Knight of Cups

Ter­rence Malick’s Knight of Cups explores the dif­fer­ence in such terms as ​‘change’, ​‘regres­sion’, ​‘evo­lu­tion’ and ​‘rebirth’. Pho­to albums are obso­lete, cul­tur­al relics, caked in the dust of time. Elec­tron­ic media has seen to that by offer­ing some­thing new in their place. A pho­to­graph is now a jpeg or a Vine. It exists on a phone or a dri­ve. One wrong flick of the thumb and it’s gone for­ev­er. Mal­ick tries to find some valu­able con­ver­gence in these ideas, whether there’s a way to make some­thing that’s big, deep, pro­found, abstract – every­thing great cin­e­ma should aspire to be – but using the tools, the imagery and the lan­guage of the tech­no­log­i­cal present.

The con­clu­sion reached is that now, look­ing through an album of pho­tographs is an active rather than pas­sive process. Knight of Cups encap­su­lates that cin­e­mat­ic poten­tial, weav­ing togeth­er stocks and styles as a way of cat­a­logu­ing the things we remem­ber and the ways we have of remem­ber­ing them. A scene of tod­dlers frol­ick­ing on a front lawn – per­haps an ear­ly remem­brance of the film’s louche hero, Rick (Chris­t­ian Bale) – is cap­tured with abra­sive, pixel­lat­ed video. A leap into the future is then rep­re­sent­ed with a con­ver­sion to gor­geous, pin-sharp 65mm film.

Rick is going through his own tran­si­tion. For­lorn and direc­tion­less, his time is spent avoid­ing his lucra­tive day job writ­ing com­e­dy movies, and hark­ing back to the numer­ous sex­u­al trysts of yore. It’s a per­son­al search for hap­pi­ness and mean­ing, rak­ing over the peach-hued ash­es of lost love as a way to form a present-day game plan. His future – and the impos­si­bil­i­ty of his quest – is rep­re­sent­ed by tarot cards which make up the film’s chap­ter head­ings. Rick’s anx­i­ety is melan­cholic more than angry. He doesn’t seem sui­ci­dal, despite a predilec­tion for jump­ing into water wear­ing the same black suit/​black shirt com­bo. He’s accept­ing of the world as it is. He’s peace­able, but agitated.

Though this may read as a dere­lic­tion of crit­i­cal duty, it feels point­less to try and divine a finite mean­ing from this text. A game of sec­ond-guess­ing Ter­rence Malick’s the­mat­ic motives is an exer­cise in pure-brewed futil­i­ty. That’s not to say Knight of Cups isn’t an inclu­sive film – it is just that. It wants you to build the­o­ries, engi­neer con­spir­a­cies, link togeth­er frag­ments of infor­ma­tion as a way to deci­pher Rick’s vague but poignant predicament.

Mov­ing beyond lit­er­al read­ings, the film is about the way we con­tem­plate, the man­ner in which our minds index infor­ma­tion and, per­haps its most unique achieve­ment, the dif­fi­cul­ty of affix­ing a dis­tinct emo­tion­al reac­tion to an event from the past. There’s bare­ly a con­ven­tion­al line of movie dia­logue. It’s all piece­meal con­ver­sa­tions and over­heard decla­ma­tions. Words and music join as one, they are sounds or stac­ca­to poet­ry, no longer a mode with which to communicate.

This ​‘sto­ry’ is being deliv­ered from the per­spec­tive of a man, and so accu­sa­tions of misog­y­ny have been lev­elled at it. If you’re mak­ing a film where open­ness is part of its design, then there’s real­ly no come back to this response. Maybe the moments of Rick tap­ping the rim of his Way­far­ers and gaw­ping at impos­si­bly beau­ti­ful women (often below the waist line) as they strut down LA side­walks are mere­ly the pri­mal, erot­i­cal­ly-charged images that he has cat­a­logued in his mem­o­ry? Is there a dif­fer­ence between mak­ing a film about a char­ac­ter who may have misog­y­nist ten­den­cies, and endors­ing those ten­den­cies? Is this an aggres­sive­ly hon­est (and objec­tive) depic­tion of macho instincts, or a sym­bol­ic (and sub­jec­tive) chan­nelling of its director’s rapa­cious libido?

We’re left to guess how and why Rick con­nects with and sub­se­quent­ly breaks away from this cortège of women. His rela­tion­ship with an old­er women (played by Cate Blanchett) crum­bles because they failed to have chil­dren. He con­nects with Imo­gen Poots at a pool par­ty which, for her, nev­er seems to end. He lat­er indulges in the male fan­ta­sy of run­ning away to Vegas with a live-wire strip­per (Tere­sa Palmer). Rick is obsessed with the beach. In his head, he loves to pad­dle in the waves with his cur­rent squeeze. The women in his life are like waves, rolling up and smoth­er­ing his body, then, draw­ing back, dis­si­pat­ing into nothingness.

Cin­e­ma is a lan­guage which Mal­ick has mas­tered, and so he is now try­ing to invent a new form of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Every­thing in Knight of Cups can be found in con­ven­tion­al roman­tic or dra­mat­ic genre films – the Dick­en­sian tale of a man learn­ing lessons from his actions, try­ing to under­stand what love is, aton­ing for things he thinks are sins, rail­ing against things that harm his temperament.

More than a stand-alone fea­ture, it’s the con­tin­u­a­tion of a jour­ney, of an artist look­ing back over his career and ask­ing what he can do dif­fer­ent­ly. It’s a hum­ble and hum­bling epic that chan­nels the­ol­o­gy, reli­gion, phi­los­o­phy, archi­tec­ture, ecol­o­gy and eth­nol­o­gy through sim­ple bursts of pri­mal emo­tion. It’s like an old mas­ter paint­ing a God emoji.