In the Cards: KNIGHT OF CUPS

I always leave a Terrence Malick film with my mind still cloudy with its cadence, and my eyes seeing the world more closely. He’s always been a poetic filmmaker, prone to gliding away from obvious plot progression through visual metaphor and a roaming curiosity for finding the beauty, the sublime, in any given moment. Lately, though, he’s been drifting further away from narrative. Where once his artful and spiritual approach was tied to the likes of a World War II film (The Thin Red Line) or a tale of colonial America (The New World), he now digs into his character’s minds with increasingly elliptical and empathetic discursiveness. He builds repeating patterns of images and rhyming, rhythmic, trance-like editing. Through The Tree of Life and To the Wonder and now his latest, Knight of Cups, he’s been drawn to similar images: beatific but sad women, stern fathers, people running barefoot on wet sand, hands gliding along surfaces smooth (stone, sheets, running water, skin) and textured (hair, grass, leaves). Does he repeat himself? Very well, then he repeats himself.

In Knight of Cups story and character are gathered only in flashes, flowing forth not in scenes but in impressions, moods, juxtapositions. Malick’s recurring images are the only entry point, and as a result it continues his trend toward gradually more obscurant and opaque films, increasingly alienating for anyone who can’t quite get on his wavelength or forgo skepticism about the sincerity of his intentions. But there’s real meditative, contemplative power for those of us who can. This new film stars Christian Bale as a disillusioned Hollywood screenwriter wandering through a womanizing, glamorous life in Los Angeles. But this is no hectic star-struck satire. Malick takes his style and approach to urban environs for the first time, but finds the intimate and the natural growing through. Every woman the man interacts with gets taken to the beach and cavorts in the puddles and waves. Gardens and boulevards express themselves through concrete and surround glassy mansions. One cameo-stuffed sequence finds a party in a palatial mansion, but Malick’s eye is often drawn to the mountains beyond.

This is an ethereal and spiritual story of a man who feels hollow, who tries to fill the void with women (a terrific lineup: Cate Blanchett, Natalie Portman, Freida Pinto, Imogen Poots, Teresa Palmer), with family (a deadbeat brother, Wes Bentley; an imposing father, Brian Dennehy; a warm mother, Cherry Jones), with nature, with religion (a priest played by Armin Mueller-Stahl). But he can’t quite make the pieces fit. He’s a pilgrim without progress (the first voice we hear is Ben Kingsley reading from John Bunyan’s 1678 text), going through the motions. Not even an earthquake or a robbery can shake him from his haze of disaffected yearning. He wants to be made whole, and yet can’t figure out how to fill the missing parts of his soul. There’s a solemn sadness to the film’s hovering beauty, Emmanuel Lubezki’s luminous camera breathing and moving on a plane of enlightenment the character can’t. It floats, slowly tracking or pushing, distracted by beauty all around. It follows a stream of consciousness, of memory, poetic associations, intuitive connections, casual and tactile expressions of faith and philosophy.

Bale walks along empty beaches and vacant backlots, stands stranded in the desert, sees homeless and hurting people on sidewalks and in clinics, hobnobs with Hollywood elites, rolls about with lithe naked women, sinks into pools. He’s drifting through experiences, part of them without being a part. Tarot cards, agents, parents, lovers, all have advice to impart about what gives life meaning. Each person - a talented cast posing and maneuvering, each bringing a different flavor and tone into the mix - has an effect on him. And yet there are no direct dialogue exchanges of any import as scenes slide and collide, linger on silences and flow with wall-to-wall impassioned murmuring voice over and classical music cut with bits of score and rock. The film is a fog, rootless, directionless, adding up to great meaning that the character can’t access. Strangely, this walls off the audience at times. I felt its yearning for completion, was often moved by it, and still had moments when I stared at the screen in befuddlement as images collected while only occasionally connecting.

Perhaps the key to unlocking this entrancing, beguiling, beautiful mystery of a film comes when Bale imagines (or is it actually happening?) a rooftop confrontation with his stubborn but frail father. The old man laments that he thought as he aged everything about life would begin to make sense, but instead he’s sad to find nothing but a confusing tangle of messy memories. The film finds moments of intense emotional drama and thoroughly somnambulant despair, holding them both at the same remove, behind artful glass and sacred aloofness. Moments of pain and moments of grace are swallowed up by the character’s depression and the film’s interest in turning his distress into beautiful suffering. It all adds up to a heavy spell I’ve found hard to shake, even as my mind struggled in the moment and afterwards to puzzle through its throughlines. This isn’t one of Malick’s best efforts, lacking his usual intuitiveness in its progression, but that’s mostly due to how closed off it feels. I get the sense this is intensely personal, a movie dragged kicking and screaming out of his innermost being and now sits there vulnerable and foreboding, full of raw spiritual power.

