We Walked Up the Steps

Terrence Malick's To the Wonder arrives -- arrived to me, anyhow -- with a built-in reputation as his most abstract and inaccessible film to date. It's quite possible that there is no arguing with this. His first four movies, Badlands and so on, may not be for everyone, but when you get right down to it, narratively they're not that wonky. Those who found themselves put off by Malick's work, and their numbers have grown with each subsequent film, tended to object to things like pacing, and his use of narration, and long stretches of the film in which these people would say nothing much happened. Malick's not trying to shake you off his tail at any point in those first four, though. It's worth noting, however, that narratively those films did start getting wonkier, especially if you view pacing as a narrative consideration (I don't myself, but never mind) -- if a traditionally tight focus on A to B to C storytelling is your thing, The Thin Red Line and The New World -- and don't even get me started on if you're one of those "narration in films is a crutch!" -- can seem like the quietest of assaults. All of which led to 2011's The Tree of Life, Malick's long-gestating meditation (a word I don't often like to use in this way, but in the case of The Tree of Life it's almost literally applicable) on childhood, the 1950s, Texas, moms, dads, death, God, Christianity, memory, acceptance, and the creation of the Universe and all life within it. As a piece about memory, Malick takes the way human memory works as his guiding cinematic style, and so The Tree of Life manages to somehow be both slow and fast, with quick scenes of, some would argue, Not Much Happening, but of course it's all cumulative, and also about forty minutes in the Earth is created. The Tree of Life was famously divisive, to the point that some theaters had to post signs saying they wouldn't grant refunds to patrons who'd bought their ticket with the expectation that this was a regular movie, not a fancy movie. Nevertheless, that film did appeal to a great many people, and there is an undeniable warmth to it all, even to the darker moments, due to Malick's grasp of the specifics of childhood, some fictional version of his childhood specifically, and the environment being so strong.

Pretty cleary, I should hope, none of the above is meant as a judgment of Malick's style, as I'm a fan, but he does have a unique gift for shedding supporters with each subsequent film. And To the Wonder is hacking away at those who remain like a madman. According to some, anyway. Me, I liked it. At under two hours, it's Malick's shortest film since Days of Heaven, but within that he's assembled a jumbled, intentionally so, and oblique, intentionally so, I guess romantic drama, would be the genre category you'd be looking for here, about Neil (Ben Affleck) who brings his French girlfriend Marina(Olga Kurylenko) and her daughter from a previous relationship (Tatiana Chiline) from France to Texas, but his inability to commit to marrying Marina, as well as his wandering eye, finally drive them away. Or not finally. The film drifts from Neil with Marina, to Neil with Jane (Rachel McAdams), a despairing, lonely farmer he'd known when they were children. Jane pretty evidently needs somebody, but with Neil she, like Marina before her, pretty clearly thought she was getting somebody else. Neil is one of those people who is basically a nice guy who's kind of an asshole, and one of the surprising things about To the Wonder is how unflinching -- without quite looking squarely at the thing, if you see my distinction -- it is about the damage one person acting upon their moods, who are guided by their selfish myopia, can wreak.

That all makes the film seem fairly straightforward, though, and it isn't. The warmth of The Tree of Life is not entirely absent from To the Wonder -- it's even occasionally heated -- but Malick achieves a chilly kind of warmth here. There's an occasional awkwardness, too. It's a film packed with perfectly observed scenes of idle playfulness and everyday existence, such as a brief moment of girls talking and skipping and bending outside of an elementary school, or a very young boy lying perfectly still on the ground as someone outlines him in chalk (sounds creepy, but it's charming), but it also has weird moments like Neil, Marina, and her daughter, in happier times, frolicking around with lampshades on their heads, shining bare light bulbs at each other, which seems like a thing that no one has ever done to entertain themselves. The idea we have of Malick, or have learned to have, is of a guy who shoots an immense amount of film with the plan of finding his movie in the editing room, at the expense of entire characters and subplots, and here even a Malick fan like myself must acknowledge that sometimes it seems like he should have kept looking. But this is a film that is more nakedly grasping at its own sense of these people and their situation than anything Malick has made. He may have been mystified by the killers in Badlands, but I believe in that case he understood that theirs was an existence you couldn't understand unless you were pulling the trigger, or tagging along for the ride. To the Wonder, like The Tree of Life before it, is Malick trying to be universal, but in doing so he has to acknowledge that universal, or at least not uncommon, experience can still carry with it a dose of inexplicability. The result of such grasping can include the occasional whiff, is my point, but the grasping is still the show.

