4/5
Knight of Cups was made with no script, no story, and no plan. What it does have is a character, and like the camera that films him, he drifts here, there, and just about everywhere in Los Angeles, desperately in search of something transcendent to fill his life’s hollow shell.
What I’ve just described could seem painfully ponderous, and for some it will be. Yet because of the magnetism of its actors and the entrancing sensibilities of its filmmakers, the movie worked for me on the level of an experience. Like a dowsing rod, it seeks out currents and resonances that build over the course of its two hours, and by the end, you’ll find yourself having been jarred from a bittersweet dream.
The film is split into eight chapters, all exploring the romantic and familial follies of a Hollywood screenwriter named Rick (Christian Bale). He has exhausted every trace of the man he once was in a carousel of sex, drugs, partying, and every other indulgence available to him. From this unravels a picture of everybody he’s hurt — or perhaps have hurt him in that strange reflexive way — along the way, including ex-wives, girlfriends, flings, an estranged father, and a brother who seems conflicted both in his admiration of his brother and in his envy. To reveal any more would simplify a story that does not lend itself to such trite synopsizing. I would be selling it to you as something it isn’t.
As images spilled onto the screen, it slowly occurred to me that there is a trust in Terrence Malick eclipsing that which I have in almost any other filmmaker, here or past. I’m still wondering why this is, and if I had to pin a reason, I think it comes down to integrity of vision. When other, perhaps younger directors attempt a movie as deliberately fluid as Knight of Cups, I see raw enthusiasm pushed through the filters of influence and imitation. The fingerprints of better directors are everywhere. When Terrence Malick shapes his films, he is channeling nothing but the medium he molds. What’s on the screen is a product of one man and one man only, and regardless of its flaws, it is a pleasure to see someone create a work wholly their own.
It should have been a disaster. More immediately, it should have been totally empty. In a post-film Q&A, the film’s cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, told the audience that the film was shot not to tell a story but rather to find one, with the director calling his actors and crew and giving them no screenplay and nothing to be sold on but his name and legacy. He gave them a character, put them in front of the lens, and requested that they simply “be” until moments of truth and clarity were arrived at through chance and averages. What we’re left with is a movie that will try the patience of many and please only a few, but I’m one of said few, and us few managed to tune into the strange, meditative signals Malick broadcast with his trademark method.
I mentioned flaws. A movie like this makes virtues of them, and they’re about as relevant to the whole tapestry as are air bubbles in a Pollock painting, but the movie is troubled in a grander sense; one gets the feeling that Malick’s fluid storytelling has finally touched the ceiling. The story he’s telling is an interesting one, but why in this way? The film unfolds in a fractaling freeform recalling one of the director’s greatest movies, The Tree of Life, but it lacks the scope and breadth that made the latter such a tremendous force of nature. Evidently, there’s more breathless spirituality to be found in the whole of the human condition than there is in L.A. malaise. Go figure.
But there are revelations aplenty in Knight of Cups, sad and lonely ones, and they aren’t to be dismissed. You’ll either find them as you’re swept away by the film’s singular tides or you’ll be too alienated to want to look for them. I can’t decide if that’s an endorsement or not, but the way I see it, by the time you’ve reached this part of the review, you’ve already made that decision. If it sounds like your ballgame, I extend to you the warmest of welcomes. You are among friends.
Spencer Moleda is a freelance writer, script supervisor, and motion picture researcher residing in Los Angeles, California. His experience ranges from reviewing movies to providing creative guidance to fledgling film projects. You can reach him at: [email protected]