Dead Man: THE REVENANT

The Revenant is a simple pulp revenge story blown up to epic proportions. A gnarly tale of extreme survival and an ambivalent ode to masculine gruffness and stubborn righteousness, it takes as its setting wintry snow-swept tundra and forests of the American West in the early 19th century. There we find a group of fur trappers whose expedition is about to go wrong in just about every way it could. It’s a rugged Western and a bloody survival thriller, shot in gorgeous widescreen landscapes and patient lingering looks at fading sunsets, snaking fog, and curling smoke. There’s a great sense of place and space, striking and vividly photographed in graceful shots of impeccable detail. With it comes the feeling that this endlessly stretching wilderness trampled by invading white men and cycles of violence has led to a form of derangement. Even those who survive will be ever changed by the sheer effort it takes to survive on a good day, let alone when stranded in a cascading series of worst-case scenarios.

Star Leonardo DiCaprio exerts tremendous effort as the main figure tortured by the events of the film. It’s practically a secular passion play of frontier suffering. He plays an expert tracker and trapper haunted by memories of dead loved ones. After a bloody battle with Native Americans (shot in harrowing, expertly choreographed long takes), his colleagues are desperate to get home. Too bad, then, that DiCaprio is mauled by a bear (an overwhelming, mostly convincing, sequence) and left for dead. He's hastily placed in a shallow grave by a greedy and mean coworker (Tom Hardy) who’d just rather get back to the fort than sit around waiting for help. This all unfolds with patience and slowly accumulating dread, a series of inciting incidents gradually occurring. We meet a variety of men (Domhnall Gleeson, Maze Runner’s Will Poulter, newcomer Forrest Goodluck, Buzzard’s Joshua Burge) who are exhausted, crabby, sore, beaten down by the elements, resigned to dreary life in an isolating kill-or-be-killed ecosystem. But then there’s merely DiCaprio, alive only through some combination of vengeance and righteous spite, stumbling agonizingly slowly back towards civilization, and the man who did him wrong.

It’s one violent setback after the next as DiCaprio – torn to ribbons, rendered mainly mute, limping, groaning, spitting, bleeding – scratches his way through ice cold water, blinding snow, roaring winds, mysterious Natives, vicious traders, and other assorted conflicts and obstacles. It’s practically a catalogue of every way frontier life could kill you: weapons (rifles, arrows, knives, tomahawks, pistols), the elements (low temperatures, rapids, avalanches), disease, infection, dehydration, starvation, accidents, battles, and murder. The film sets up clearly a variety of reasons why Hardy is loathsome, though still reasonably human. And DiCaprio goes through a wringer of endless sequences of torturous pain – a faintly and grimly hilarious pile on of deadly and dangerous incidents – escalating in an exhausted what-now? effect. These visceral strands combine to create an elemental desire for DiCaprio, who should be dead several dozen times over, to get back to the fort and prove Hardy wrong.

But of course the overarching tension of the piece is not whether or not DiCaprio will live to confront Hardy again. Nor is it whether or not he’ll learn along the way that revenge is ultimately unsatisfying. (This is a revenge tale with movie stars, after all. We know where it’s headed.) It’s a tension between art house existential dread and gooey genre fare – never more than in a subplot about Natives looking for a kidnapped daughter (an inverted Searchers) treated as a plot engine and overly mystical essentialism. Alternately transcendent and brutal, the main suspense comes from wondering just how much punishment is going to be dealt to our hero. By the time we get a climactic nasty close-up of blood-soaked snow, we’ve already seen a mauling, a stabbing, a hanging, a rape, a few massacres, and a dead horse used for warmth, Tauntaun-style. It’s a lot to take, each new act of violence handled very seriously, with the thudding weight of a film out to be tactile and gross, emphasizing how difficult it all is.

Torn between artful self-importance and gripping narrative demands, it nonetheless forms a compelling whole. It’s directed and co-written by Alejandro González Iñárritu, who makes Very Important and very showy movies about human suffering like Babel and Birdman. His co-writer is Mark L. Smith, who wrote the brisk and nasty little horror movie Vacancy. It’s an interesting pairing. Together they’ve made a movie that’s gripping and long, a beautiful, miserable, suspenseful slog, well over two hours of one thing after another. It’s elegiac and solid, staggering natural formations held on screen as long shivering breaths between moments of pain, and then human figures slowly make their way through them. We might watch for several minutes as DiCaprio limps and winces his way up a hill, then crouches down behind a tree to see what new complications are in store. Nothing happens easy in this film. Iñárritu takes a simple story and makes it a showcase for his style and his skill, and the expert craft of his cast and crew, holding the ominous and steady tone.

