Autumn leaves, dying grass and fading flowers. Light, on skin and hair and water. A lone bee crawling across panes of glass in dusty sunlight. Profoundly moving and intensely sad, Terrence Malick’s latest masterpiece unearths the beauty of minutiae whilst evoking the vastness of love and faith and loss. Visually it is captivating, content-wise it is thought-provoking. TO THE WONDER embodies the deepest tragedy and greatest euphoria of human emotion, exploring the joys and pains of love both spiritual and real.
Loosely telling the story of a stoically silent construction engineer from Middle America, named Neil (Ben Affleck) and a volatile, flighty French woman named Marina (Olga Kurylenko), and their heady fall in and out of a love both immensely tender and quietly violent, the film evokes greater universal themes of humanity and spirituality.
…a visual, emotional and lyrical tour-de-force…
Affleck’s stubborn refusal to show any semblance of expression somehow ensures that it is felt even more deeply, and in juxtaposition with Kurylenko’s intense smiles and vacant stares serves to strengthen an empathetic sense of humanity. In addition, Javier Bardem’s subtle turn in the supporting role of a troubled slum-town vicar establishes this humanity in relationship to God, the wonder of the title expressed in the beauty of nature and Creation which Malick so delicately captures. Yet still there is a sense of doubt which pervades and seeps from every pore, just like the disappointment and faded hopes and loss of faith so characteristic of Malick’s work but which render it so true.
TO THE WONDER is a visual, emotional and lyrical tour-de-force, combining narrative and art and symbolism with a tenderness that is beautiful and intensely sad. Recalling at times the abstraction and meditative cinematography of early experimental art films such as Maya Deren’s MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON, Malick succeeds here in bringing the realm of art into wide-release cinema. The imagery is stunningly poetic in each and every frame, words and light and music are layered to compound each deeply felt emotion: Malick has created in this his latest offering an affecting and an exquisitely choreographed filmic dance of elegant poetic magnitude.
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