Ben Affleck and Olga Kurylenko explore a poetic love in TO THE WONDER (photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures)
TO THE WONDER (Terrence Malick, 2012)
Opens Friday, April 12
www.magpictures.com
Polarizing auteur Terrence Malick follows up his Oscar-nominated, Palme d’Or-winning The Tree of Life with To the Wonder, one of the most beautifully shot, elegantly paced, and innately poetic films you’re ever likely to see — but it’s also one of the most confusing, annoying, and frustrating. An unnamed American man (Ben Affleck) and Ukrainian woman (Olga Kurylenko) are exploring their newfound love in Paris, she reciting melodramatic romantic thoughts in voice-over, he looking on like a man harboring a secret, barely speaking. They travel to the spectacular island abbey known as Mont St. Michel, home to the ancient buildings called la Merveille (“the marvel,” or “the wonder”), where they walk across a mysterious landscape of soft ground that might give way and swallow them up at any moment. The man asks the woman and her ten-year-old daughter (Tatiana Chiline) to move with him to his home in rural Bartlesville, Oklahoma, where he works as an environmental inspector evaluating drilling projects. There, a local priest (Javier Bardem) is questioning his own faith, and the man soon meets up with a former flame (Rachel McAdams). Or something like that. The plot, if you can even call it that, is just an excuse for Malick and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki to create spectacular visual imagery, and every minute of it is indeed dazzling. But unfortunately, it’s nearly impossible to care about the characters amid a purposefully vague and ambiguous narrative — at least we’re hoping it’s purposeful, because otherwise it’s simply amateurish. The central problem is the man; Affleck tries his best, but the character lacks any kind of depth or believability. You’re likely to want to smack some sense into him. And the priest seems to come from a completely different movie. In his thirty-year career, Malick (The New World, Badlands, The Thin Red Line) has written and directed only six features, never fewer than five years apart. Perhaps he should have taken more time with To the Wonder, his second film in two years, to figure out what he wanted to say about love and faith and not just beauty.