TO THE WONDER

There really is no other filmmaker in the world like Terrence Malick. It even feels slightly incorrect to call him a "filmmaker", more a philosopher who uses cinema as his medium to explore deeper questions of humanity and existence. His films aren't so much films as tone poems, where details of narrative and exposition are secondary to the more sensory experiences film can offer. With his first film since his divisive epic 'The Tree of Life' (2011), Malick pushes his idiosyncratic style even further with 'To The Wonder', one of his most intimate to date.

Neil (Ben Affleck) and Marina (Olga Kurylenko) meet in France and fall in love. Neil asks Marina to move back with him to Oklahoma, along with her daughter. Very quickly, though, the love that bound them together begins to fracture, and so does their household. Marina, becoming increasingly emotionally unstable, turns her eyes back to her homeland, while Neil's eyes begin to fall on a long-lost love, Jane (Rachel McAdams). Weaved amongst these characters and seeking an understanding for what love is, a priest, Father Quintana (Javier Bardem), looks towards the heavens for some kind of sign for his own understanding of how love shapes the world.

After encompassing the scope of human existence in 'The Tree of Life', 'To The Wonder' seems like quite a minor film for Malick. It's certainly the most intimate and low-key since his 1978 masterpiece 'Days of Heaven'. Rather than working on a sweeping canvas, Malick focuses on this splintering love triangle with microscopic precision, Emmanuel Lubezki driving his camera right into the most intimate of moments, often without compromise. The director and cinematographer take their improvisational style further than ever before, capturing much incidental natural beauty and tiny moments others may have lost. For the first time, however, the method demonstrates its failings, and while it may have worked on Malick's larger pictures, the intimate scope and barest semblance of a narrative means their working methods can be seen for what they are: moments of nature captured for their beauty but with not much thematic connection to the central thrust of the film. Malick shapes his films in the editing room, trusting his gut and creating work immensely personal and unusual. There is a sense, watching 'To The Wonder', that this is a film not entirely sure of what it is, or at least wasn't during the shooting. There isn't the connecting thematic skeleton that tended to hold his previous works together, and while 'To The Wonder' is still a visually and aurally breathtaking experience, it doesn't possess the aching poetry of 'Days of Heaven' or 'The New World' (2005), or the devastating emotional resonance of 'The Tree of Life'.