To the Wonder opens Friday, April 12, at the Egyptian.
Key word even the well-intentioned keep missing here: Play. Sexual variety sure, but that’s not even the point. The point, as I see it: How play keeps you evolving the rules to exhilarate yourself. Two people in love across from each other across a train compartment table; Terrence Malick tilts his camera so the scenery outside the train’s window tilts — a jet caught right at takeoff — and the two people don’t seem to tilt at all. Malick plays with perception to catch giddiness, those arms-thrown-back-eyes-closed moments where you splash in your own absurdity. Where you do something increasingly tough as adulthood solidifies: Forget that somebody else is watching, or could be watching.
Malick does a decent job of de-idolizing Ben Affleck; you wouldn’t even guess he’s Ben Affleck for the first twenty minutes or so, until he starts talking. Without his distinctive voice, and shot only in profile or from a distance, his odd resemblance to a young Bruce Springsteen, notable from Dazed And Confused days, sometimes resurfaces. But it’s Malick’s intent, I think, to show that he could shoot this with almost anybody. We become subsumed into the young couple’s constant movement, their constant unselfconsciousness, and the ride we’re going along for trumps conventional ideas of star power.
With Javier Bardem, the director/writer pours such wine into a somber bottle. Bardem’s priest is disconnected from the Almighty, and wonders what he has to do to get it back. Sometimes he wonders if it’s God’s fault. These musings and those of the effusive Romina Mondello, might seem ponderous, but Malick wants us to worry at extremes. Mondello’s conviction that her point-rocket-push-button adventurism can’t fail (“I am my own experiment”) could well smash into an existential barrier, leaving her very much like the priest.
The subtitles are too small for the screen, unless the director put them in that way as a knowing hardship. Everything else inhales and exhales as a gestalt. The lovers eventually lose play, but unlike a lot of people, they keep trying to find it again, testing out angles, shapes, attitudes, convolutions, and belly-flop silliness.
Malick makes it look easy. But he’s almost 70 and this is only his sixth feature, so maybe not so much. Tune in, drop in, open yourself to the macrocosm.
