Tantalizing bits of light shine in Malick’s maddening latest
As a critic and as a human being with needs, I’m driven more than a little crazy by the recent films of Terrence Malick, with their perpetual murmuring voice-overs and creamy idealization of women as saints or sinners.
Malick writes scripts and films extensive dialogue scenes and then cuts most of the real-time, back-and-forth conversation in the editing. He favors a gliding river of pure cinema, sometimes gorgeous beyond measure, and that’s the thing. He’s a responsive artist who’ll canoe straight into the weeds without a narrative paddle. He gets caught in the weeds, and then he films the weeds, while an actress or an actor poses rhetorical questions on the soundtrack about love or guilt or the humbling glory of God’s green and increasingly ruined earth.
That makes Malick sound like a hack or a poseur. But even now, coming off a particularly unfruitful streak in the wake of his last major work, “The Tree of Life” (2011), Malick can’t be written off. He’s profoundly intuitive as a creator of poetic imagery. He doesn’t care much about prose, and even less for story beats. Even in the emptiest of his emptiest (my vote goes to “Knight of Cups,” in which Christian Bale wandered through a gentle rain of beautiful, available female flesh), you’ll get a moment, or a rhyming composition created in the editing process, and it goes in your brain, and the visual echo stays for a minute or 10 or maybe the entire picture.
He appears to be coming to the end of a phase. “Song to Song,” his latest, may be the endgame in that phase.
Many loathed the world premiere this month at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, where Malick filmed much of the movie.
So be it. Every time the movie made me nerts, a minute or three scenes later there was a sunset or a look between Michael Fassbender and Natalie Portman or a rare line of voice-over dialogue that went Frequently maddening in its reiteration and circularity, “Song to Song” nonetheless offers more of interest than “Knight of Cups” or “Voyage of Time,” his recent Imax cosmos travelogue.
Malick’s latest can be described, deceivingly, as a romantic triangle, though it’s really more of a romantic rhombus or an octagon, or something. We’re floating through the Austin music scene. Fassbender is a devilish, filthy-rich control freak of a music producer. Ryan Gosling is a songwriter under his wing. Rooney Mara is a vaguely defined singer/ songwriter as well, and finds a mentor in a Patti Smith-like legend played by Patti Smith.
Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, in his fifth Malick collaboration, apparently has found a way to light Portman from within. She’s the embodiment of earthy Texas sensuality, and her waitress character is introduced in shamelessly ogling fashion. Portman falls into Fassbender’s bed, which is occupied, on the sly, by Mara’s character, stepping out on her boyfriend. The heavily improvised “Song to Song,” which was originally called “Lawless” and then “Weightless,” harks back to the Arthur Schnitzler play “La Ronde.” It’s a daisy chain of intimacies.
The characters aren’t really characters; they’re moods. “Song to Song” tests its dreamers and wanderers and leaves them a little wiser, maybe, for the experience. And maybe that’s the best way to express how I felt watching it, wrestling with it, hating some of it, falling under the spell of the occasional, tantalizing best of it.