Helpful to an honest mind
Let it be known that not even Terrence Malick can resist the temptation to tip his camera back and let it take in the sight of palm trees waving above the boulevards of Hollywood. The director has crafted some arresting images — locusts in Days of Heaven; a European ship arriving in The New World; kids gambolling in a cloud of DDT in Tree of Life — but even he has to admit that simple palms over Rodeo Drive have a kind of existential beauty.
Or maybe I’m reading too much into it. Or maybe not enough? This is the difficulty with Malick’s films of late, and it’s not getting any easier. The director has been moving into more minimalist, dialogue-free fare, even as his output blossoms. (Four films between 1973 and 2010; three since then, with two more imminent.)
The newest stars Christian Bale as Rick, a pampered Los Angeles screenwriter who flits between ocean and swimming pools, parties and modernist glass houses. He presumably gets the difficult, boring- to- watch job of writing done off- screen. Onscreen, he mostly spends his time gallivanting about with a series of girlfriends played by Cate Blanchett, Natalie Portman, Imogen Poots, Freida Pinto and Teresa Palmer — “creatures that will dazzle your eyes to look on them,” to borrow a phrase from The Pilgrim’s Progress, though I think its author had a less earthy vision in mind.
John Bunyan’s 1678 Christian allegory informs much of Malick’s film, from the opening voice-over, to the notion of a soul in search of enlightenment, and even to the written work’s subtitle, “Delivered under the Similitude of a Dream,” which perfectly describes the movie’s shifting scenes and untethered narrative flow.
But there is much more going on here than Christian theology. Knight of Cups refers to a tarot card — one that presages changes and excitement when upright, recklessness when upside down, as Bale appears in the movie’s poster. And Malick sprinkles further cards into the mix as chapter headings — The Hermit, Judgment, Death, Freedom, etc.
Bale’s character is ( like everyone else in the universe, onscreen and off ) trying to make sense of his life. He frames his quest in terms of an amnesic prince in search of a pearl, though both the metaphor and his actual existence are often derailed by the mundane events of reality, including the calmest home invasion and robbery I’ve ever seen played out on the screen.
Malick isn’t quite making a parody of Hollywood society, but he skates close to the edge at times. Note the scene in which the master of nature cinematography (Malick regular Emmanuel Lubezki is the director of photography) frames the action in front of a backlot backdrop of a sky. Or the party scenes, populated by the likes of Jason Clarke and Antonio Banderas, as well as by reallife agents, writers and producers recognizable only to those in the biz. (I’m not that in the biz; I just looked at the credits.)
But the overall tone is serious, even sombre, with koan- like lines and images that will linger long after the screen fades to black; those palm trees, yes, but also exhibits at the L.A. County Museum of Art (the one with the tiny cars made me want to visit), gossamer glass buildings that let inside and out bleed into each other, and repeated images of water, empty rooms, aircraft, etc.
Viewers will need to be in a certain contemplative mood to appreciate lines like: “Dreams are nice, but you can’t live in them.” If you’ve just had a large coffee and are now wondering if you have to pee, might be best to give it a miss for now. Perhaps the last word on Knight of Cups is best left to its, um, co-writer, Bunyan, who concluded his tract with a plea to “turn up my metaphors, and do not fail / There, if thou seekest them, such things to find / As will be helpful to an honest mind.” ΩΩΩ