A wayward screenwriter in 鈥楰night of Cups鈥
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AFTER making lyrical, rapturous films set in the Pacific theater of World War II (“The Thin Red Line”) and Jamestown (“The New World”), Terrence Malick has steadily moved closer to present day and his own stories, too. In a trilogy of films, he’s sought to use all the sensory and symphonic powers of cinema to illuminate personal pasts — his Texas childhood, an ill-fated romance in Paris, hedonistic success in Hollywood — like shimmering kaleidoscopes of memory. Proust would have really dug it.
Along the way, Malick has astonished and confounded, and in the relative rush — three films in five years follow four in three decades — he has lost some admirers who have watched his pursuits of transcendence become too dreamy-eyed, too banal to inspire the same adulation the revered filmmaker previously enjoyed.
“Knight of Cups” — deeply felt, wholly admirable, unmoving — furthers the trend. Christian Bale plays a screenwriter whose breakthrough success has brought him riches, women and existential emptiness. Like Malick’s two previous films — “The Tree of Life,” the astonishing father-son tale writ across the cosmos, and the less successful love story “To the Wonder” — “Knight of Cups” is made in an impressionistic style all Malick’s own that has begun to feel, despite its earnest yearning, artificial.
The story rarely unfolds through dialogue, action or anything like humor, but through meditative voice-over and montage in beautiful imagery that expresses the inner thought and memories of Rick (Bale).
He spends much of the film wandering: through a decadent Los Angeles pool party, a dayglow strip club, a vacant studio back lot. There’s a series of romances played by Imogen Poots, Teresa Palmer, Freida Pinto, Natalie Portman and Cate Blanchett, as his ex-wife doctor.
It’s a modern telling of the prodigal son fable set in glitzy Hollywood; Rick is introduced as a sleeping prince who drank from a poison cup. It’s one of Malick’s most elementally composed films — all earth, sea and sky. Early on, a view from on high captures the glowing arc of the globe, flickering with rivers of Northern Lights.
One narration sums up the film, where Rick laments that he’s been sleepwalking, “in love with the world, in love with love.”
“Knight of Cups” is a vivid collage that ultimately doesn’t take form. But Malick’s ambition for higher meaning and purer cinematic expression remains enthralling. For better and worse, his cup overflows.
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