Knight of Cups (15.)
Directed by Terence Malick.
Starring Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Natalie Portman, Brian Dennehy, Freida Pinto and Wes Bentley. 118 mins.
A Cup Knight, who needs one? Especially as, this being a Terence Malick film, you know that it's going to be a Long Knight of the Cups; a long, aimless, unbearably precious Knight of the Cups – basically two hours of Christian Bale looking at stuff, wistfully. Or the back of his head walking towards something, possibly the sea. Or falling in and out of love with very beautiful, quite tall but always very thin women, in sleek empty modern rooms. It's like an epic perfume advert that has forgotten what the product is.
Then again, such adverts aren't really about the product as about selling a mood: that of conspicuous alienation, glamorous emptiness, and that is exactly what Malick is hawking. Bale is a disenchanted Hollywood scriptwriter, “fragments of a man,” looking to try and heal his wounds. The film skims over his failures – the ex-wife (Blanchett), the fractious family relationships with his brother and father (Bentley and Dennehy), the vacuous Hollywood parties. His life is desolate, but aspirationally desolate. Sure, you've got problems but not like these beautiful people have problems. They're so desolate they can't even express it with their mouths; everybody communicates through poetic voice-overs that entwine into a single stream-of-conscious banality - many voices but with the same pretentiousness. There are a few homeless people and burns victims thrown into the mix, just to show Malick's inclusivity, but the poor don't get to have their own voice-over.
The film is, frankly, embarrassing – like a horrible dare where some mates pranked a Soho advertising twerp that he was a genius and gave him the budget to go out and make his version of a Tarkovsky film. Malick was never much of a story teller but since Tree of Life, he has abandoned even the pretence of a plot in favour of a floaty, eavesdropping style where we get hints and slithers of events that flow past us in a beautiful blur. He has put his faith in the resourcefulness in actors – no script, no written dialogue, he just hands them cards with a sentence on that they can reflect on as they improvise. Leaving actors to their own devices is a recipe for disaster, because none of them can see beyond their own next moody close up.
At least in Tree of Life, events seem connected to real life. You believed in the existence of Brad Pitt and his family and those children and their childhood in fifties Texas. Since then Malick's films have moved into glossy fantasy. Knight of Cups is packed with cameos (Ryan O' Neal, Antonio Banderas and Jason Clarke pop up as themselves) though in many way every performance in the film is a cameo. As such, it could be seem as his equivalent of The Player, Altman's snarky Hollywood satire on the town that had shunned him. Bale is a Malick substitute; he is treated as a figure of great importance but has nothing to say or contribute.
Malick seems to be the proof of my mother's chastisement that “you can be too clever.” He is clearly a clever and talented man. A man versed in literature, philosophy and myth, his first film Badlands is one of the few that you could legitimately call a masterpiece in that it seems to be a perfect expression of a challenging and thought provoking world view. The Thin Red Line, though no less pretentious and willfully “arty” than this, is still one of the great war films. In the Eastern myth of the title the Knight of Cups is a seeker after a pearl, and Malick has been seeking his pearl throughout his career, obsessively. His films have explored history, gone back to the prehistoric era, looked out around universe and recreated the big bang; he has shot miles and miles of film, used every other star in Hollywood, and spent years editing his footage trying to locate his pearl of wisdom.
Now he has abandoned plot and we look at his films to see what he has found to supersede our tired addiction to narrative, what great truths his life-long search for knowledge has uncovered and the answer is nothing, absolutely nothing.
Directed by Terence Malick.
Starring Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Natalie Portman, Brian Dennehy, Freida Pinto and Wes Bentley. 118 mins.
A Cup Knight, who needs one? Especially as, this being a Terence Malick film, you know that it's going to be a Long Knight of the Cups; a long, aimless, unbearably precious Knight of the Cups – basically two hours of Christian Bale looking at stuff, wistfully. Or the back of his head walking towards something, possibly the sea. Or falling in and out of love with very beautiful, quite tall but always very thin women, in sleek empty modern rooms. It's like an epic perfume advert that has forgotten what the product is.
Then again, such adverts aren't really about the product as about selling a mood: that of conspicuous alienation, glamorous emptiness, and that is exactly what Malick is hawking. Bale is a disenchanted Hollywood scriptwriter, “fragments of a man,” looking to try and heal his wounds. The film skims over his failures – the ex-wife (Blanchett), the fractious family relationships with his brother and father (Bentley and Dennehy), the vacuous Hollywood parties. His life is desolate, but aspirationally desolate. Sure, you've got problems but not like these beautiful people have problems. They're so desolate they can't even express it with their mouths; everybody communicates through poetic voice-overs that entwine into a single stream-of-conscious banality - many voices but with the same pretentiousness. There are a few homeless people and burns victims thrown into the mix, just to show Malick's inclusivity, but the poor don't get to have their own voice-over.
The film is, frankly, embarrassing – like a horrible dare where some mates pranked a Soho advertising twerp that he was a genius and gave him the budget to go out and make his version of a Tarkovsky film. Malick was never much of a story teller but since Tree of Life, he has abandoned even the pretence of a plot in favour of a floaty, eavesdropping style where we get hints and slithers of events that flow past us in a beautiful blur. He has put his faith in the resourcefulness in actors – no script, no written dialogue, he just hands them cards with a sentence on that they can reflect on as they improvise. Leaving actors to their own devices is a recipe for disaster, because none of them can see beyond their own next moody close up.
At least in Tree of Life, events seem connected to real life. You believed in the existence of Brad Pitt and his family and those children and their childhood in fifties Texas. Since then Malick's films have moved into glossy fantasy. Knight of Cups is packed with cameos (Ryan O' Neal, Antonio Banderas and Jason Clarke pop up as themselves) though in many way every performance in the film is a cameo. As such, it could be seem as his equivalent of The Player, Altman's snarky Hollywood satire on the town that had shunned him. Bale is a Malick substitute; he is treated as a figure of great importance but has nothing to say or contribute.
Malick seems to be the proof of my mother's chastisement that “you can be too clever.” He is clearly a clever and talented man. A man versed in literature, philosophy and myth, his first film Badlands is one of the few that you could legitimately call a masterpiece in that it seems to be a perfect expression of a challenging and thought provoking world view. The Thin Red Line, though no less pretentious and willfully “arty” than this, is still one of the great war films. In the Eastern myth of the title the Knight of Cups is a seeker after a pearl, and Malick has been seeking his pearl throughout his career, obsessively. His films have explored history, gone back to the prehistoric era, looked out around universe and recreated the big bang; he has shot miles and miles of film, used every other star in Hollywood, and spent years editing his footage trying to locate his pearl of wisdom.
Now he has abandoned plot and we look at his films to see what he has found to supersede our tired addiction to narrative, what great truths his life-long search for knowledge has uncovered and the answer is nothing, absolutely nothing.
