In ‘Cups,’ Malick expands cinema’s range
Terrence Malick is inventing a new kind of cinema, one that calls for new language to describe it. This is a cinema of ecstasy, of the spirit, of witnessing the beauty in all things. As a story, his new film, “Knight of Cups,” is instantly forgettable, and that’s assuming you can find a story to follow. But the experience of the film is about something else, about creating a feeling of transcendence and joy through visual means. It’s remarkable.
Most people won’t get it, and for good reason: It doesn’t provide any of the usual things that people look for in movies. Forget plot, forget characters, forget exciting moments. This film is an invitation to pay attention to life. And to realize you’ve been going around not noticing anything. It’s like a court of justice where the forgotten things of the world come to be remembered, where the ephemeral becomes permanent and where the beautiful and unnoticed things become seen.
I know, I know, this sounds too lofty, and not at all precise, but to talk about “Knight of Cups” feels a little like trying to pull a kite out of the sky. So let me return to Earth to put it this way: Anyone who tells you this film is just a collection of pretty images didn’t understand what they were watching. “Knight of Cups” is thick with life. Malick pulls into this film so many aspects of consciousness and so many moments of previously uncaptured stray experience that it’s like watching someone tap into the miraculous.
And what’s especially impressive and gratifying is that he tried to do something similar with his previous film, “To the Wonder,” and failed. Instead of retreating, he has gone deeper into this mature style, which relies on voiceovers — sometimes streams of consciousness, sometimes snatches of conversation —underlying footage of environments and people, sometimes alone and brooding, sometimes in combinations.
One characteristic thing Malick does repeatedly is to let you hear an exchange or two of dialogue. And then, as he moves into a scene of people talking, he drops the volume on the conversation, so that it’s barely heard. The effect, which will drive some viewers crazy, is of never quite landing into a scene. The scenes are more like dreams of scenes, as though you’re seeing a memory, or life as refracted through a distracted mind.
Christian Bale plays a screenwriter who is finally coming into success. The setting is Los Angeles — from the rough to the insanely opulent — and Las Vegas, with the film arranged in several parts, each revolving around a different character, and each with a chapter head named for a tarot card. We meet the screenwriter’s wife (Cate Blanchett), who is anguished by their breakup. We meet his gruff, tormented father (Brian Dennehy), and we meet a succession of women, only one of whom twirls around, as women often will in Malick films. Teresa Palmer is the twirler, but then she plays a pole dancer, so it kind of fits.
Malick doesn’t take you into the emotion of his characters by showing you why they feel the way they do. Instead, he shows you what they’re seeing. He shows you how they’re receiving the world, and, assuming you find your way onto the film’s wavelength, you care about them immediately because you’re in their head. So when we hear the father say, “It comes to me how tenderly you’d touch my face when you were 4 years old,” we feel that with an unexpected immediacy.
The movie benefits immeasurably from the cinematography of Emmanuel Lubezki (who has won three straight Academy Awards). His camera always seems to be burrowing into the frame, as though searching. What does he find? Well, a limping pelican, and dogs trying to bite a Wiffle ball in a swimming pool, and Caesar’s Palace as seen from below, against a dark-blue sky. Over and over, we see moments that almost happen between people — eye contact that goes nowhere. We see beautiful buildings, and buildings that aren’t beautiful but seem so from the standpoint of ecstasy.
“Knight of Cups” is like a religious vision in both senses of the term, in that it’s both a point of view and the vision itself. Love almost happens but doesn’t. Time is passing, everything is falling away but then opening up into eternity. And all things are glorious. Usually, you can imagine how movies were made — how the idea came and the process of their creation. But “Knight of Cups” seems as if it arrived whole. If there’s a better film this year, get ready for a very good year.