Knight of Cups - New Terrence Malick

Having been fascinated with the critical divide around this film, I was very eager to see just how good/bad it was. And I'm going to side with the 'pro' camp on this one - thought Knight of Cups was excellent.

I found To The Wonder incredibly tedious, and in a way this is a similar proposition. But I admired how in some ways this is the purest Terence Malick film yet - almost completely disregarding conventional narrative structure, distilling everything down into... I don't know even know how best to describe it. The fragmented images are just a stream-of-consciousness flow of ideas, emotions, themes, memories. There's a basic episodic structure in place, but really the audience is left to pick at what's presented and interpret them. I can easily see how that would come across as wishy-washy for most, but there's something about it that drew me in totally - took me a while, but certainly by the second half of the film I was engrossed (if occasionally distracted when someone like Kevin Corrigan popped up for like a single shot - Malick's brutal editing process continues unabated).

It's a small film, and yes let's be honest it's about an incredibly wealthy man and his almost envious existential crisis following affairs with a stream of beautiful women. 'Sympathy' is not exactly the inherent response one has to the situations he faces. Yet I think Malick's images engage with the subject matter in quite fascinating ways. Like the frequent, sometimes extended shots of the homeless individuals of LA to put Rick's 'predicament' into context. And the way it probes the inherent yet grandiose emptiness of the lifestyle Rick and many of his associates live, and their quests for some sort of meaning in the process (one shot of a solitary shrine sitting in the middle of a sickeningly opulent Las Vegas resort stood out as a particularly provocative one). Also loved the recurrent image of Rick and his latest lover on beaches - trying to constantly recapture, with diminishing returns, that same old romantic rush, all the while doomed to ultimately fail to engage with the women as the unique individuals they are.

It is, naturally, gorgeous, in much the same way Emmanuel Lubezki and Malick's collaborations always are. The fact that Bale barely says two sentences in the film creates a wonderfully tricky relationship between the camera and Rick's world, almost as if he too is a mere observer looking back at his past. But there's a few new tricks too, most notably the fascinating use of digital cameras. Smaller cameras are used to achieve a new intimacy and rawness, feeling even freer and more dynamic than the by now characteristically floaty, woozy Malickian aesthetic. It's also used on a few occasions to add an uncertainty to what's happening - the significance of one early scene of children playing remains vague, and the choice to shoot it on a GoPro or similar adds to that sense of mystery and almost fuzziness.

If it caught me on a different day, I might have responded differently, and there's no question its ambiguity and general floatiness could be easily interpreted as being irritatingly vague and empty. And it's ultimately a pretty small film, dealing with a wealthy person's personal crisis in grand, self-serious ways. But as a piece of cinema it's rich and deeper than its undeniably shallow protagonist, and indeed the manner in which it probes and deconstructs that shallowness is fascinating. This is Malick pushing his style to further extremes - and it will annoy as many as it bewitches.