For the Beauty of the Earth: A HIDDEN LIFE

"Therefore to him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin." James 4:17
 
From Terrence Malick, among the most earnest and spiritual of all filmmakers, comes A Hidden Life, a story of how difficult it can be to live a moral life in extreme times. How timely, and how timeless. In its persuasive, all-enveloping, overwhelming style, it’s a story of how small one person’s struggles can be against the enormity of nature’s landscapes, and the apocalyptic stakes of global conflict. And yet, one person’s struggles are enormous, a massive interior space with a thousand interconnected emotional tendrils tying him to his family, his community, his country, and his world. What is done to the least, is done to all. Malick’s interest in the interconnectedness of one another and to larger spiritual sensitivities, so beautifully explored in the expansive Tree of Life and the interior To the Wonder, is here aligned with a historical narrative that adds a dread trajectory, a sense of dark doom chugging like a distant locomotive underneath the pastoral beauty. It takes place in Austria during World War II. A farmer (August Diehl) and his wife (Valerie Pachner) live a simple life planting, harvesting, doing household chores, looking after his elderly widowed mother, and raising three adorable daughters. And yet, what has happened to their country? Their fellow citizens are enthralled to a bigoted strongman who goads violence against minorities and uses bellicose invasive rhetoric against their foreign neighbors, who cages those he deems unwanted, and threatens to crush any dissenters, as a lack of deference paid to this ruler makes one a traitor. It is probably inevitable that this peaceful farmer will be called to the front, and forced to pledge allegiance to Hitler to do so. Failure will mean imprisonment, torture, death. He prays. He talks to his wife. He consults his priest. And yet, when the time comes, only he can decide how deeply held his beliefs really are. The movie builds an accumulation of detail, piling up Malick’s attention to casual poetry of everyday life: a small dazzle of light on the ground, the soft soothing wind through the grass, the gentle play of a child, or the comfort of a ritual. We feel all too acutely what the evil of the world evokes to protect, even as it erodes and destroys.

Malick, pushing his discursive, intuitive editing and sensitive, wandering camera into emotive abstraction of late — Song to Song and Knight of Cups, his circuitous stories of romance and mental anguish against semi-autobiographical showbiz backdrops, are perhaps the loosest and most hypnotic films on the bounds of mainstream cinema in recent memory, at once empathetic and abstruse — here weds his style to a narrative with a stations-of-the-cross rehearsal of one man’s stubborn refusal to swear loyalty to a cause he rightly views as evil. In the early going, Joerg Widmer’s crystal-sharp scope cinematography finds enormous natural beauty dwarfing the farm, threatening to swallow up their village with overwhelming beauty. How can there be danger in a place so close to nature, so close to God, the mountains stretching high until fog and clouds are one, vast verdant fields and flowing hilly pastures canting at steep angles offset by the tilting camera. Everything is at peace, but as virulently patriotic villagers stormily invade the spaces of the farmer and his wife — skulking at the edges of frames or sauntering up drunk on prejudice and wagging index fingers — it’s clear the toxic influence of the Nazi propaganda is awakening ugliness that’ll be hard to contain or reverse. The masks are off, the farmer murmurs in one line of Malickian voice overs that run, per his custom, in spare, direct, moving monologues used as lyrical counterpoints and underpinnings to the gorgeous montages cut cleanly and evocatively in his typically poetic rhythms. As the film’s arc pushes the farmer into smaller boxes, backing him into political corners that become prisons figurative and literal, he holds fast to his deep moral belief that to assist the Nazis, no matter how trivially or even to simply save his own life, is to become one. No amount of hectoring from neighbors or pleading from elders or punishments from government officials can change his mind. It’s a tragedy about the toll goodness can take; it dares to look at the damage doing the right thing can inflict upon a person, upon a family, when everyone around is succumbing to the wrong things simply because it’s easier to go along to get along. It’s one thing to know there’s a deep evil stirring in your countrymen; it’s another entirely to risk everything to resist being a passive witness to it. One small personal act of resistance will not change the grand scheme of things. But what if the greater cost is to do nothing?