And of course Malick goes about all this, and much more, in his own way. A question that is sometimes asked by screenwriter types, or students and enthusiasts of same, and here I should specify screenwriting of a very specific and traditional kind, is "Who is this about?" The character, they mean, the main character, our point of view, and so on. To the Wonder does not exactly seem to ask this question. For instance, for all the talk about Ben Affleck having very little to say in the film, he's in more scenes than he isn't, and it's his actions and inaction that fuels everything. When Neil is with Jane, Marina is gone. When Neil is with Marina, Jane is gone. At the same time, unlike Jane, Marina has much to do and think and suffer through when she's alone. And if Neil fuels the action, such as it is, it's Marina who fuels the style. Kurylenko is rather terrific in the film, and she'd better be, because if Malick's camera has to hitch itself to Neil on occasion, it would quite blatantly rather spend its every second with Marina. Malick regards her, and Kurylenko, to be as much a part of the natural beauty of the world as the birds and beaches turtles and leaves and sky and horizons and oceans that have over the years spread from the background of his films to the foreground. The camera quite literally follows Marina throughout the film -- never have I scene a film where a character is so relentlessly photographed from behind. I do not mean this in the lascivious way it might sound, but at the same time I'd be lying if I didn't acknowledge that a certain...Godly lasciviousness wasn't a part of it. Boy that doesn't sound right, but To the Wonder is the kind of film that connects a whole lot of things that most people would consider disparate, but which aren't, at least if you hold a certain philosophy. Anyhow, the camera follows her (Jane, always waiting to be shattered to bits once again, is seen head-on) -- she's always walking ahead of Neil, and us, spinning and playing at the best of times, looking back at Neil, and at us, and it's hard to think we're not, in some way, pursuing her. We are, but Neil may not be -- Neil's fickleness needn't be our own, and doesn't seem to be Malick's. This would seem to place Marina on an uncomfortably high pedestal, but she somehow still manages to register as a real human being. She is gorgeous and mysterious and life-affirming in her very presence, but if you follow her around with a camera long enough, you're going to see how profoundly frustrated she is, or has become, during almost every waking minute of her life.

To give you some idea of the way To the Wonder otherwise presents itself, when it's somewhat less concerned with Kurylenko, among the things I thought about while watching it are Werner Herzog's Stroszek (both films are strange, neither film approaches strangeness with the same philosophy, but both films do stand still and look at America all around them and are somewhat dumbstruck) and 2001: A Space Odyssey, due, admittedly, to one particular cut from one kind of naturally landscape to another, utterly different kind. But it's a film that invites a great tumble of connections that don't need to achieve a one-to-one comparison. For example, John Prine's "Unwed Fathers" ran through my head, even though Neil, the guy that would pertain to, isn't really the guy in that song. But he has a profound ability to make Marina unhappy, and even though his relationship with Jane is not presented as just some dude looking to change the old oil, there, even prior to her introduction Neil is shown to be a man who is weak in the face of his capacity to attract women. It's shown with a glance here and there, at a woman passing by, and through certain cryptic things Marina says, but it's unmistakably there. Add to that the fact that at the time of his affair Marina and Neil aren't married, and it becomes surprising that To the Wonder reveals itself to be, at its heart, about the sanctity of marriage. Very much marriage as a religious sacrament, I mean. If Malick's obsession with the natural world can be explained, as I believe it can, by the Tom Waits line "God's green hair is where I slept last," then it should surprise no one that his view of love, including sexual love, manifests as the pursuit of something holy (pursued as if by a cameraman, you might say). It's what Marina is pursuing, and not the in the Cathy "I need a man! Ack!" way, but in the "love is a celebration of God" way. This is evidently not Neil's stance on the whole issue, even though for his own peace of mind he appears to have chosen to deny everything about himself, or near enough, otherwise he'd live his life crushed by guilt, and who has time for that?

