On To The Wonder

Terrence Malick’s To The Wonder comes just one year after his award winning The Tree of Life (2011). Rumoured to be even less narrative bound than The Tree of Life, To The Wonder arrives as a 100-minute romance with idiosyncratic Malickian touches.

Of the director’s work it thematically and stylistically combines The Tree of Life with his second feature, the incredible Days of Heaven (1978). To The Wonder tells the story of Neil, a reticent mid Western American and Marina, a vivacious Parisian. Their romance is passionate and sudden, but doomed by differences and unwillingness on Neil’s part to commit. After a visa expiry, Marina returns to Paris where she becomes increasingly depressed losing her 10-year-old daughter’s affections to the estranged father. In America, Neil becomes romantically involved with a childhood sweetheart. Marina returns to America forcing Neil to break off his childhood romance and attempt to rekindle his love with Marina.

The narrative is straightforward (a love triangle, not unlike Days of Heaven) yet it is delivered with the looseness that Malick has become known for. However it is accessible (more so for fans of his work) and when Marina is on screen To The Wonder is majestic. Marina, played by Olga Kurylenko, is the heart and soul of the film and when midway she temporarily departs, the film loses its grip and Ben Affleck and Rachel McAdams (playing Neil and his childhood sweetheart) are unable to capture in their performances the freedom that Malickian characters require.

Malick films Kurylenko always moving, spinning, jumping or rolling, connoting the evanescence and vitality of her character. Like the natural environment that Malick so beautifully frames and shoots, Marina is a part of the natural, spinning like a leaf or swaying like the long grass surrounding her American home. Neil on the other hand is static, only coming to life in anger and it is no surprise that his job requires him to take from and destroy the natural world.

The film does suffer from a midway lull, but there is beauty in the images and To The Wonder further highlights that there are few directors as in tune with the beauty of the natural world that surrounds us every day and our interaction with it as Terrence Malick. 

On Great Characters with Flight

There are many great films with great characters. There are few mediocre films with great characters. Flight is one of them. John Gatins has created in Whip Whitaker, played by Denzel Washington, a character who is both good and bad simultaneously and he brings life to the film when it is at its best and worst.

Whip is a pilot who enjoys all the trimmings that come with the status of airline pilot: women, alcohol and drugs. Whip doesn’t just enjoy them; he enjoys all three the morning he is due to fly cross-country. Juxtaposed with this unforgiveable and entirely depraved behaviour is Whip’s status as one of the best pilots in the air. So, when his plane falls apart mid air it is only the skill of Whip that keeps 90% of the passengers from what would have been a certain death.

What follows is an entirely believable lawsuit that in turns investigates the crash while prosecuting Whip for flying high, drunk and tired. The catch is, of course, that Whip is entirely in the wrong and should be punished to the full extent of the law, yet without him the failure of the plane (that has nothing to do with Whip) would have resulted in total deaths.

Washington plays this dichotomy of traits with sublime excellence communicating at times the enjoyable highs of drug use seen in the earlier scenes of Goodfellas (1990) with the terrible lows of grittier drug representations. The film does lag in the final third and it is too long. The ending is problematic also and director Robert Zemeckis opts for mawkish sentimentality, which feels incongruous. Despite this Flight is, when Washington is on screen, captivating.   

On Politics and Lincoln

You wait years for a film about slavery to come along, and then two comes at once. Earlier this month Tarantino’s Django Unchained and now Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln. However, only one of these films is about slavery and that is the latter.

Despite criticisms of ignoring the black point of view, Spielberg’s film rolls on and rightly so; it is a beautifully crafted piece of work and is a film about Abraham Lincoln, a white president with a white cabinet. Despite some early civil war scenes Lincoln is a film that plays out in the small back rooms and basements of unassuming Washington buildings. A hunt for votes to pass an anti slavery amendment is the main narrative thread and from this Spielberg pulls a gripping story and creates a masterful film.

Lincoln is a film very much about politics and at times feels like a nineteenth century The West Wing (1999 - 2006), as we see Lincoln and his cabinet unafraid to tangle with the opposition, winning votes by any means possible. The film neither dumbs down nor isolates audiences and credit for this goes to Tony Kushner’s script that takes an otherwise heavy political story and turns it into an accessible mainstream film. Spielberg refuses to idolise his characters, even Lincoln and this only wins the director more plaudits. A director that can, like few others balance films such as Lincoln with the more mainstream, such as War of the Worlds (2005). The grey scale cinematography brings Lincoln’s world to life and the film is perhaps the most noteworthy of all its recent awards competitors. 

On Torture and Zero Dark Thirty

Much has been written and said about Zero Dark Thirty’s responsibility to American audiences and how exposed they should be to the dark side of their recent history. We speak here of course of torture. Kathryn Bigelow’s film does not shy away, nor enhance unrealistically scenes of torture. Zero Dark Thirty approaches torture as necessary in the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, in fact it is information received through torture that leads to his capture.

Yet the idea that torture uncovers information of no value is not uncommon, therefore Bigelow’s film very purposely takes a firm pro-torture standpoint without juxtaposing it with a criticism of American policy. This is a brave move and one that has earned the film much criticism for even daring to show torture. However, Americans and the world over know that torture is a part of their recent history and therefore it is legitimate to present it. Whether torture led to the capture of Bin Laden is another matter, but one that Bigelow, in her attempt to create a piece of entertaining narrative cinema, need not abide by.

Regardless of the historical facts (and Zero Dark Thirty would do itself many favours by removing its opening declaration of verisimilitude), Zero Dark Thirty is a gripping thriller, fantastically acted, directed and structured and one that need not answer for its images.