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.

Wonder, Wander: TO THE WONDER

To the Wonder is the kind of film that’s so evocative and thought provoking that to say it is about nothing says more about you than about the film. It’s the latest from Terrence Malick, the master poet of cinema. He wields the camera and the editing bay like Whitman or Frost used their pens, sketching beautiful imagery and natural detail to evoke in an instant the deepest of reflections. Unlike his last film, the confident spiritual coming-of-age panorama The Tree of Life, this new film is confident in its hesitance. Here is a film that pushes his style even further, more abstraction and more ellipsis, dialogue slipping further away from the images, narration sparser and rarely less than a kind of pure yearning for an elusive something. Where Tree of Life, through an intensely personal montage of childhood experience, managed to examine existence itself from the dawn of time to an abstract timelessness of a conclusion, To the Wonder is an earthy, specific, and wounded picture about characters shyly, strongly trying and failing to connect with each other and with a sense of a bigger picture. What is Truth? What is Love? What is Wonder?

The Wonder of the title refers to a literal place, the island Mont Saint-Michel in Normandy, France, where Neil (Ben Affleck) and Marina (Olga Kurylenko) spend happy hours in the beginning of their romance. We see them nuzzling each other, caressing shoulders, holding hands, relaxed, leaning into each other’s arms. But Wonder can be both awe, a miraculous feeling of surprise and revelation, and pondering, to be filled with curiosity and questioning. These two characters will spend the course of the film wondering towards wonder as the film follows them in and out of love. Neil, in love with this Parisian woman, wishes to move back to the United States with her and so Marina, along with her daughter, follows him there, happy at first, but eventually consumed with a nagging emptiness as their relationship strains.

But we begin in a state of love. The two communicate their love, their infatuation, through touching, through subtle exposures. They chase after each other playfully, entering into a kind of dance with Emmanuel Lubezki’s expressive cinematography that captures landscapes both natural and manmade with a wandering poetic eye, lingering on tall stalks of grass in windswept fields, shallow water on shifting mud as the tide rolls in, tidy lines of colorful packages on aisle after aisle of supermarket shelves, cool fluorescent reflections on a row of laundromat washers. These two people are merely another aspect of these landscapes, their every movement, their very proximity to each other becoming richly evocative of their emotional states.

As they fall out of love, that distance is no longer a dance of playfulness, but rather a hazy mood of stillness and resonant, hesitant serenity. Dissatisfaction sets in with the distance. Proximity often brings argument, muffled dissonance beneath the quietly swirling score. We hear their voices, hers more than his, whispering to us in urgent narration, questioning their place in the world, entering in conversations with their innermost desires and fears, pleading to a God they may or may not find comfort in. Even what Malick captures of their routines gathers metaphoric weight. He tests soil and water near construction sights for underlying problems, trying to keep forward movement from inadvertently destroying those around it. She is often found drifting, twirling, sitting in sparsely furnished rooms (impeccably designed by Jack Fisk) and empty streets, aimless and yearning. There’s a sense that they need more than each other to be happy, but the matter of what that more entails is something with which they wrestle and wonder, together sometimes, but largely alone.

An intriguing comparison to their plight – held in tension between needs both philosophical and physical – is found in an even more sparsely plotted and overtly meditative subplot about a priest (Javier Bardem) who presides over the congregation the characters attend. We follow him as he moves, every step and action controlled, as he moves isolated through a Bressonian collection of visits to the homes and neighborhoods of his most impoverished congregants. We hear his voice on the soundtrack as well, whispering to God for answers even as he’s reaching out to those in pain, which causes him pain. Is this love? It’s a spiritual love and earthly devotion that becomes a burden on the man who takes it as his solemn duty.

