To the Wonder

Dur­ing the press tour for his award sea­son hot cake Argo, Ben Affleck – clear­ly off his rock­er on mis­fired crit­i­cal sun­beams – cock­i­ly lament­ed that he had starred in the only bad Ter­rence Mal­ick movie.

Dear­est Ben, if you ever, in just a sin­gle frame of your direc­to­r­i­al career, man­age to match the kind of exquis­ite for­mal refine­ment that To The Won­der blithe­ly exhibits as a cin­e­mat­ic giv­en, then we’ll maybe let that one slide. Maybe.

It’s been referred to as a ​‘B‑side’ to The Tree Of Life’s oper­at­ic prime cut, but that descrip­tion infers that To The Won­der is some kind of funky doo­dle not deemed good enough as a stand­alone work. No, these two films oper­ate bet­ter as a mon­u­men­tal dou­ble A‑side, both evolved out of the same mias­mic pri­mor­dial yolk and con­struct­ed with an insou­ciant rigour that’s bound to leave the right­eous slack-jawed in awe.

While Tree Of Life pre­sent­ed Earth as a place of rhap­sod­ic enchant­ment, To The Won­der gives us a mod­ern-day world on the cusp of dev­as­ta­tion. Tak­ing place among the pre­fab tract hous­es of a dusty Okla­homan berg where every hour is mag­ic hour, To The Won­der is less inter­est­ed in the con­so­la­tions of spir­i­tu­al­i­ty and the dynam­ics of love than it is the emo­tion­al bar­ri­cades that pre­vent us from liv­ing a life of sub­lime indifference.

Affleck essays Neil, a com­mit­ment-shy envi­ron­men­tal health offi­cer whose inter­nal anx­i­eties pre­vent him from tru­ly accept­ing child­like Russ­ian-French nymphet Mari­na (Olga Kurylenko) into his cold heart. A pati­na of dread and dis­qui­etude – both spo­ken and con­cealed – encas­es the action. Char­ac­ters grap­ple with meta­phys­i­cal conun­drums and para­dox­i­cal hom­i­lies to come to terms with the pre­cious­ness of exis­tence. They even begin to realise that the uni­ver­sal con­stant of roman­tic rela­tion­ships may just be los­ing its place at the top of the chain of human responsibility.

With this more insid­i­ous­ly dour and sub­tly opaque affair, Mal­ick again acts as head cura­tor of a lux­u­ri­ant flick-book of divine images, all of which have been immac­u­late­ly beat-matched via the breath­tak­ing, ellip­ti­cal edit­ing. His part­ner in cin­e­mato­graph­ic crime, Emmanuel ​‘Chi­vo’ Lubez­ki, locates tum­bling cos­mic depths in the most mun­dane of moments: a mead­ow of ambling bison mutates into a vision of chaos and claus­tro­pho­bia; the shift­ing sands near Mont Saint-Michel; a night-time vis­it to a wash­ing-machine out­let becomes a tri­al of enforced domes­tic­i­ty; Mari­na euphor­i­cal­ly flits, jerks and prances, her façade of inno­cence a phys­i­cal man­i­fes­ta­tion of the idea that Neil is unable to get close to her, to con­sume her.

Weav­ing in tan­dem to this is the sto­ry of a priest (Javier Bar­dem) who’s stray­ing from the flock. He sur­veys the lives of impov­er­ished locals just as Neil finds tox­ic chem­i­cals leak­ing from local indus­tri­al plants. To The Won­der pon­ders how dif­fer­ent life might be if we could com­pre­hend the awe­some­ness of a world we take for grant­ed. We might wres­tle with our own doubts about this film, but how fit­ting is that for a film about doubt?

Its utter earnest­ness leaves it wide open to crit­i­cism, but to bemoan the super­fi­cial qual­i­ty of the per­for­mances, the script or the sto­ry would be to miss the point of the film entire­ly. Mal­ick doesn’t make films any­more. He builds cathedrals.