Let me just start off by saying, I am not a fan of the Terrence Malick movies that I have seen. I have great respect for him as a filmmaker, he just doesn’t make movies that I enjoy. His previous work, the Academy Award nominated “Tree of Life” bored me to tears. Because I wasn’t going to get anything out of the nonexistent storyline, I ended up “watching” it on 10x fast forward on Blu-Ray. While “Tree of Life” was a beautiful movie it makes a better screensaver or visual effects demo reel than movie.
This movie was not much different and really felt like deleted scenes from “Tree of Life” pieced together with some footage of Ben Affleck and labeled a new movie. While this was on a much smaller scale than “Tree of Life” which basically told the tale of the beginning of the Earth to death, this covered mostly just the lives of Neil (Ben Affleck) and Marina (Olga Kurylenko) from their meeting in France to their journey to his home in Oklahoma. What happens from there is your normal series of romantic ups and downs of a couple that probably shouldn’t be together.
To be perfectly blunt that just by describing this movie, I’m practically giving away everything that happens. For Malick fans this ok, since you are just in it for the experience of the movie and for a deeper meaning rather than pure entertainment value. It seems like Malick stockpiles as much footage as possible of these actors wandering around aimlessly and tries telling the story in editing. The astonishing thing about Malick’s movies is there are always actors that he shoots footage of and then they don’t make the final cut of the movie, in this case Rachel Weisz, Michael Sheen, Amanda Peet and Barry Pepper were all in it at one point but gone by the time the movie was released. To be fair, Javier Bardem, who plays a conflicted priest, and Rachel McAdams, who plays Neil’s ex-flame who briefly comes back into his life, also could have been completely cut from the movie with little being missed other than running time. While I do respect Malick as a director sometimes I question whether or not he really knows what story he is trying to tell until he gathers all of the footage and decides from there. For as much as I didn’t like “To The Wonder,” there’s no doubt that Olga Kurylenko carried this film and absolutely loved the material she was performing.
It was ironic that Neil and Marina spent part of the opening of the movie drudging through mud flats in France as this seems to be an analogy for the pacing of “To The Wonder.” Terrence Malick’s films are the movie equivalent to jazz, to some they are beautiful and compelling, while others just experience an incoherent mess that seems to go on for too long. This film tends to explain itself through its actions and not its words. Too much is told through montage sequences with random poetic lines of narration. While there is one scene where emotions are actually explained through dialogue and not scenes that look like a perfume commercial, this three minutes of movie is not enough. There tends to be an interesting story in this movie, however Malick would rather show you random shots of interesting things. While ultimately much more focused than “Tree of Life” and by therefore much more watchable, this classic case of style over substance disappoints.
2 Stars out of 5
No comments:
Post a Comment