Alex writes about Terrence Malick’s Song to Song.<\/em><\/p>\n Below is a list of questions I silently posed to myself amidst the running time of Song to Song:<\/p>\n Now to answer the most salacious, obvious premise-setter of a question that was the fifth query in that list: no. I do not hate Song to Song. But there was a time during its runtime when I was concerned I might, and that idea alone was frightening enough. (And now that the premise has been set in an appropriately obvious manner, we may continue.)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I am a Terrence Malick superfan. As film fans have seemingly given up on him in reaction to his post-The Tree of Life output, I have only more thoroughly begun to admire Malick\u2019s attempts within his wandering style. Last year\u2019s Knight of Cups was exceptional even by Malick\u2019s own standards, although admittedly his previous release To The Wonder being definitively not spectacular. To The Wonder was an enjoyable muse on Malick\u2019s inner quandary about returning to America from his new world in Paris, sure, but it mostly fell apart because two of the three leads were not compelling in the Malickian cinematic universe. Neither Rachel McAdams nor Ben Affleck were as comfortable in Malick\u2019s world as The Tree of Life\u2019s Jessica Chastain and Brad Pitt, so their respective characters came apart as scraps of people as opposed to feeling like fully formed, comfortable humans*. This was not entirely the fault of McAdams nor Affleck, but it became the defining fault of the film.<\/p>\n *It is here where I will note that Olga Kurylenko was quite good in To The Wonder.<\/em><\/p>\n It is difficult to give a good performance in a Terrence Malick film for myriad reasons, but the primary one is a continual lack of preparation time. When on set with Malick, work is notoriously improvisational, something I would imagine has only increased as Malick\u2019s crews embraced digital cinematography. Sometimes actors will have no idea what their job will be on a given day; Malick has been known to be driving to set, see a location he wants to shoot in, and demand the production van stop to shoot something that just came to mind. He will whisper* a brief idea to them that is basically nonsense – for example, \u201cLook at the sun like you can\u2019t fathom the beauty of this world\u201d – and the actor in question is forced to navigate that thought within the interior world of their character they have built for themselves. In order to do this, you have to have both fully created your character internally and be able to improvise within it, which appears to be difficult for many (the aforementioned McAdams and Affleck, Rooney Mara, Sean Penn, Christian Bale, among others). It sometimes feels like you have to already embody the type of person Malick wants you to play in order to give the type of performance his movie needs; being a convincing actor is difficult enough without prep time, so it seems one has to already embody core characteristics of a Malick character in order to successfully perform as one. Par example, Jessica Chastain appears to be a very loving person who seems like she would genuinely be a fantastic, caring mother; ipso facto she gives the best performance of her career in The Tree of Life, a performance that in turn carries the movie.<\/p>\n *I say whisper because that is – almost without exception – how actors describe getting instructions from him.<\/em><\/p>\n The reason it matters so much that Malick\u2019s performers naturally occupy a similar space to their characters is certainly because Malick gives them so little to work with, but as an audience he often gives us even less. Narrative details are sparse in this world. Watching a modern Terrence Malick film becomes a gorgeous Rorschach test where you are forced to stare at archetypical scraps of characters and reflect on your own life; if you are willing to look, you might see something you identify with, but if not you might walk out by the twenty-five minute mark*.<\/p>\n *Last year I arrived thirty minutes early for a late night screening of Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice and realized I could see the beginning of Knight of Cups again to kill time before the superhero squalor. By the time I left Baleman for Batman twenty minutes in, four people had walked out. I do not fault them.<\/em><\/p>\n Now, I recognize this is an apologist\u2019s description of Terrence Malick\u2019s films. If somebody said that to me about Gus Van Sant or Lars von Trier or Mark Vun Bard it would take every ounce of my soul to not spit on their shoes. It sounds hacky, I know, like I can\u2019t come up with a better answer for why I like Malick\u2019s films. And it is. I fully recognize this. Malick turns me from a thoughtful person into somebody willing to engage with scraps of people and thoughts simply because he gives me something to project my own life onto. Which is simultaneously what everybody wants from their art and something nobody can vocalize without sounding like that idiot in the coffee shop who is talking a little too loudly. But this is simultaneously the problem with Malick and precisely what makes him great. He devolves my critical voice into blabbering mush about the grace of the natural world, even to the point where I don\u2019t hate myself for writing the first half of this sentence.