TO THE WONDER--a pygmy review:

I'm not certain if #ToTheWonder is the same story #TerrenceMalick has been telling his entire career, but with different characters, or it's a different story in which the same characters continually reappear. Either way, "Wonder" feels like Malick repeating himself, self-plagerizing ideas he has clearly not completely worked through. (One could argue all artists do this, to varying degrees of conspicuousness.)

In addition to the obvious regurgitations of hobbled human love, we return once again to that mystical place at which man and God might chance to meet. But as with Malick's previous film, #TheTreeOfLife, man continues to yearn for a higher power that steadfastly refuses to reveal himself. "Wonder" features a priest who spends the entire film echoing the pleas of the shattered parents in "The Tree of Life:" "Where are you, God? Why don't you answer me when I call out for you? Why, in my pain, do you not reveal yourself?" In both films, God is silent. He does not answer because he either chooses, in some wisdom higher than his creations can fathom, to stay silent, or he is silent because he does not, in fact, exist. Unlike me, Malick, I think we are safe in assuming, believes the former. For him, God is revealed in the beneficence of human beings. And so, the priest will continue to do great good for his fellow man, out of boundless love and compassion, even though his physical loneliness and existential isolation is eating him from the inside out. Loving people, even badly at times--increasing the well-being of others and adding rather than subtracting from their happiness, be they strangers or intimates--is all we can do. It is God in action; God made flesh. And it can be enough, if we recognize that life is, as the film tells us through the relationships between the other characters, not just a feeling, but a duty. Steadfast and unflinching love is a choice we make. We choose to be satisfied; we choose not to follow the fidgety, oscillating dictates of our emotions.

I can see exactly why many people find themselves impossibly and fatally distanced from Malick's art. I admit, I should think myself one of them. But I find Malick endlessly hypnotic. It's not that he doesn't tell narrative stories, as I once asserted, but that he merely spins his narratives differently--they are poems more than they are prose.

Every time I leave a Malick film, I perceive my senses have been heightened. The things I see and hear somehow stand out in stark relief to everything else. The world is somehow more elemental and I am more in tune with it. It is as if I can feel the thrum of nature's machinery at work beneath my feet and all around me. Malick manages at every turn to find breathtaking beauty even in the must mundane and even ugly things. Upon leaving "The New World," I was in tears, so heartbroken was I to leave the world he crafted for me and to re-enter a cacophonous reality of cars and cell phones and jetliners. It was as if my intimate connection to my planet, given me by the film, was irrevocably severed. If "To the Wonder" taught me anything, it is that one can find exquisite beauty even in this world of urban blight, strip malls and garish sensory overload. You have but to look with different eyes.

Was "To the Wonder" lesser Malick? Undoubtedly. And yet, for me, even Malick's lesser works tower above the best work of inferior directors. No filmmaker is closer to my heart.

http://youtu.be/uFIHVPGYFUQ

Reply · Report Post