To the Wonder

Malick is one of my favorite directors ever. He's made three masterpieces, one excellent film, and one merely solid one. The Tree of Life is his finest achievement, one of my five favorite films ever. Now here comes To The Wonder and it's like Tree of Life's very similar, but much more emotionally-undeveloped younger cousin that wants to be as mature and as serious as it's older relative. That's the problem, but it's also part of its appeal. I did not have high expectations for this, but I also didn't really think it would hit greatness. I was sort of right. By this point it's safe to say that you're either fond of Malick's general style or not. Obviously I am and so there's nothing here that's challenging for me as a viewer because I know what to expect. But even with his former weakest, The New World, there was still something unique to each of his five films. This is To The Wonder's biggest problem. The cinematography is beautiful and would blow your mind away if this was your first Malick film, but as it is, it's kinda predictable. The story at the core is also never fully brought to life in the way the story in his last one was, although Kurylenko and McAdams both bring some truly ethereal presence.

It sounds like I didn't even like it. I did, but I also think it started off pretty great and kinda lost itself and got weaker as it went on. And while there's still a lot to admire, I'm not surprised by the criticisms and it's finally the film where the term "Malick cliché" can be applied to.

This film is about a man's turbulent relationship with a French woman, complicated by a childhood sweetheart he re-acquaints.

"To The Wonder" is a slow moving film with somewhat a plot, but not one that I understand. It tells how Neil meets Marina in France, then they move to the States. Marina is unhappy there and moves back to France. Somehow Marina moves back to the States to rekindle the relationship. That's what I got from the film, but the scenes are too random to really understand what is happening. There is a scene of Marina attempting overdose, then the next scene shows Marina kissing Neil's feet. Now just what exactly is happening? Even Rachel McAdams, the queen of romantic films, could not save this randomness. Her saccharine persona is truncated by scenes of crop fields and animals grazing. Actually, those romantic scenes of them frolicking in the fields concentrates more on the crops and animals.

"To The Wonder" is surely more accessible than "The Tree of Life", but it is still not so accessible to the general public.

TO THE WONDER is the new film from master writer/director Terrence Malick. The story begins with Ben Affleck's character, Neil, in Paris where he falls in-love with a single mother named Marina, played by the beautiful Olga Kurylenko. Neil brings his new love and her daughter, Tatiana, back home with him to the United States. When Marina's visa expires and Affleck's character is reluctant to marry her, Marina and her daughter return to Paris. Neil begins spending his time with a childhood friend, Jane, played by Rachel McAdams. However Jane is a woman of great faith, a faith that Neil does not share. Back in Paris, Tatiana leaves to go live with her father and Marina becomes depressed, longing to return to the US to try to work things out with Neil. It is at this point that the story falls apart.

It's impossible not to compare TO THE WONDER to THE TREE OF LIFE simply because the two films are shot in the exact same style. Beautiful shots and gorgeous cinematography accompanied by a classical score and poetic voice-overs from the characters. The Tree of Life was and is not only a masterpiece, but one of the greatest films to ever be made. I thought maybe To The Wonder was a little too soon for another Malick epic but I do not believe that is the case as far as why this film fails.

The two characters I felt for and wanted to see more of was Javier Bardem's Father Quintana and Rachel McAdams' Jane. Here we have a priest struggling in his relationship with God and a woman who has suffered through the grief and loss of a child, yet has found a way to continue living in harmony with great faith. These highly interesting characters are under-used as the film focuses more on Neil and Marina, who by the end of the film, we begin to hate.

The actors do not help the film tell it's story, it almost seems like they walked on-set without a script and improvised their parts. In Tree Of Life we had Jessica Chastain, Sean Penn and Brad Pitt giving the performances of a lifetime, not through dialogue, but simply through facial expression, movement and body language. There wasn't a need for scenes of dialogue, the story was understood. With To The Wonder, I was craving a scene of dialogue towards the end. I didn't want to believe Affleck and Kurylenko's characters were as shallow and selfish as they seemed, I wanted and felt I deserved to know more about them and why they continued to struggle. Why are they so frustrated and angry?

No matter how abstract or convoluted a film is, I've never had an issue coming to some sort of an understanding and usually, the more a film leaves open for me to interpret myself, the more I respect the film. However, To The Wonder leaves us with two characters we no longer have any reason to care for and the film gives us no way to understand or relate to them in the end.

This is perhaps Terrence's only really bad movie and this is coming from his biggest fan. I usually love the camera work with the raspy philosophical voiceovers, but in this one it just felt empty, repetitive and generic. There were pretty evident themes of love, loss, faith and indecision, but it seems like they were never truly exploited. The first twenty minutes drew me in, they reminded me of The New World and Song to Song, but the movie just keeps going downhill after that. You get nothing out of this movie except pretty images, which is not enough to redeem it in the end. Skip this one if you can, especially if you don't really like Terrence's previous modern work.

To the Wonder is a bold and artistically ambitious piece of filmmaking, which is more than can be said of most films, but it's ultimately a failure.

Malick's film is concerned with themes of love and religion. The director has clearly made a very personal film: he met his second wife in Paris, and the couple lived in Oklahoma before eventually separating.

To the Wonder is unusual in that it contains very little dialogue, which creates an almost dreamlike quality. None of the characters are properly developed, though, and the result is an emotionally unsatisfying experience. Ben Affleck is given little to do other than stare pensively into the distance. Olga Kurylenko spends most of the film twirling. Javier Bardem's Father Quintana feels detached from the rest of the story and Rachel McAdams has little more than an extended cameo.

Certainly the film's strong point is Emmanuel Lubezki's stunning cinematography. Even the biggest detractors of To the Wonder would have to concede that it's a beautiful film.

At its best, To the Wonder evokes the greatness of Malick's previous film, The Tree of Life - but that film had characters you could connect with, so it worked on an emotional level as well as an intellectual one. At its worst, To the Wonder is dull and repetitious. It ends up feeling like a parody of a Malick film, with its self-importance and constant waxing poetic. There's too much style and not enough substance.