Ben Affleck, Olga Kurylenko…falling in love in France
“TO THE WONDER” My rating: C (Opens May 3 at the Tivoli)
112 minutes | MPAA rating: R
There’s a temptation to write off “To the Wonder” as a dead-on satiric parody of a Terrence Malick film.
Except that it is a Terrence Malick film.
And since I don’t think Malick is making fun of himself, we are left to struggle with just what this admittedly talented but hugely exasperating filmmaker is up to.
Hell, maybe he’s just perverse.
“To the Wonder” embraces all the elements that irritated people with his previous film, “The Tree of Life” (which I count as one of the great movies of the last decade) and jettisons all the good stuff.
The film may be the ultimate statement in Malick’s war on narrative. It’s visually poetic, yeah — like an artsy fartsy TV commercial where you can never figure out what they’re selling — but also emotionally empty. I couldn’t shake the feeling that the movie is throwing a hearty “fuck you” into our faces.
I’m going to assume Malick is not just giving us the finger here, that he has attempted to make a real piece of art, and that he has failed.
Happens to everyone. Now how about a plot next time?
Here’s what we can say with certainty. “To the Wonder” is about an American man (Ben Affleck) who on a trip to France falls in love with a young woman (Olga Kurylenko) and brings her and her young daughter back to live with him in the U.S.
Except that he resides in a treeless, flat, irony-free tract-home subdivision outside Bartlesville, OK. It’s a neighborhood hemmed in on one side by high-tension power lines and on the other by an Interstate. There’s an oil well in the back yard.
Hmmmm…let’s see. Paris…or Oklahoma? Gosh, it’s such a tough call.
It’s enough to make you think this woman hasn’t got a brain in her head.
Javier Bardem
Anyway, the relationship runs out of steam. Marina and Neil (that’s how the credits identify them, I don’t believe they ever call each other by name) break up when her visa expires.
Neil then starts seeing a childhood friend, Jane (Rachel McAdams), who is running her family’s ranch and coping with the death of her child.
Eventually, though, Marina comes back to the States and reclaims Neil, though the relationship once again falls apart.
There’s another character, a Roman Catholic priest (Javier Bardem) who is having a crisis of faith and tries to compensate through charitable work with prisoners, addicts, and other outcasts.
And maybe we’re supposed to read something into Neil’s job — he seems to be a geologic engineer testing ground pollution resulting from the fracking boom.
Anyway, there ought to be enough for a movie in all this — but there isn’t.
I’ve heard that Malick based the film on the breakup of his own marriage. But unlike “Tree of Life,”” which was rich in intoxicating details drawn from his memories of a Texas childhood in the ’50s, Malick here seems terrified of actually examining what went wrong. Instead of informing, he’s evading. This may be the most impersonal study of romantic failure ever.
For starters, there’s virtually no dialogue. Once again we eavesdrop on the character’s thoughts, particularly Marina’s, but they’re in French. So, yeah, you have to read subtitles, too.
And it’s not like her thought processes are particularly coherent. She thinks stuff like “Love makes us one. I in you. You in me.”
Blah blah blah. Come to think of it, it’s a good thing it’s in French.
Ben Affleck, Rachel McAdams
Malick has Kurylenko express romantic happiness by frolicking and gamboling. God help us, but this woman frolicks and gambols. She’s like a hippie chick on LSD at a Renaissance Festival (and the camera is always bobbing and weaving to catch up with her).
Affleck, on the other hand, is pretty much expressionless, though he does look like he’d give his left nut for a slug of Maalox.
I’m just spitballing here, but it looks to me like Malick’s methodology has finally led him to a dead end.
In recent films he’s worked without a script, allowing his actors to improvise and shooting tons of coverage over many months. Then he spends more months in the editing room trying to find the story in all that footage.
If there is a story.
That process served him well in “Tree of Life.” But “To the Wonder” looks less like artistic shorthand than just plain laziness.
Perhaps the quality of his actors is the deciding factor. “Tree of Life” had Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain. Affleck and Kurylenko are decidedly second tier by comparison.
It’s been announced that Malick’s next movie is a comedy. Couldn’t come too soon.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 
With all the voiceover narration and lack of dialogue, the cast members really didn’t get a chance to ‘act.’ This leaves me to assume that whatever they were doing on screen was simply in reaction to whatever Malick was telling them. (“Look somber.” “Twirl with delight.”) Yes, it’s a miscalculation, more of a tone poem than a movie.