A reclusive director plumbs new boreholes of cringe
Song to Song 15 cert, 129 min
Dir Terrence Malick Starring Ryan Gosling, Rooney Mara, Michael Fassbender, Natalie Portman, Cate Blanchett, Bérénice Marlohe
‘Ican go on for hours with one chord. Just one chord, hammerin’,” the singer-songwriter Patti Smith advises a young musical disciple towards the end of Song to Song. Terrence Malick, it turns out, is no different. The reclusive master’s latest opus glides past the 120 minute mark still tinkling away in the same tone it began in – one that also predominated in his 2015 Hollywood-set romantic odyssey Knight of Cups and vast tracts of his 2012 heartbreaker To The Wonder.
Song to Song unfolds in and around the rock scene in Malick’s adopted home town of Austin, but you sense it wouldn’t be noticeably different if it had been set at a bacon factory or an ice rink. The sweat and throb and stink of the music business – all out-of-character stuff you’d love to see Malick grapple with – are conspicuous by their absence. In their place is yet another petal-hued, vetiver-spritzed Miltonian whisperscape, with attractive actors dancing the usual metaphysical love-ballet.
Two of the class of 2017, Michael Fassbender and Ryan Gosling, fare better than you might expect. Both men’s styles of movie-stardom might seem incompatibly different, but they mix well on the Malick palette. Gosling plays BV, an affable singer-songwriter who’s offered a contract by Fassbender’s Cook, a fearsome record producer who lives in an impossibly expensive-looking glass-and-concrete cuboid.
One man is as charming as the other is terrifying, and it’s an occasionally potent combination. There’s a nice scene in which the former tries on the latter’s jacket: “It makes you walk different,” BV muses, while Cook offers to buy him 100 more. In another scene, during an impromptu trip to Mexico, Cook buys a mouth-squeaker and inexplicably starts acting like a monkey. It’s a genuinely unnerving performance from an actor whose entire body seems tight with threat.
Sex and Malick have never been an easy fit, but Song to Song plumbs new boreholes of cringe in that department, and its bedroom encounters are gauzy and bloodless.
Song to Song was formerly known as Weightless, which would have suited its drifting, twirling rhythms. At least its new title doesn’t invite an en-masse sigh of: “Well, quite.”