To call To the Wonder plotless is only to note how Malick has moved from positioning his poetry of cinema in more conventional containers – his Badlands and Days of Heaven period pieces with genre elements held in place by a mood that was already distinctly his, The Thin Red Line and The New World historical epics, The Tree of Life bildungsromans of both one boy and the world itself – to a film that is ruminative and expressive, finding outward expression of interior feelings its overwhelming feature and intent. I found myself thinking of poet Archibald MacLeish’s line “A poem should not mean / But be.” In its abstraction in pursuit of stronger emotion, To the Wonder does not mean, but is. Detail comes strong and precise – a new flame (Rachel McAdams) during a separation, a child suddenly entering the picture – sitting in focus, then fading, perhaps unexplained, but still felt, into the current of life, in a questioning quest to the purity of awe.

Life, the Universe, and Everything: THE TREE OF LIFE

When I reminisce about my childhood, I don’t tend to remember specific scenes. No, what my mind conjures up are images, fragments, sounds, sensations, and emotions. Out of this noise arise scenes, moments, narratives informed by the stories and anecdotes that I remember and that I’ve been told that contextualize almost all. The genius of Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life is how it builds a story of a family out of such a collage of impressions, fragments of time, space, and sound. It leaves contextualizing to the audience, to gather clues from concrete details and allow them to slowly, inexorably, build up into a larger picture. The film carried me into its rhythms, its patterns, its moods, its swirling classical score and flowing montage, creating within me a deep sense of calm, a hushed reverence for the immensity and complexity of life. This is not merely cinema; this is a reverie, a trance, a meditation, a prayer.

Malick, a rare auteur indeed, has released just four films in the past four decades. He creates works that in other hands could be the stuff of cheap pulp, a killing spree (Badlands), a love triangle (Days of Heaven), a world war (The Thin Red Line), and a historical romance (The New World). His work exhibits a patience that builds upon philosophy, romantic visions of the natural world, and deep inquiries into the human experience, imbued with the rigor of intellectualism curled into pure emotion. These are films that feel engaged on a deeper than usual level with the characters within them. These are characters that don’t simply feel real; they feel imbued with a soul, a tangible spiritual nature that informs the core of their very being. In his latest film, Malick takes this one step further, giving us a tender, earnest look at the interior life of man across the vast reaches of time and space.

The Tree of Life opens on the face of a little girl who will become a mother and eventually lose a son, three decades in as little as three blinks of an eye. We are introduced to the slow, ragged early stages of mourning as the world moves along without this boy. The camera is subjective, but through whose eyes are we seeing? Attention is pulled towards shadows, towards neighbor kids. Are we searching futilely for this lost boy? His mother (Jessica Chastain) talks to an older relative (Fiona Shaw) who, in a cold close-up, tells her to be thankful she has two other sons. This is no consolation. His father (Brad Pitt) tells those offering condolences to move along, that they’ll be fine, but there’s a small hint of doubt in his eyes. The family has been wounded by this mysterious loss that laps at the edges of the frames, the circumstances of which never to be explored. This is a loss that can never be explained. A sudden death is never quantifiable, understandable, and yet it is carries with it nothing but meaning, an existential fracture that can never be fully repaired.

We see one of the surviving sons years later. He (Sean Penn) moves through a world of modern architecture, all cold angles, glass, metal, and white, dry walls. We gather that the anniversary of his brother’s death is approaching, that it may even be this very day. Has this man been imagining the pain his parents felt when they first heard the news? How could his brother have left them? What purpose could it have served? What has this trauma done to him, to his family? “Where were you?” is the whispered question that rattles in his head in his mother’s voice. Who is “you?” Is it his brother? The universe? God?

As if to answer such a question that echoes from deep within a place of unimaginable pain and loss, Malick’s film flashes back, back before the death, back before birth, back to the birth of the universe. Nebulas swirl. Planetary bodies collide. Volcanoes erupt. Soon, though, life begins. Single-celled organisms soon give way to wriggling sea creatures that are soon enough giant sea creatures then, before long, dinosaurs. Then, though, a mother gives birth. It’s Texas. It’s the 1950’s. It’s a boy.