But God's everywhere in this film, and is at least as big an issue as in The Tree of Life. Javier Bardem is also in To the Wonder, playing a priest named Father Quintana, who goes through his life doing good for the needy and outcast, and delivering sermons at the church attended by Neil and Marina, but wondering where in the hell God is. His crisis of faith reaches a resolution of sorts, the word "everywhere" being the key there, and in a way Malick charts his progress -- his narrative arc, if you really insist on calling it that -- in the regular three-act way some people castigate Malick for abandoning. Not only that, but stylistically To the Wonder illustrates Quintana's story more directly than it does the Marina-Neil-Jane triangle. So God and Quintana form the buried engine of a film about the sanctity of marriage in which no marriage occurs until late in the film, and man, it doesn't seem very sacred really, by the time the credits roll. But it's the words that make it all make sense, Malick's much-derided narration that even many of his admirers say is something you have to just sort of deal with. And it's true, when you have Kurylenko (who does most of the narrating here) say in three different ways, one after the other in a row, that her love with Neil had made two people become one, it can become hard to take it seriously, and think it will be better for everybody to just focus on what works. But it's always been true, and here maybe more than ever, that Malick's narration provides the philosophical context that provide significance and weight to the images. They may be on the nose, even trite -- though by no means always, I'd argue -- they work almost as hypnotic, and spoken aloud, stage directions. It's part of the hum of Malick's films. If anyone agrees with me about the "stage directions" business, I can imagine them stating that they do NOT like it when movies tell them how to feel. But Malick isn't telling you how to feel. He's telling you how he feels. He made these movies, not us. That's their power.

Capsule Reviews - Movie Theater Edition

Hey, I’m back, with a blog post, even! And not one about how I haven’t blogged in a while! No, instead, since I’ve been going to the movies a lot lately, I decided to round up the last four films I’ve seen and review them in capsule form. By way of getting back on the horse, kind of thing. Some of these are probably out of theaters by now, but I really don’t give a shit.

Sinister (d. Scott Derrickson) - This horror film seems to be the Insidious of 2012, and this is not at all something to be proud of. Like Insidious, I was rooked into going to see it by lots of talk about it being a surprisingly effective piece of work, and I left thinking that there are a lot of people with depressingly low standards for their horror movies. It stars Ethan Hawke as a true crime writer who's on the scent of something big -- several families murdered in their homes over the span of a decades, and in each case everyone in the family was killed, except one child from each, who have all disappeared. Renting a home that once belonged to the most recent victims, and is therefore also a crime scene (all of this unbeknownst to his wife, played by Juliet Rylance), Hawke finds a box of home movies in the attic. These are all home movies taken by the murderer, and each one reveals some ghostly thrash metal guy lurking around the premises at the time of the deaths. All of this is a good enough premise, and I actually liked Hawke's performance well enough (along with Fred Dalton Thompsons' brief appearance as a sheriff, his was the only performance I did like). But Sinister is mostly idiotic. Attempts to show Hawke thinking hard about the facts of these cases settle on showing him pinning photographs of the victims to a board, and writing in his notebook things like "Who killed you???" and "Where is Stephanie???" If not for these notes, he might go off track and start trying to figure out if the company that made the camera is still in business. Beyond that, you have a twist that can only really be one thing, because -- and this is a spoiler, sort of -- somebody had to take the home movies, and if it wasn't the guy from Korn, then, well... Derrickson and co-screenwriter C. Robert Cargill try to gussy it all up with a cameo by Vincent D'Onofrio as an expert on ritual murder, who kindly lays out the ancient mythology that ties the murders together, all of which, by the end, means precisely fuck-all. Add to all this Derrickson's fumbling, half-stupid (only half, because he must do as he's been taught) use of horror movie music stings, including a final one that is legitimately insulting, and I'm left thinking that horror movies with vaguely but meaninglessly creepy titles that too many people give a pass to are about to actually become a whole thing that I'll have to learn to put up with.

