If you’re not on board with what Terrence Malick is doing at this point, it’s unlikely that you ever will be. The famously secretive filmmaker, who for most of his career achieved Kubrick-level productivity (between 1973 and 1998 he made three films), has been relatively busy over the past decade, with three completed films since 2005 and two more that are currently in post-production. More surprising is that with each successive film, Malick has made his work more visually oblique and narratively elliptical. As he becomes more famous, and his mythical stature continues to grow, he has staunchly refused to make his films easier on the viewer while at the same time making them more direct and even more personal.In the critical sphere, Malick has his boosters and his detractors in equal measure, and I often find myself somewhere in between. I’m easily marveled by his visual language and pleasantly puzzled by his free-associative editing. But as often, I’m turned off by his romanticism and lack of definition. In his latest, “Knight of Cups,” which arrived in theaters late last week, the director takes a side road down the path of his obsessions and arrives at what feels like the most complex and exciting film he has made in a long time.What little plot remained in Malick’s work has almost completely faded here in a haze of druggy excess. Christian Bale stars as Rick, a screenwriter who is divorced from his wife (Cate Blanchett) and parades through a modern Los Angeles (and briefly Las Vegas, among other locales) with a host of beautiful, much-younger women (Natalie Portman among them). There are parties, strip clubs, minimally furnished apartments, and expensive hotel rooms where Rick spends most of his time while dealing with the loss of his mother and problems with his brother (Wes Bentley) and father (Brian Dennehy). Bale hardly speaks a word of dialogue in the film, which is narrated by him and other characters in poetic aphorisms. When a character does speak, Malick will typically cut him or her off mid sentence, or play a different line of dialogue from the one they are currently speaking.“Knight of Cups” is a film of impressions, like the memories of a dying man playing back in his head. The film has no interest in connecting the dots between these moments. When we encounter a scene it has already begun and we leave before it has finished. We have no idea why Rick and his wife got divorced, or even if they truly are. Assumptions can be made, but nothing is certain. Like a music producer at a mixing board, Malick seems to enjoy recording a lot of material (actors famously don’t always know if they will make the final cut of one of his films) and then playing with the levels, bringing one up and another down whenever he sees fit. He doesn’t submit to traditional ideas about visual continuity or storytelling. He’s more concerned with feeling, emotion — the visceral experience of moving images.There will be people that will see another film from Malick concerning family, shifting desires, and grief and feel like he is treading familiar water here, despite his newfound interest in the urban landscape. And it would be great, in a way, for Malick to take on a project that falls outside his cycle of obsessions — like previous films, “Knight of Cups” falls down the rabbit hole into total darkness. But he is also an optimist, and his films reflect this. Despite the painful pieces of this film, he is always searching for moments of survival and rebirth.
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