A literal navel-gazer

There was a time when a new film from Terrence Malick was cause for rare celebration. 1978’s Days of Heaven, 1998’s The Thin Red Line, 2005’s The New World — each received critical plaudits and Oscar love. In 2011 he gave us The Tree of Life, a gorgeous puzzler that was nominated for cinematography, directing and best picture.

And then he really got going. Instead of averaging a film a decade, he brought out To the Wonder in 2012, Knight of Cups in 2015 and Voyage of Time (in 45- and 90-minute versions) last year. But as quantity rose, quality suffered. The movies stopped feeling like Malick had made them, and started feeling like someone else was aping his techniques: Whispered dialogue, sun-dappled scenes, wide-angle shots, weird flashbacks (like, to the age of dinosaurs), etc.

You can see where this is going, can’t you? Song to Song is Malick’s first film since the trippy Voyage of Time screened at the Venice and Toronto festivals last fall. It’s the first of two releases planned for this year. And it’s pretty dreadful.

Ryan Gosling and Rooney Mara star as musicians floating around the scene in Austin, Tex., and falling in love. Michael Fassbender is the producer who courts Gosling’s soul and Mara’s heart. At some point, Natalie Portman and Cate Blanchett (both from Knight of Cups) wander into this love triangle, making for some additional emotional permutations.

I haven’t mentioned their characters’ names because they’re not used much. And there’s so little character development, it’s difficult to think of them as anyone other than the actors. There’s also remarkably little music, given the film’s title, setting and groovy, 45-rpm poster.

The images are perfectly Malickian; never less than beautiful but never more than that, either. The characters live crepuscular lives — every scene seems to have been shot at dawn or just before sundown. There are more Dutch tilts than at a jousting tournament in Amsterdam. And there’s a weird, interstitial segment of planetary images and black-andwhite film that makes it look as though the story has been hijacked by Guy Maddin.

“I thought we could just roll and tumble, live from song to song, kiss to kiss,” says Mara in one of the longest and most coherent lines of dialogue. And there’s a fair bit of rolling and tumbling — though, distractingly, every sex scene seems to involve a close-up of a woman’s belly button. Malick has been accused of ever-increasing navel-gazing in his movies, and this one does nothing to rebut that charge. ∂½

Rooney Mara