Knight of Cups

KNIGHT OF CUPS (Terrence Malick, 2015)

KNIGHT OF CUPS follows Rick (Christian Bale), a screenwriter lost in the wilderness of Hollywood and all of the temptations it has to offer. Writer-director Terrence Malick compares Rick’s experience with a story about a father who sends his son west to retrieve a pearl, except the boy forgets his mission as he is seduced by what this new land puts before him. Success has brought money and an unending flow of beautiful women to Rick, but it has separated him from his wife Nancy (Cate Blanchett) and brought tension between him and his father (Brian Dennehy) and brother (Wes Bentley). Like Rick, who is referred to in the title, every significant character is given a chapter named after their corresponding tarot card. Each segment looks at how each person affects the wandering dreamer.

Malick continues to push his style to greater abstraction in KNIGHT OF CUPS. This film may show the limits of its utility. Malick employs a thin line of narrative for hanging his meditations in voiceover about the pursuit of God and love and alienation from it amid a world that distracts from the eternal by making beauty and novelty easily accessible to stave off boredom. Characters are heard on the soundtrack before they’ve been introduced and often sound the same, so it can be difficult to parse whose thoughts we’re hearing, although Malick may be more interested in the totality of the statements than assigning any to particular voices. The technique is freeing in that it allows the viewer to float along with the experience and confounding when trying to understand specifically what Malick is saying. For better or worse, the actors are symbols, even more than in his previous film.

After THE TREE OF LIFE and TO THE WONDER, how much one is willing to submit to the ride probably depends on one’s tolerance for Malick’s mystical poetry. The film unspools like a waking illusion, with Rick hazily roaming through the dream factory rich in material things and impoverished spiritually. It helps that cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki’s ravishing imagery of manmade opulence holds interest even if one loses the threads of philosophy and theology that hold KNIGHT OF CUPS together. It’s a staggeringly beautiful film in which the camera swoops among the people and tilts upward as if in worship and humility.

Christian or faith-based cinema tends to be narrowly defined to the kind of pat homiletics in stuff like MIRACLES FROM HEAVEN. Certainly those very straightforward types of films are more accessible on an aesthetic level than the sound and image pastiche Malick favors, but both are searching for something higher. KNIGHT OF CUPS dwells in the sinful entertainment capital to understand how one can be led astray and might be led out. If there can be multiple denominations within the predominant western religion, why can’t there be different ways for art to contemplate the nature of the divine too?

Grade: B

Ebertfest 2013: Opening Night

Ultimately Opening Night at the fifteenth annual Roger Ebert’s Film Festival was not markedly different from any of the twelve others I’ve attended.  Although he can no longer be there to prevail over the proceedings, in a sense the start of this year’s fest was the fulfillment of everything he worked toward with it.  The community that has sprung up around Ebertfest and his relationships with writers and filmmakers near and far took center stage.

Far-Flung Correspondent Grace Wang’s short film I REMEMBER opened the event. A brief video tribute to Ebert edited by Michael Mirasol, another FFC, featured various thumbs-up from the movies and the critic’s analogue from Roland Emmerich’s GODZILLA.  Four University of Illinois chorus members led a sing-along to “Those Were the Days” with lyrics Ebert customized for this night.  An Ebert-selected clip from CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT added cheerful and wistful notes reminding what the festival has given all who have been to it. One of the great films was projected in a beautiful 35mm print.   Matt Zoller Seitz, a critic and contributor to Ebert’s website ,led the post-film discussion with Chicago cinematographer Haskell Wexler, to whom this year’s festival is dedicated.  The theater itself showed off its latest renovations and restorations, improvements that were driven in part by the festival making its home at the Virginia.  And there guiding it all was his wife Chaz showing remarkable composure while occasionally going off script from the comments she said she would stick to while performing her duties as host.  It was not a somber night but rather a warm reminder of how one film critic had direct or indirect influences on all who were present.

In recent years fewer films have been shown from 35mm sources at Ebertfest.  If there’s only one this go-round, the organizers made it count.  Terrence Malick’s DAYS OF HEAVEN looked spectacular on the Virginia Theatre’s enormous screen. With its use of available light DAYS OF HEAVEN boasts one of the great achievements in cinematography.  I’ve seen the film two other times, once on DVD on a 27” TV and once from 35mm, but this viewing was something of a revelation in major and minor ways.  I’d never noticed the migrant workers in the distance throwing hammers in the upper lefthand corner of the frame while front and center are Richard Gere and Brooke Adams laying in the wheat field.  Linda Manz’s flat narration had been an obstacle of sorts for me in previous viewings, but this time I marveled at how it brings a unique tone and point of view to what could have been a familiar love triangle.

