Tag Archives: Flowers

Sitting through Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder is like
watching a stranger sorting through a packet of old photographs. To
the photographer, the snapshots recall a story. To us they’re
disconnected episodes in an unknown narrative. The people we see in
them are laughing, crying, whatever; but we have no idea who they
really are, and we never find out. As a cinematic technique, this
willful ambiguity, dispensing with the building blocks of plot and
character, is trying, and we feel a tide of boredom rising. But
it’s Terrence Malick, so we hang on.
The movie isn’t much more than a footnote to The Tree of
Life, Malick’s grand and masterful contemplation of human
purpose amid the imponderable sweep of God’s creation. That movie
really did instill a sense of wonder; this one is an afterthought.
The familiar hallmarks of the director’s style are everywhere in
evidence – his endless doting on the natural world (flowers
reaching up through snowy ground, sunlight beaming through trees)
and his heavy reliance on voiceover as a narrative device. But the
interior monologues here (“What is this love that loves us?”) are
low on illumination, and if the insistently arresting imagery were
removed, there wouldn’t be a lot left to hold our interest. There’s
very little as it is. ; ; ; ;
The main characters, if we can call them that, are an American
named Neil (Ben Affleck) and a Frenchwoman named Marina (Olga
Kurylenko, giving the movie’s only engaging performance). We find
them at the outset in Paris, in love, wandering the picturesque
streets and parks, then taking a side trip to Normandy to wander at
even greater length through the monastery of Mont Saint-Michel
(which offers plenty to keep cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki
busy). Here, Marina, fulfilling the function of Lady Life Force,
laughs and skips and pirouettes with little letup, while Neil, for
the most part, broods inscrutably. (Affleck has virtually no
dialogue in this movie; he’s used mainly as a compositional
element, like a lamp or a statue.)
How Neil and Marina got together, or what Neil’s even doing in
France, are not the sort of fundamental data with which Malick is
inclined to be forthcoming. While we’re still wondering, he
relocates Neil and Marina and her cute tweeny daughter (Tatiana
Chiline) back to the States – to Bartlesville, Oklahoma, which we
assume is Neil’s hometown. (Malick, who was once married to a
Frenchwoman, is also a Bartlesville man.) I mean no disrespect to
the Sooner State in pointing out that Bartlesville is to Paris as
corn dogs are to caviar, and that the movie’s visual interest
begins to wane once the story arrives there. As depicted here,
Bartlesville is a parched prairie burg of high wooden fences and
struggling lawns. Marina sees promise in this arid place – she
wants to be Neil’s wife. (“I want to be a wife,” her inner
monologist says.) For some reason, though, having dragged this
woman 5000 miles from her homeland, Neil’s not ready to commit. She
grows glum. He grows remote. They drift apart for a bit. Then
another woman appears – an old friend of Neil’s named Jane (Rachel
McAdams), taking up plot acreage that might have been more usefully
devoted to basic story information. She’s not around long, though.
Nor is a chattery Italian woman who befriends Marina for about two
minutes. (There’s also, briefly, a turtle, which I won’t go
into.)
I should mention that Javier Bardem is in this movie, too,
although solely to give voice to the director’s well-known
spiritual concerns. Bardem plays a priest, Father Quintana, who’s
losing his faith, and wants Godly reassurance. (Alone in his head,
he thinks things like, “My soul thirsts for you. Will you be like a
stream that dries up?”) As Quintana shlumps around town muttering
to himself, we begin to wish he would join Jane and just get out of
the way.
Malick attempts to enliven things with hand-held camerawork, but
the picture is essentially action-free. Neil and Marina wander
around aimlessly, sometimes in the company of photogenic buffalo or
horses, or they stand around in their sterile Bartlesville house
staring at the carpet. On the rare occasions when they actually
gear up to speak to one another, Malick carefully obscures their
words or calls in a wash of Dvořák or Berlioz, and we relapse into
indifference. Well before the movie dribbles to its conclusion, we
have joined Father Quintana in asking, “Where are you leading us.”
God has little to offer him in reply, and the director has nothing
for us. ;
Disconnect
Did you know there’s a dark downside to the ubiquitous presence
in our lives of laptops, iPads, smartphones and such – that they’re
turning us into disconnected tech zombies ripe for exploitation and
abuse? Of course you did. So first-time feature director Henry Alex
Rubin’s Disconnect offers little in the way of hot
cultural news. But the movie is nevertheless gripping, filled with
rich performances by a top ensemble cast and powered by a script
(by another first-timer, Andrew Stern) that punches home its points
with memorable detail.
The picture is structured much like Steven Soderbergh’s
Traffic, which used interwoven stories to take the measure
of the international drug trade. Here we have Rich Boyd (Jason
Bateman), a corporate lawyer whose laptop habit is blinding him to
the needs of his wife (Hope Davis) and two kids – especially his
15-year-old son Ben (Jonah Bobo), a sensitive loner who’s drifting
into emotional isolation. When Ben is ; approached online by a
sweet-sounding stranger using the name “Jessica,” his world lights
up – until this mystery girl draws him into a cruel game, and
darkness once again descends.
At the same time, Cindy Hull (Paula Patton), a woman who has
recently lost a child, is secretly visiting a Website support group
for people mourning the death of their loved ones. There, unbeknown
to her husband, Derek (Alexander Skarsgård), she establishes a
relationship with a purportedly heartbroken man named Stephen
(Michael Nyqvist). Then Derek’s credit card is hijacked, and his
bank account is siphoned dry. He calls in computer-security expert
Mike Dixon (Frank Grillo), who pries Cindy’s email correspondence
with Stephen out of the family computer. Derek decides that Stephen
must be the identity thief by whom he’s been victimized, and since
police offer little hope of nailing the guy, Derek – an ex-Marine –
wonders if he should do so himself.
Meanwhile, Mike is unaware of another problem, one closer to
home. His computer-addict son Jason (Colin Ford) and an equally
snotty high-school friend have devised a plan to humiliate an
unpopular classmate through online trickery — a project that goes
terribly wrong.
Finally, a TV news reporter named Nina Dunham (Andrea
Riseborough) has been investigating live sex-chat sites that
utilize runaway kids to lure their creepy clientele. Nina
establishes a cam-to-cam connection with an underage stud named
Kyle (Max Thieriot), and convinces him to take part in her
investigation, which she hopes to turn into a sensational broadcast
report. She promises to shield Kyle’s identity, but once again
things go very wrong, and after Rich Boyd, her station’s lawyer, is
called in to assess the situation, Nina and Kyle both find
themselves in extremely deep trouble.
Although the outlines of these people’s problems are familiar,
the multilayered story is filled with surprises, and the actors are
uniformly compelling. Bateman – who’s never been better than he is
here — brings an entirely non-comedic weight to the role of a man
self-convinced that his computer obsession is simply an offshoot of
his complex job. Riseborough channels a redeeming warmth into her
depiction of a woman half-blinded by professional ambition, and
Bobo (of Crazy, Stupid, Love) and Thieriot (featured in
the new TV series Bates Motel) are superb as two very
modern kinds of lost boys.
There’s no pat resolution to most of these stories – no
group-hug renunciation of the online shadow life. The movie ends on
at least one note of tattered hope, but it’s not clear if all the
characters have learned the sort of schematic lessons you might
expect. And outside, of course, technological temptations fester
and
grow. ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; … Read More