The Revenant relies on committed performers and incredible cinematography to achieve its aims. DiCaprio is at his most primal here, often playing wordless scenes of anguish and exhaustion that are among his least phony on screen moments. But just as good is the supporting cast, especially an intense and unexpectedly darkly funny Hardy, a quietly panicking Poulter, and a hesitantly authoritative Gleeson. Together they form a nice cross-section of the different ways people can react to conflicts of lawless violence from nature and from man. The action is captured in dazzling photography by Emmanuel Lubezki, whose work on the likes of The Tree of Life, Children of Men, Burn After Reading, and many more equally visually rich films, has cemented him as one of modern cinema’s best image-makers. He uses austere long shots, drinking in natural beauty, and then hammers home turmoil in fluid takes. He gives the film its massive wide-open spaces, and its close-up intensity, clinging to actors, swiveling and swooping as they get swept up in chaotic moments. This is exquisitely inflated pulp.

An Actor on the Verge: BIRDMAN OR (THE UNEXPECTED VIRTUE OF IGNORANCE)

At the corner of anxious depression and artistic frustration is Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), an emotionally and physically claustrophobic backstage comedy of sorts. It stars Michael Keaton as an actor on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He plays Riggan Thomson, an actor whose stardom peaked two decades ago with his role as Birdman in a series of superhero movies and now sees his mental state rapidly deteriorating as his passion project comeback – writing, directing, and starring in a Broadway play based on a Carver story – nears opening night. If the first part of the conceit sounds a lot like Keaton, who two decades ago left the Batman series and is now in what’s being touted as a “comeback role,” lets hope his psyche’s in a better state.

The film floats through lengthy Steadicam takes from master cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki edited to look (nearly) like one long fluid shot. Hardly novel, Hitchcock made one film look like one shot all the way back in 1948 with Rope. But it’s a trick so few attempt that it retains an impressive power. It’s transfixing, sliding through rehearsals and previews with smart elisions of time as the camera roams in and around this New York theater on the week leading up to the opening night. As characters zip in and out of scenes with expertly timed dialogue and blocking, I sometimes sat back from the proceedings, simply enjoying the logistical satisfaction of so many moving parts coming together. It’s a little better than a gimmick, effectively trapping the audience in the film’s headspace with no down time. The pressure is high. The walls are closing in.

Keaton, one of our finest actors when it comes to exploring the wilds between id and ego, does a terrific job holding down the increasingly mad center of the film. His character is a pitiable narcissist who has bitten off more than he can chew. He’s doing this to be relevant, to be loved, and to make art, definitely in that order. He’s frazzled, overwhelmed by the multitasking asked of a multi-hyphenate, his only solace talking to the voice hallucinating inside his head egging him on for better or usually worse. Surrounding him is a fine collection of showbiz types. There’s the exasperated producer (Zack Galifianakis), the leading ladies (Naomi Watts and Andrea Riseborough), the preening Method actor (Edward Norton), the ex-wife (Amy Ryan), a critic (Lindsay Duncan), and stagehands (including Merrit Wever). Best is Emma Stone as Keaton’s ex-addict daughter working as his assistant, a non-showbiz voice in rooms of people rapidly disappearing up their own egos.

The parts are performed with great precision, words spat out in rapid-fire monologues and tense dialogues that harmonize with the all-drum-solo score from Antonio Sanchez. Together they’re an endless clanging keeping the entire experience off balance and driving forward. The cast is free of the usual shot/reverse shot coverage, allowing them greater control over the rhythms and pauses, the psychological space as well as the physical. They create a world of people symbiotically clinging to each other as both a career move and an artistic expression, acting out their interpersonal dramas in the wings and dressing rooms before sublimating those energies into performances on stage. Their banter is as crisp and funny as it is painful, and the laughs start to choke off the more desperately the sweat appears. Narcissism and insecurity make a potent mix, one the film is unrelenting in conjuring.

At first it appears tonally different and a stylistic outlier in Iñárritu’s oeuvre. It’s lighter, more fluid, and about a feeling of emotional constipation and professional frustration that, though deeply felt and important to the characters, pales in severity to the violence and misery on display in his Very Serious Dramas Amores Perros, 21 Grams, and Babel. I appreciated those film’s miserabilist impulses, but he hit a wall with the dire Biutiful, luxuriating in signifiers of importance without much more to say with them. So on the one hand, Birdman’s relative lightness on its feet is a much-needed artistic rejuvenation. On the other, it’s as deeply pessimistic as anything he’s made. It loathes, thinking artists are egomaniacs, Hollywood is hollow, critics are lazy, and audiences are stupid at worst, gullible at best. The core of rage in Keaton’s performance, playing a character who feels most upset that after all this effort he may not receive affection for it, plays off this omnidirectional frustration that assumes the worst out of everyone.

