To the Wonder

Terrence Malick’s sixth film, To the Wonder, released last week in select theaters, as well as on demand and on iTunes. It’s a characteristically visceral experience of a film, meaning I STRONGLY suggest you try to see it on the big screen rather than on a computer screen. See here for theater release schedule. 

I have been following Malick’s career with great interest for more than 15 years (basically since I saw The Thin Red Line in 1998), and have written quite a bit about the man and his films. See here, here, here, here and here for a sampling.

So it was with great pleasure that Christianity Today gave me the opportunity to write a lengthy review essay about the film, in which I synthesize the themes and cinematic vision of Malick’s larger body of work by a taking a close look at To the Wonder (which I’ve already seen three times). Below is one section of the review, but if you have a bit of time and you’re a fan of Malick, I’d strongly suggested reading the whole thing.

To the Wonder is about a way of seeing—both seeing the world around us, and seeing ourselves properly, something he embodies not just on screen but in his working process. It’s no coincidence that it begins with the point of view of Marina and Neil’s own cell phone camera (as they travel by train “to the Wonder”). It’s the focusing of our attention via lenses on life: perceiving the beauty in the pretty and the ugly, the thrilling and the mundane, and seeing how it all points heavenward. Christ in all; “All things shining” (The Thin Red Line).

Malick’s camera has a particular gaze. He spends more time than most on almost gratuitous beauty (puffy clouds, swimming turtles, beautiful hands). And his lens lingers on the mundane: empty rooms, walls, appliances, even a laptop displaying a Skype conversation. Everything is interesting to Malick.

Everything except himself. In both To the Wonder and The Tree of Life, the actors portraying the adult Malick (Ben Affleck and Sean Penn, respectively) come across as passive observers—quiet, contemplative, almost awkward bystanders in the movie. They are fitting representations of a man who seems far more comfortable paying attention to the world around him than bringing attention to himself.

Much has been made of Malick’s tendency to hire big-name actors for his films, shoot tons of footage, and then leave them largely or entirely out of the final cut. Rachel Weisz, Michael Sheen, Amanda Peet, and Barry Pepper are among the actors ultimately cut out completely from To the Wonder. Adrien Brody famously thought his three months of intense shooting on The Thin Red Line would result in a starring role, only to find out at the premiere that his part had been reduced to a single line of dialogue. It may be a somewhat cruel trademark (from the big-ego actor’s point of view), but this method is fundamental to Malick’s vision of man’s place in the cosmos.

In this, Malick is suggesting that it’s far more important for us to see well rather than to be well seen. Insofar as cinema has a purpose, it should not be about audiences glorifying actors or actors glorifying themselves, as much as creating an environment of focused vision and contemplation wherein the beauty of this world confronts and perhaps transforms the audience.

The whole of Malick’s oeuvre seems to be a call to put aside our hubris and wake to the Divine all around us. Brad Pitt’s character in The Tree of Life ”wanted to be loved because I was great,” but by the end of the film he recognizes that he was foolish for paying no attention to “the glory all around us . . . I dishonored it all and didn’t notice the glory.”

But when Malick speaks of being awakened to the “glory all around us,” what does he mean? Is it a sort of pantheistic deification of nature? A deistic affirmation of some vague, removed divinity? With The Tree of Life and now To the Wonder, I am convinced that he is speaking of “the glory” of the world not in the sense of being the thing to be worshipped but as pointer to the Being to be worshipped, namely the Christian God. To adopt this way of seeing is to engage with external activators of the sensus divinitatis built into our very being—an innate proclivity to suspect God’s existence.

Read the full review at Christianity Today. I’d also suggest you read this fascinating piece on Malick’s filmmaking process for To the Wonder.

Malick’s “To the Wonder”: Posters & Trailers

It’s hard to believe that in less than three months, the world will have another new Terrence Malick film. Less than two years after The Tree of Life, Malick’s sixth film, To the Wonder, will debut on April 12.

I’ll say little about the film (I haven’t seen it) beyond what us die-hards already know, but there have been a few really nice posters and trailers released in recent months, so I’ll just whet your appetite with those.

