as well as the audience — and she looks for spiritual guidance from a Catholic priest (Javier Bardem, whose sudden, incongruous appearance on the screen prompted a burst of laughter from the Venice audience) who is himself going through a moody crisis of faith. With Tatiana not fitting in at her new school, her
mother’s visa running out and Affleck’s character too frozen by his fear of commitment to offer mar- riage, mother and daughter eventually leave. While
they are away, Affleck takes up with Jane (McAd- ams), a childhood flame. But the Kurylenko char- acter cannot find work back in Paris, and wants to return to give the relationship one more chance. That sounds almost like a story, but Malick’s
method, as in The Tree Of Life, is to shoot around scenes rather than to shoot scenes, to encourage what looks like extensive improvisation — and then edit the few more conventional dramatic sequences to lose most of the dialogue; Affleck is left with barely a line. One of the few characters who is given much dialogue is Italian actress Romina Mondello, who suddenly pops up as a con- fidante to the Kurylenko character. It is an odd choice, as the virtual monologue in which she encourages her friend to free herself (spoken in Italian — one of four languages that appear in the film) is one of the film’s more ridiculous scenes. Emmanuel Lubezki’s magic-hour photography
is as ravishing as ever — and together with Hanan Townshend’s sensitive, unfurling orchestral sound- track, comes darn close to nailing ‘the wonder’ at times. But the reduction of drama to voice-over comments and revelations (Bardem’s are in Span- ish, Kurylenko’s in French and English) becomes wearing well before the mid-point. When the Kurylenko character murmurs, “We
fight,” it’s news to us — but then, as if by magic, we see her and her man fighting. This is story, and male-female relationships, reduced to the sche- matic level of The Four Ages of Man, and Malick’s undoubtedly sincere attempt to reach beyond the deceiving surface to the essence of things feels, in the end, like a brand of coffee-table existentialism.
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