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.