The swoon of new love is palpable as Neil (Ben Affleck) and Marina (Olga Kurylenko) kiss, nuzzle, chase one another through cloisters and marvel at the beauty of an ancient monastery on France’s Normandy coast. It’s a starkly beautiful place which is known in French as the 'Merveille’ – literally the 'Wonder’.
many viewers may find To the Wonder repetitive
Delighting in the muddy sand that almost bounces back when they walk along the beach, the pair of lovers are an innocent Adam and Eve in Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder. Their fall from innocence is inevitable, especially when love is tested by the banality and boredom of small town American suburbia. Neil, an American, is offered a job in Oklahoma, and he invites the European Marina to move back with him, along with her 10-year-old daughter. There, in the wide open spaces, where big brick houses seem plonked in sunlit grassy fields, the romance struggles. Marina wants to be married but Neil seems unable to commit. She tries to find solace in church, where fellow European, Father Quintana (Javier Bardem), also struggles with his own spiritual 'dryness’; his first bloom of love for God has shrivelled into doubt and duty as he serves prisoners, drug addicts and the poor.
American auteur Terrence Malick is an acknowledged genius; a director whose six released films to-date are each breathtakingly beautiful, original and philosophically inclined. Malick’s scant but impressive filmography – Badlands (1973), Days of Heaven (1978) The Thin Red Line (1998), The New World (2005) and The Tree of Life (2011) – reveals a director grappling with nothing less than the meaning of life, the universe and everything in it. This latest film is a poem to love in its many forms: erotic, marital, parental, adulterous and religious. Sadly, much like real life love, many viewers may find To the Wonder repetitive, disappointing and confusing, yet saved by moments of sublime beauty.
Malick is known for minimal plot and dialogue and vaguely outlined characters, but here they are so thinly drawn – and given so little to do – that they are reduced to a few pencilled strokes: Marina the 'free spirit’ is continually whirling and dancing like a witless child; while Neil, the silent and solid American, is largely shot from behind – a rock that Marina can crash herself against, which she does, repeatedly. The camera continually swoops and rushes and yearns for the sky, but we wish it would take more interest in the human drama below.
The concrete details Malick allows – like Neil’s work as an environmental researcher documenting the effects of pollution on the beleaguered community; or the humble mealtimes shared with neighbours and their messy children – at least give the work the texture of reality. There’s a real and uncondescending respect for the mid-west American world that we rarely see on the big screen.
Even a lesser Malick film (and most critics agree this is his least impressive work) is worth your time. Stunning cinematography by Emmanuel Lubezki (who also shot The New World and The Tree of Life) is combined with an intense and transporting orchestral score filled with Dvorak, Gorecki, Bach and Tchaikovsky. Yet perhaps the cruellest criticism of the film is also true: that this is Malick on the verge of self-parody, with his most iconic stylistic flourishes repeated over and over without much point.
