‘Song’ bears Malick mark, but with life
As filmmakers who’ve become obsessed with Terrence Malick’s early work continue to ape his style, Malick himself has ventured into territory that is stubbornly spiritual and anti-narrative. He eschews story conventions. He turns movie stars like Ben Affleck and Christian Bale into props, using them, not for their acting, but their broad shoulders, which fill up the screen as ethereal women twirl around them.
Malick has created his own genre, and with experimental reveries like “To the Wonder” and “Knight of Cups,” he has alienated some of his most ardent fans. That trilogy of contemporary dramas concludes with “Song to Song,” taking the filmmaker — and his stars Rooney Mara, Ryan Gosling and Michael Fassbender — to his adopted hometown of Austin, Texas.
For those who wrote off Malick after “To the Wonder” or “Knight of Cups,” it’s unlikely that “Song to Song” will inspire a change of heart. But others who have stayed with him will likely find “Song to Song” entirely worthy and invigoratingly different from the two previous films. There’s actually a plot (kind of), and the actors are allowed to act and even have some life and fun.
“Song to Song” explores love triangles of sorts, very much in the Malick mode, where one relationship is pure (Mara and Gosling’s struggling musicians), another is untenable (Cate Blanchett and Gosling), a third is damned (Fassbender’s sleazy, wealthy producer and Mara), and a fourth is doomed (Natalie Portman’s waitress/ teacher and Fassbender).
Others liaisons are sprinkled in, too, mostly for the guys. As retrograde as it may seem, in Malick’s worlds the males are emboldened to sleep around in the name of searching. The women are a different story.
If there is a main character, it’s Mara’s Faye, who, we’re told, is a musician, although we seldom see her playing — only hanging out on the side of the stage, idly holding a guitar. She’s a local girl who’s ashamed of her “bad heart,” and who takes up with both Gosling’s BV and Fassbender’s Cook at the same time. The innocent BV remains ignorant of this, even as the three become close enough to vaca- tion together. Faye flits between the two of them, and the tension builds as we wonder when the charade of fidelity is going to fade.
Captured with Emmanuel Lubezki’s sumptuous cinematography, these travel scenes are fairly riveting. At times I even forgot I was watching a Malick film, which has somehow become more of a compliment recently than a criticism.
There are unexpected moments of joy, too, which don’t involve beautiful fields or women twirling or cryptic voiceovers. They include BV dancing in the dusk to Del Shannon’s “Runaway,” BV and Cook weightless on a plane, Patti Smith giving sage advice, Val Kilmer taking a chain saw to an amp. Do they add up to anything? Maybe mood, maybe nothing.
But the new film is wild and confident and unlike anything that Malick’s peers are making. There’s even a youthful restlessness in his exploration of the impossibility of reconciling wealth and success with innocence and authenticity.
Gosling, in particular, is a refreshing presence. He lets his smarmy charisma shine through Malick’s words, which many actors before him have taken too seriously and made leaden and lifeless. Gosling flirts and smirks, while Fassbender festers with menace. Mara is enthralling, if a little hard to grasp.
Malick’s women are usually more enigmas than characters — paragons of grace and goodness who must nonetheless experience deep shame when they stray, whether encouraged by a lover (“Days of Heaven”) or in spite of one (“To the Wonder”). It’s a one-sided, almost biblical kind of morality that may have made sense in his period pieces but is glaringly odd in the contemporary stories.
Still, Malick is just doing his own thing, and everyone else is still running to catch up with what he did in the ’70s. He’s already on another planet.