More significantly, during my third viewing of DAYS OF HEAVEN Malick’s impressionist style and signatures announce themselves in a way that unites his body of work.  His elliptical storytelling, thematic exploration of spiritual communion and separation, and use of dance and dance-like movement is all here in this 1978 film, albeit not as refined as he’s pushed them in THE TREE OF LIFE and TO THE WONDER.  Clearly story is not his primary interest.  Here’s it’s about the emotional rather than the narrative experience, yet it’s fascinating to discover how sharply written this film is in advancing major chunks of plot through a choice sentence or two and revealing its essence.  Gere asks Adams who’s going to know about what they’re up to, and she responds that nobody will.  Of course, DAYS OF HEAVEN implies that while mankind may be ignorant, God is observing and can choose to keep such sinners out of or banish them from His house.

During the post-film discussion Wexler, who’s credited with additional photography, mentioned how they reproduced the locust swarm, an effect that boggled my mind while watching the film.  They shot the scene in reverse while someone in a helicopter dropped coffee beans.  Beat that, CGI.

All in all, it was a terrific way to begin the fifteenth Ebertfest.  We’ll see how this festival goes for me, though, because I suffered an injury that hopefully won’t have me hobbling around too much.  Going down the stairs I felt a muscle in my calf pop. Leaving the theater was a bit of a painful challenge, but with rest, ice, elevation, and ibuprofen, I’m hoping to stay out of urgent care and not have my festival experience affected.  The year Ebert slipped and hurt his arm during Ebertfest didn’t slow him down, so surely I can soldier through whatever this is.

Badlands

BADLANDS (Terrence Malick, 1973)

Set in the late 1950s, BADLANDS follows 25-year-old garbage collector Kit (Martin Sheen) and 15-year-old Holly (Sissy Spacek), who are running from the law for their killing spree that stretches from South Dakota to Montana. Kit looks like James Dean and shows interest in the red-haired, freckled-faced teen, who admits to not receiving that kind of attention at school. It’s no wonder this man from the wrong side of the tracks captivates her. That her father (Warren Oates) disapproves only makes Kit more attractive. Kit and Holly’s outlaw adventure across the Great Plains is instigated when he kills her father and burns down her home. It’s them against the world as the couple hightail it out of town for a life of survival off of the land and anyone who gets in their way.

BADLANDS is loosely based on a similar string of real-life killings by Charles Starkweather and his young girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate in 1958, although writer-director Terrence Malick uses their story as a jumping off point for his interests than an investigation of true crime personalities. Instead of a psychological portrait of two young killers on the road, it studies the mundanity of murder. Kit and Holly seem not to be disturbed or excited by taking lives. Killing comes naturally and is carried out without consideration for the act’s meaning. They kill because it is an avenue to getting what they want or preserving themselves. They kill because it’s what they do.

The way of nature is a consistent theme in Malick’s films, and here in his debut he cuts to the chase regarding an unyielding universe that operates outside of philosophical constructs. In the animal kingdom Kit and Holly’s deeds would not be judged within a moral framework, nor would they be when considering man’s dominion over all creatures great and small. Shooting a dog to punish a child or tossing a catfish into the yard to suffocate because one is angry are not doings deserving of guilt or ethical penalty much like raising cattle for slaughter is unobjectionable. (In these instances one must account for when the film takes place and was made.)

But of course humans conduct themselves within the parameters of what society deems acceptable and unacceptable. This is why Kit and Holly’s brazen attitudes about the sanctity of life shock the sensibilities. Holly’s flat, matter of fact narration and Sheen and Spacek’s dispassionate performances reflect the emptiness in their characters and the problem of living outside higher and human-determined law. (In fact, the only time they appear to conform to the world’s expectations is when they hide out in the forest free of constraints and playact as civilized people.) Kit and Holly are frightening not because they are unknowable but because their actions stem from nature.

Additionally, this outlaw pair is scary because they’re dumb and likable. Malick has come to be known and revered as a cinematic poet and philosopher, as a filmmaker who explores big ideas, but in BADLANDS in particular he also shows a knack for off-kilter humor. Kit’s cocksure carriage, as though he’s embodying a role in a movie in his head, and the weird ideas that both verbalize breed affection. There’s something hilariously twisted about an adult killer insisting his girlfriend stop by school to get her books so she can keep up with her studies while they are on the lam. If only their strange notions and convention breaking were less sociopathic.

BADLANDS is a clear announcement that Malick is and would be a major talent to watch.

Grade: A