Birdman’s bravura cinematography is also a reflection of this cramped, thematically repetitive expression, as pressure mounts and the play stumbles on its way to opening night, the drums clanging, the camera ceaselessly swirling, the cast executing their tightly choreographed blocking. It plays on the surface pleasures of the backstage drama, threading it with humor sometimes so dark it borders on gallows. By the end, it’s miserable. Still, it’s hard to look away from such a high wire act on the last nerve’s edge tension between comedy and tragedy. You get the sense Riggan’s entire existence depends on this play going well. And given his, and the film’s, tendency to assume the worst, the outcome looks bleak, indeed.

Free Falling: GRAVITY

A relentlessly suspenseful technical exercise, Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity is a visual marvel. It tells a story of survival as a space shuttle is destroyed by a cloud of debris mid-space walk, leaving two astronauts adrift. For the next 90 minutes or so, they scramble to survive in a plot that’s spare and tough, unblinkingly and unceasingly orbiting with these imperiled characters. It’s just one thing after another going wrong, the cold hard cruelty of physics throwing ever more obstacles in the way. The film is an absorbing astonishment of virtuoso visual expression and aural detail. The plot is so simple and yet the feeling of floating unmoored and unprotected in the dead of space, scrambling to find some way, any way to safety is harrowing and overwhelming. The sense of isolation and sensory alienation is vast and impressive, a tension that tightens early and doesn’t even begin to let up until barely before the end credits roll.

I would describe the film as containing sequences of sensational special effects, but it’s more accurate to describe the entire film as one fluid effects sequence. Cuarón’s camera, guided by master cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, floats freely and smoothly in long takes in stunning 3D that contain staggering amounts of visual information, subtle details of stars twinkling in the far background as our planet sits below, the astronauts walking outside their spacecraft near foreground. Careful attention is paid to the ripple effects of one motion in the void of space, tethers twisting, metal shifting, a screw slowly floating away once loosened from its position. The opening scene has tranquility about it, a subdued sense of motion as if the characters were simply underwater. It is silence and perspective that shows otherwise. When the first wave of debris hits, disaster unfolds in eerie near-total silence, metal ripped to ribbons and twisting in the vacuum of space with nary a sound but the ragged gasps and exclamations of the panicked survivors.

It’s a scenario that’s instantly chilling. As the actors in the suits, Sandra Bullock and George Clooney need not push too hard to make the sense of peril and hopelessness known, surrounded as they are by so much black, cold space. As performers, they’re two of the most naturally likable screen presences around, but though that’s part of the attraction here, they’re also delivering terrific pared down performances. These are impressive physical performances, fit and expressive in movements and body language, working seamlessly within precisely calibrated shots filled with exacting and convincing computer generated detail. Bullock especially does fantastic work here, for a character in which determination and hopelessness exist in close proximity, a mournful resignation that’s scraped away by steely determination. It’s all about the essentials. They’re people struggling to survive, all business, but for some light conversation that attempts to flesh out a token amount of backstory. Their characters move forward, proceeding to the next logical step, then the next. I found myself wondering how they could possibly get out of this situation.

The events of the film seem completely rigorously plausible, at least within the heightened movie nature of it all. As I’m not a scientist – far from it – I can’t comment on that further or more specifically. But the film proceeds with a cool, observational approach to its resolution that both makes sense and provides constant surprise from the characters’ combinations of resourcefulness and skill. The wonder of the film is not the characters behaviors or even, strictly speaking, the events of the plot. The film’s constant astonishment is the way it is shown, in smoothly composed shots of seamless digital amazement. There are moments I can’t wait to see again, mostly to wrap my head around the complexity with which they unfold, quickly and gracefully, as I gaped at the screen trying to process it all.

Cuarón has always been something of a visual master, from his sci-fi masterpiece Children of Men (2006) and fantasy adaptations A Little Princess (1995) and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) to even something as deceptively grounded as his earthy relationship drama Y Tu Mamá También (2001). His camera’s curiosity and exquisitely choreographed (and digitally assisted) fluidity in conjunction with his characters’ inner lives is his trademark source of amazement. In Gravity, he pushes the visual immersion of his style as far as it has ever been. It is the work of one of our most visually accomplished filmmakers showing off. Its rigorous simplicity is a constant source of wonderment. Nothing more or less than a feat of technology creating an impressive, immersive experience, I spent Gravity in a state of tense awe.