Argo (d. Ben Affleck) - So I guess this is what Affleck's doing now, and I have to say I'm not against it. I'm a pretty big fan of his directorial debut, the Dennis Lehane adaptation Gone Baby Gone, to the point that I think it's really underrated, you guys, and was at least halfway on board with his follow up, another crime thriller called The Town. If I take issue with how Affleck, in that case, adapted Chuck Hogan's novel Prince of Thieves (mainly I have trouble with a bank robber writing a letter about how we all have to pay for what we've done while kicking back on a beach in Florida), I do so while acknowledging that Affleck's filmmaking chops are genuine. Now, with Argo, he's making the kind of film that a director makes to prove to everyone that he's no longer new at this -- he's established. This time, he has a true story to work from, about a CIA agent named Tony Mendez (Affleck) who, in 1980, has been tasked with coming up with, and executing, a plan to safely extract six American diplomats who managed to avoid becoming hostages when the US Embassy in Iran was taken over only to wind up in a limbo situation that could possibly prove more dangerous. The plan Mendez hit on was sort of loony tunes: set up a fake film production for a science fiction film called Argo, complete with script, real Hollywood professionals (Alan Arkin as the producer, John Goodman as the make-up guy), and get the six diplomats out by going to Iran, making everyone believe this was a real movie, and then basically folding the diplomats into the production and getting the fuck out of there. And it's good stuff. The opening, which depicts the fall of the embassy, is extremely well done, and Affleck does a good job at playing up, but never overplaying, the comedy that is unavoidable in situation like this. Arkin, it shouldn't at this point surprise you to learn, walks away with the film in those scenes.

It ain't perfect. The ending, which of course milks for the greatest suspense possible the extraction of the diplomats, is a bit silly in the way Affleck piles on the obstacles. Two or three could have been left out with no problem, especially the ones you can tell never actually happened, such as Arkin and Goodman needing to get to their office so they can answer a very important phone call and being held up by a PA who's frankly too big for his britches, if you want the honest truth. Also handicapping things is Affleck himself. His performance as Mendez is probably the worst, or anyway least successful in the film. I know Affleck is a not-untalented actor, but he plays Mendez as a man with no muscles in his face and a throat condition that renders his voice incapable of inflection. Because I do know that Affleck is better than this, the question then becomes "Why?" and I have to figure, in keeping with certain ideas illustrated throughout the film, the thinking was that Mendez was just a guy doing his job. He wasn't a movie hero, in other words, and Affleck -- correctly, I'd say -- finds the truth of people like him to be more heroic. It's just that I imagine the real Mendez looks and talks like a person. But never mind -- it may be Argo's biggest flaw, but it's almost thoroughly overshadowed by an otherwise slick and entertaining thriller.

Seven Psychopaths (dr. Martin McDonagh) - I have, let us say, some pretty significant ideological differences with Martin McDonagh, the successful playwright and writer-director of the films In Bruges from 2008 and now Seven Psychopaths. It is to the credit of one or the other of us (I'll say me, because I've had a rough day and could use the boost) that I've so far been able to get past them and appreciate the truly original and even moving mayhem of his film work. And Seven Psychopaths is even almost trying to make me dislike it, just in terms of plot. I don't know what it is about wacky hitmen stories that are believed to be too outrageous once cute dogs are added to the mix, but it's a shortcut-to-lunacy I'm about done with. Yet McDonagh makes it work, or makes it not not work. Seven Psychopaths stars Colin Farrell as Martin (this name is significant) as a Hollywood screenwriter struggling to get moving on a film he's writing called Seven Psychopaths. As the film sets this up, it's also setting up the concept of seven psychopaths, both real and maybe not real, maybe fictional -- the first one, "Psychopath No. 1," is a masked figure we meet in the first scene as he kills two Mafia hitmen played by Michael Stuhlbarg and Michael Pitt. These two things converge once one of the numbered psychopaths, mob hothead Charlie (Woody Harrelson) enters the picture, trying to find his beloved dog which has been stolen by Martin's crazy friend Billy (a hilarious Sam Rockwell), as part of a dognapping operation that involves his weird friend Hans (Christopher Walken) bringing missing pets back to their owners and collecting hefty rewards, these pet owners being Beverly Hills-type pet owners, which Hans will then use to pay for his wife's (Linda Bright Clay) cancer treatment. And yes, I know, but McDonagh is the master of some weird kind of alchemy that allows such nonsense to work. Not only is the film entertainingly bloody, and very funny, and not only is it great to see Christopher Walken play one of the three leads and be allowed to go all Christopher Walken up in this business, and not only is Harrleson wonderful, as is Tom Waits (he's another one of the psychopaths, one with a particularly strange backstory), but this whole thing actually turns out to be a not very subtle but nonetheless entirely engaging examination of these kinds of movies. Violent movies, revenge movies, to be specific. And more interestingly still is the realization that for all its gooniness, Seven Psychopaths is actually an extremely personal film, made by a man known for writing plays and movies like this, and wondering, finally, what the hell he's been doing with his life.

