Terrence Malick’s films are not exactly known for their riveting narratives. Affecting visual and aural poeticism, not story, are the lifeblood of the director’s works. On those rare occasions when events unfold with urgency---the white-knuckle assault on a Japanese bunker in The Thin Red Line, for example---Malick layers the action with his characteristic elliptical philosophical musings. Even by the standards of America’s most contemplative auteur, however, To the Wonder is an exceedingly wispy film, a collage-like reverie about the nature of love.
The story that can be gleaned: Marina (Olga Kurylenko) and Neil (Ben Affleck) meet in the former’s native France and fall in love, and he asks her to return with him to small-town Oklahoma. She agrees, and together with Mariana’s daughter Tatiana (Tatiana Chiline), the couple find happiness, at least for a little while. Eventually, however, the love that was once so blissful curdles into alienation and resentment. She returns to France and he finds solace in the arms of ranch owner Jane (Rachel McAdams), but the emotional bond that Neil and Marina shared is not entirely extinguished. Meanwhile, local Catholic priest Father Quintana (Javier Bardem) struggles with his understanding of God’s will.
To the Wonder being a Malick picture, the plot is conveyed through thin, jumbled slices of time, leaving much that is merely suggested or outright ambiguous. (Neil and Marina seem to move at least three times while in America.) Still, the specifics of story hardly matter. The director is, as always, employing cinema to convey sensations and engage with insoluble aspects of the human experience. Once the viewer settles into Malick’s idiosyncratic but highly seductive style of filmmaking, To the Wonder begins to resemble a lovelorn diary: rambling, effusive, and shameless in its bittersweet sincerity.
To the Wonder is simultaneously the most slippery and straightforward of Malick’s features, for while the director’s rhapsodic approach has never been applied more thickly, it has never felt more appropriate. The vivid talents of cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki and production designer Jack Fisk transform locales from an exurban ranch home to Mont Saint-Michel into gorgeous backdrops for a feature-length rumination on the gravity of emotional attachment. It’s a case study in high-minded filmmaking, but ultimately so achingly lovely that one can’t help but swoon.