<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n Let\u2019s go back to my above question: do I hate this movie? As I was sitting in Song to Song, about two-thirds of the way through I was feeling the way most people seem to feel sitting through a modern Malick film. I was getting almost nothing out of it other than consistently gorgeous cinematography and a casually charming Ryan Gosling performance. In short, I kind of felt how most viewers seem to feel about Malick\u2019s post-Tree of Life output. I wrote about all this in detail a year ago, but it seems even more clear to me as seemingly even more people have (judging by the reaction to Song to Song at least) given up on Malick, this just so happened to be the first time I was personally experiencing said feeling. And then, very near the end of the picture, something changed. I found myself leaving my previous thoughts behind, because I had suddenly found too much to like in Song to Song.<\/p>\n A day after the screening, I tried to parse this conundrum with a friend: if the journey to the ending is trying, can a good close elevate a piece of art from bland to good? I would say the answer is obviously yes, while others might claim that you are simply being fooled, being caught in the midst of the Whiplash effect. Again, midway through Song to Song, I legitimately questioned whether or not I hated this film. This has never happened to me with another Malick film, because I love Malick films so deeply that I have watched even To The Wonder on four separate occasions. So the question of why this happened seemed worth pondering.<\/p>\n I am a decisive man. I do not waffle; my freezer is sans Eggos. As such, if I were to ever meet the real life equivalent of a post-Tree of Life Malick character, I would almost certainly despise them. All they do is walk around, touch walls, and have wholly non-committal conversations. They\u2019re not even shitty people necessarily, just so outwardly sensitive that spending any time with them would have to be an absolute nightmare. They all want to talk about their feelings and be in love triangles and move from Paris to America and that is all tremendously boring to me. But something about these pictures draws me in nonetheless.<\/p>\n As mentioned earlier, the characters in these films are archetypes. People in Malick films are not fully formed characters with backstories pre-written for the actors to absorb; Terrence Malick decidedly does not take the Michael Mann approach to pre-production. They are sketches, frequently sketches that are redrawn over and over throughout the course of two hours, sketches that never fully get completed. As such, when I describe all the pertinent details in the following paragraph, they will sound silly. This is unavoidable. But Terrence Malick must make you feel silly before he makes you ponder your own existence, so this is how it must go.<\/p>\n In Song to Song, the archetypes we are given are musicians, a capitalistic artist, an aspiring teacher, or Cate Blanchett. Rooney Mara and Ryan Gosling spend most of the movie being an uninspiring musical couple, and music producer Michael Fassbender tries to seduce one or both into a record deal and\/or bed and\/or a timeshare on the outskirts of Austin that has a fabulous pool situation. (Not only are motives unclear in Malick\u2019s world, so are actions themselves.) When Fassbender meets a waitress played by Natalie Portman – a waitress who would be a teacher if there were enough scholastic jobs to be had \u2013 Fassy becomes enamoured with her. That\u2019s pretty much it; the rest of the movie is primarily very gorgeous people very gorgeously wandering.<\/p>\n Fassbender\u2019s character quickly becomes the most fascinating of our sketches, because he is the one who is the catalyst for the way the film discusses art. Mara and Gosling are musicians – Gosling specifically is one who believes he should make his music on his own \u2013 while Fassbender is the producer, and a seemingly successful one at that. (Again, his chosen abodes are pretty fucking amazing.) But his seduction of \u2013 no hold on one second.<\/p>\n See, this is where I was going to write, \u201cBut his seduction of Gosling appears to be a negative for the Gos\u2019 existence, and the same can eventually be said for Mara. Fassbender lures them into a world outside their own and temporarily destroys the good things they already had.\u201d That is a tremendously stupid and obvious statement (even apart from my gross overuse of the word \u201cbut\u201d throughout this essay). The glorious thing about Malick is that he can make you feel these things without necessarily spelling them out; since so few pick up what he is putting down though, I feel compelled to explain what I get out of it. If I sound like an idiot, so be it. As long as I nail the conclusion, hopefully you\u2019ll think about what came before it in a different light.<\/p>\n As the movie progresses, Portman becomes more drawn into Fassbender\u2019s world, a world outside her own. Late in the film, Malick cuts between a scene of Portman\u2019s mother draping water on Portman\u2019s face and Fassbender dousing two naked paramours with a showerhead. And then, we see Portman in entirely different waters. She got too deep into one world, too far away from one she should have never left, and she loses her life in the process.<\/p>\n\n