Malick offers little to 'Wonder' about
I'm not embarrassed, I'm not backing down: Yes, I put Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life on my Top 10 list in 2011.
I'm not embarrassed, I'm not backing down: Yes, I put Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life on my Top 10 list in 2011.
Loping and elliptical, with a performance from a sad-eyed, clench-jawed Brad Pitt that was all body language and brooding brow, Malick's movie zoomed across time and space, dropping in on dinosaurs, and dropping in on a beautifully gloomy mid-20th-century Texas husband and wife (Jessica Chastain). Curtains billowed. Sunlight sliced across floorboards. Nature. Domesticity. Violence. The cosmos.
To the Wonder, the suddenly prolific Malick's latest, continues in a similar vein - with a sad-eyed, clench-jawed Ben Affleck taking over from Brad - but it's more like a parody than cinematic poetry.
Punctuated by fragments of voiceover and interior monologues, and, yup, full of billowing curtains and sunlight slicing across walls and doors and floors, this impressionistic meditation on love, adultery, and the staggering gorgeousness of model-turned-actress (and Bond girl) Olga Kurylenko, feels like a very long perfume ad.
A new formula of Chanel, perhaps, wispy and redolent of regret.
If there's a plot here, it's this: Affleck, an Okie, and Kurylenko, a French girl, fall in love in Paris - she twirls, she skips, she dances, he stands there like a lug. They move back to his hometown, on the big, empty Oklahoma plains, to windswept fields turned over to housing divisions.
She brings along her daughter, who's none too happy. He has an ex (Rachel McAdams), who wears cowboy boots and knows her way around a horse. Affleck's character is a total blank, but apparently even a blank can get restless, and so he drifts back to his old cowgirl.
And Kurylenko, though she still skips and twirls and dances (down the supermarket aisles), starts to cry, too. She has an assignation at the Econo Lodge. Her lover is in construction, or appliances, or he's a sinewy psychopath (think of Martin Sheen's Kit in that early Malick gem, Badlands).
And for some reason, Javier Bardem shows up, as a tormented priest who does his voiceovers in Spanish.
"There's nothing here!" screams Romina Mondello - Kurylenko's Euro gal pal, walking the deserted sidewalks of this Anytown, U.S.A.
Boy, truer words . . ..