Once again, we are privy to a subjective camera. Now we have a viewpoint to match that of a young child. The camera is low as we follow an infant’s gaze, which becomes a toddler’s tottering gait, which becomes a rambunctious schoolchild’s run. We see large adult faces looming down, a jack o’lantern’s toothy grin held low, bubbles, grass, a cake, a plate, a candle, a lantern, a chair that seems to move itself, what must be an unseen adult’s hand kept out of frame. Under Malick’s direction Emmanuel Lubezki’s camera is inquisitive and roaming, catching bits of light and dust in its search for tangible details from Jack Fisk’s production design, Jeanette Scott’s costumes, from nature itself, as it grows gradually taller, smoother, more often tightly focused. Our gaze grows older alongside this young boy. Its restless curiosity finds deeper motivations, deeper questions. The grass has weeds that must be plucked; smiles and braids, even a slip, belong specifically to a girl-next-door; the commonplace mass of humanity has within it the disabled, the criminal, the wounded.

As he gets older, he (now Hunter McCracken) is allowed to roam more freely. “I found a dinosaur bone!” he shouts, holding a large rock he has plucked from an overgrown field. There’s an intense imaginative connection to the world in this boy. At play, he’s free. At home, he becomes withdrawn, carefully sizing up his father’s expression at the dinner table, constantly checking to make sure that he’s within an acceptable range of behavior. His mother, a kind, sweet, gentle presence, encourages his gentility. His father, harsher, tougher, more burdensome with the weight of his expectations, encourages a kind of self-doubting perfectionism. “You can’t be too good,” he tells his three sons. He’s rough, maybe even hurtful at times, but he’s just trying to show his love the best that he can. He doesn’t want to see in his sons a reflection of his own perceived failings.

Throughout the childhood seen here, the boy is often in the company of one of his brothers (Laramie Eppler), a companion in his adventures. The specter of death hangs heavy over their relationship and, though we know it is inevitable, it may even be our reason for being cast back into this sea of memories, the fact of his death oftentimes fades away. There are good times. There are bad times. But always his brother is present. There’s great love between them, but also rivalry, great caring, but also great potential for pain. When one coaxes the other into a dangerous situation that causes a sudden hurt, there is immediate remorse. “You can hit me if you want,” he says, offering his brother a plank of wood. The brother considers it, but tosses it aside. There may be hurt but there is forgiveness as long as they’re together. Later, we will see the brothers beaming at each other from opposite sides of a window, tapping on the glass. It’s in moments like this, a moment of solid and clear separation, that the brother’s eventual fate is brought back to mind.

This is a film that nestles an intensely personal human drama, sharply cutting to the bone, brushing strongly against the nerves, within the context of the entirety of existence, from birth to death, from the beginning of time, to an imagined reconciliation with all that came before. This juxtaposition shows how infinitesimally small individual human stories are in comparison to the grand sweep of time, and yet how each aspect of history, the personal and the universal, are just as profoundly moving and impactful, are just as mysterious. The mysteries of nature, the mysteries of the universe, the mysteries of God and the meaning of life, the mysteries of mankind, and the mysteries of what makes a man that which he becomes, all are equally ephemeral, unknowable, and endlessly ponderable. Can the sadness of the modern man brooding in a skyscraper be tied back directly to events of his childhood? Can the trauma of modern lives trace roots back to the dawn of the dinosaurs? Here is a film of questions that provoke deep, lingering lines of inquiry and yet never once moment-to-moment feels overly calculated.

Malick’s masterful technique here allows the moments, the shots, the scenes, the emotions, to flow intuitively. If I had to step back and explain away every transition, every fragmentary inclusion, I might be hard pressed to do so. After three viewings, I’m still not entirely sure what to make of the conclusion which offers a reunion and reconciliation but exists on a heightened imagined plane that seems either too literal or too vague. (It also feels somehow inevitable and perfect to me). But who cares about explaining away the magic of the film’s trancelike power, its hushed prayer for understanding and earnest exploration of the emotional landscapes of modernity? Each cut, each movement, feels so right. The film unspools like a memory, like a revelation, poetic, simple yet deep, densely enigmatic and utterly personal.