Flight (d. Robert Zemeckis) - The single best moment in Robert Zemeckis's new film Flight comes at the end of the plane crash sequence that sets the film's real plot in motion. The pilot, Whip Whitaker (Denzel Washington) is, we know by now, a drunk, a drunk who has just been drinking and even sleeping off last night while his co-pilot (Brian Geraghty) takes the wheel. But when the plane begins to come apart during its descent, Whip snaps to, barking out instructions to his co-pilot and one of the attendants (Tamara Tunie), in an attempt to land the plane in a field. His plan is a crazy one and it pretty much works, but there's a moment when Whip can't do anything else, and the plane's mechanics have all shut down, and everything goes quiet. This massive aircraft is dropping into a field in complete silence, and it's very eerie, almost beautiful. Once that's over with, however...

Flight is not otherwise bereft of good moments. It's an intriguing story, too, a nicely ambiguous one about who is to blame for this crash, which, while successful in relative terms, nevertheless did take the lives of six people, including a flight attendant (Nadine Velazquez) with whom Whip had been partying the night before. We know Washington's character is completely fucked up as a person, but nothing he did seems to have caused the plane to malfunction. But routine toxicology tests still reveal what he's been up to, and his guilt, his duplicity, and his eventual full-on scumbaggery can be pretty fascinating. Any scene Washington shares with Bruce Greenwood as his friend and union rep, and/or Don Cheadle as his attorney, are pretty much bound to be gripping on some level, just by virtue of the acting talent on display. But Flight is still a terrible mess, sometimes shockingly clumsy, sometimes shockingly thoughtless. An entire subplot involving Kelly Reilly as an ex-junkie exists only so someone can walk in on a drunk or blacked-out Washington and be disappointed in him. Worse, the use of songs, from "Gimme Shelter" to "Feelin' Alright" to "Under the Bridge" to "Sympathy for the Devil" (played first when we meet John Goodman's character, Washington's likable pusher (Whip's into cocaine, also)) is almost perversely literal. If the Rolling Stones had ever recorded a song called "Flying a Passenger Jet While Drunk," Zemeckis would have been all over that.

And while it’s bracing to see the lead character in an expensive studio film played by a major star as a complete piece of dogshit (and it's also interesting to see two men, the ones played by Cheadle and Greenwood, pursuing an immoral goal, but not as villains, rather as guys doing their jobs), it would have been nice if Zemeckis could have followed through. To be clear, I don’t so much mind the redemption we get, as such, and in fact I like what he and screenwriter John Gatins pulled from their back pocket by way of a catalyst for this redemption. But minutes before Whip’s conscience gets the better of him, we saw this man not only at the very nadir of his selfish and debauched existence (signaled, by the way, with some slow motion and, would you believe it, a horror movie music sting, except in this case the monster is vodka), we’d seen him rewarded for it with further debauchery. Nothing could stop or change him, which is precisely what he’d been angling for this whole time. But then, nope, changed my mind, I feel bad now. I’ve heard some complain that the depiction of Whip’s alcoholism is over the top, but he’s not shown doing anything that a real person who’d achieved that ranking in alcoholism wouldn’t do. The problem is that it would appear that Zemeckis has very little sense for this kind of thing – not in real life, because what do I know, but as a filmmaker. I feel like the whiplash of going from A Christmas Carol to Flight actually ended up on film somehow.