First, the HD trailer:

The beautiful UK poster (it comes out in the UK on Feb. 22):

The French trailer (comes out in France on March 6):

And a trio of French posters:

 

What We Know About Malick’s To the Wonder

Just over a year after his magnificent Tree of Life debuted, Terrence Malick is about to unveil his sixth film, To the Wonder. For longtime Malick devotees like myself, it’s hard to even believe this is true. Sadly, while the film will be seen at two different festivals in coming months (Venice and Toronto), it has yet to secure a distributor and theatrical release date, which means in all likelihood we won’t be seeing it in 2012. 

Typical for a Malick film, very little is known about To The Wonder, and until critics see it and write/tweet their first impressions of it after the world premiere in Venice on Sept. 2, very little will be known.

What we do know about the film is this:

• It was filmed in 2010 in Oklahoma, around the Bartlesville and Pawhuska areas and briefly in Tulsa. Some reports suggest additional filming took place in Paris.
• The film is 112 minutes long — Malick’s first film under two hours in length since 1978!
• It’s Malick’s first film to be rated R, “for some sexuality/nudity.”
• The film’s cast includes Ben Affleck, Rachel McAdams, Javier Bardem, Rachel Weisz, Olga Kurylenko, Michael Sheen, Amanda Peet, Barry Pepper, and Malick’s stepson Will Wallace.
• Many of Malick’s longtime collaborators returned for To the Wonder, including Jack Fisk (production design), Emmanuel Lubezki (cinematography), Sarah Green (producer), Jacqueline West (costume design), and David Crank (art direction).
• Malick chose a young, up-and-coming composer from Austin to score the film: Hanan Townshend. Townshend previously contributed a small piece of music to The Tree of Life. 
• In an interview, cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki described To the Wonder as “abstract,” adding that the film is “less tied to theatrical conventions and more purely cinematic than any prior film Terry has made.”
• The film’s official brief synopsis is as follows: “After visiting Mont Saint-Michel — once known in France as the Wonder — at the height of their love, Marina (Kurylenko) and Neil (Affleck) come to Oklahoma, where problems soon arise. Marina makes the acquaintance of a priest and fellow exile (Bardem), who is struggling with his vocation, while Neil renews his ties with a childhood friend, Jane (McAdams). An exploration of love in its many forms.”
• From this description it appears that Malick is following his semi-autobiographical turn in The Tree of Life with another film based on his own life experiences. Malick, like Affleck’s character of “Neil,” had a romance with a woman in France in the 80s named Michèle Morette (like Kurylenko’s character of “Marina”), married her in 1985 and then moved back to Texas with her. They divorced in 1998, however, and Malick reconnected with Alexandra “Ecky” Wallace, a former high school sweetheart (like McAdams’ “Jane”) from his days at St. Stephen’s school in Austin, Texas.
• That the film was primarily shot in Bartlesville, Oklahoma supports the notion that this will be a very personal film for Malick. He grew up in Bartlesville and his father, Emil, still lives there. Bartlesville is also the town where the only (to my knowledge) known Q&A with Malick and an audience occurred, in 2005 when The New World came out. 
  
• The film title appears to be a nod to Mont Saint-Michel–a monastery in Normandy, France which has been called “The Wonder of the West.”
• That the film includes a monastery and two characters who are priests/clergy (Bardem and Pepper) seems to suggest that Malick will continue the religious explorations and liturgical tones so beautifully rendered in The Tree of Life. 
• Venice Film Festival director Alberto Barbera has said that the film’s “main recurring theme is the crisis… The economic crisis, which is having devastating social effects, but also the crisis of values, the political crisis.”
• The Toronto Film Festival website notes that To the Wonder “continues [Malick's] exploration of the vagaries of desire and regret that shape our time on this planet” and explores themes of spirituality and ethics, politics and faith. “As Malick liberates himself more and more from the restrictions of conventional narrative and pursues a more associative approach, he gets closer to eliciting pure, subconscious responses from his viewers.”

I will add to this post as additional details and tidbits about the film are made known!