They
climbed until they reached another canyon. This one was sterile, but its bare
ground and jagged rocks were even more brilliantly colored than the flowers of
the first. The
path was silver, grained with streaks of rose-gray, and the walls of the canyon
were turquoise, mauve, chocolate and lavender. The air itself was
vibrant pink.
They stopped to watch a humming bird
chase a blue jay. The jay flashed by squawking with its tiny enemy on its tail
like a ruby bullet. The gaudy birds burst the colored air into a thousand glittering particles like metal confetti.
—Nathanael West, “The Day of the Locust“ (1939)
A soul, indeed. With “Knight of Cups”, his most satisfying film since “The Thin Red
Line” (1999), Terrence Malick joins the lineage of artists who have sought to
depict—and transcend—the treacherously complex surfaces of California, Los
Angeles and Hollywood. But Malick’s refined, hyper-cinematic prism yields
visions and impressions which set his vision far apart from those of
Nathanael West, Maya Deren, Bret Easton Ellis, Michael Tolkin, Charles
Bukowski, Robert Altman, David Lynch, Mike Davis, James Benning, Thom Andersen,
Joan Didion, Bruce Wagner, David Cronenberg, and all the others who have found
teemingly rich material—psychological, socio-economic, psycho-geographic—in
these palm-fringed, perpetually sun-bleached, economically unequal, seismically
volatile zones.
(Presumably) completing his spiritual-quest trilogy which began with the
cosmogonic, bewilderingly diffuse Palme d’Or winner “The Tree of Life” (2011)
and continued with the more overtly (and detrimentally) evangelical “To The
Wonder” (2012), Malick has delivered an exasperating, exhilarating magnum
opus, a film with unapologetic, vaulting ambition that is to be prized,
even cherished.
That said, those who found “Tree” and “Wonder” too elliptical, too whispery,
too grandiose, too “Malicky” will want to steer well clear of this elliptical,
whispery, grandiose enterprise, which conjures sharp shards of narrative and
assembles them not into a coherent, conventional narrative, rather a glittering
kaleido-mosaic. It’s held together by a loose Tarot-inspired structure
(prologue and eight chapters, each of the latter named for a particular card);
by a haunting score (original compositions by Hanan Townshend intermingle with
a slew of classical samplings); by Emmanuel Lubezki’s swooping, prowling,
never-resting camerawork (widescreen images run the gamut from
crystal-def to GoPro, including a handful
of near-subliminal glitches presumably left in on purpose ); and by the central figure of
Rick, a mega-successful Hollywood screenwriter played by Christian Bale
(returning to the Malickverse a decade after “The New World”).
Rick seemingly has it all: wealth, money, beautiful women—Knight can be parsed
as Malick’s “8 ½”, with Imogen Poots, Teresa Palmer, Cate Blanchett and Natalie
Portman flitting in and out. His is a hedonistic lifestyle among the glitterati.
The lofty perch of worldly success, however, affords Rick the time and space to
contemplate just how far he has strayed from true contentment, real knowledge,
a proper understanding of his place in the scheme of things. His road from
perdition begins when he survives a powerful earthquake that quite literally
jolts him awake and knocks him from his bed. But the journey upon which he
embarks is as much about mental realignments as it is physical wandering.
Malick follows Rick and various subsidiary characters—including Brian Dennehy
as his Christian father, Joseph (!) and Wes Bentley as his fallen-angel
brother, Barry—around an exhaustive range of Los Angeles locales, with spells
of contemplation in the desert and a fleeting detour to Las Vegas. We
criss-cross social strata from a hideously opulent mansion-garden party, where
Antonio Banderas’ Tonio is Rabelaisian ringmaster-in-chief (“treat this world
as it deserves—there are no principles, just circumstances”), to Skid Row. Los
Angeles plays itself, and so do its residents—from partygoer Bruce Wagner to the
physically mutilated, mentally fried underclass of the city’s horrible, irresistible
Downtown, “Knight of Cups”’ equivalents of the impoverished Texan marginals
glimpsed in “To the Wonder”.
And while Rick, for all his torments, never makes for a particularly engaging
or sympathetic protagonist—arguably never even really registers as much of a
character (what kind of films does he write? When does he ever do any work?)—Malick
places him in the center of such a vast and complex web that the hollow at the
film’s core can with effort be overlooked, forgiven. “Knight of Cups” has a propulsive
flow and a strange coherence which “Tree” and “Wonder” never quite sustained—coincidence
that Malick only credits three main editors this time, a trimming of the team
from his last couple of outings? In retrospect, the two predecessors now look
like hugely elaborate sketches, groping towards a profundity which this film
makes a much more plausible stab at grasping. The final moments could be
construed as Malick’s farewell to the cinematic form as he has always known it.
Crucially, there’s a strain of self-aware humor here that also feels like
something new, something Malick arguably last displayed all the way back in
“Badlands”. “Don’t get your head too far up your own ass,” warns Rick’s agent,
an aside clearly audible in Joel Dougherty’s oceanic sound-design. “I took
drugs once. I see things other people do not,” burbles an Aussie surf-babe—hallucinogenic
presented as a less reliable portal to elusive grace than human love, than an
appreciation of the natural world. “I only teach one thing. Pay attention to
this moment. Everything is there, perfect and complete,” a serene guru-type
intones, guiding Rick around his achingly Tao-minimalist pad.
Shortly after, Rick contemplates a Scalextric sculpture in an art-gallery, with
tiny cars whizzing endlessly and pointless around a micro-sized representation
of a city: urban life and modern capitalism as a hive of self-propelled, blind,
near-inescapable kinesis. Breaking free from such systems and finding the pearl
one seeks—even realizing the pearl exists—can take years, even decades (Malick
is 71). And the effort can make us appear as ungainly as the California Brown
Pelican glimpsed on a dockside, hoisting its bulk awkwardly along the dry
boards and palpably desperate for the briny.
Malick’s choice of fowl, “Knight of Cups’” true heraldic beast, is clearly no
accident. An endangered species, innocent casualty of an eco-system wrecked by
myopic human greed, the California Brown is “the only pelican that is a plunge
diver… a unique feeder that makes impressive dives from ten to thirty feet
above the surface. They are, however, able to dive from as high as one hundred
feet. The deeper the meal the higher the dive.”
