Terrence Malick’s newest film, Knight of Cups, screened the day after the disastrous Academy Awards ceremony, and the timing made it seem a godsend. Inspired by John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), Malick depicts Hollywood director Rick (Christian Bale) and his soul-searching reflections on his sybaritic life — as a womanizer, as a potentate in a venal industry, and as a son and brother in a suffering family.
We desperately need a reminder that the film industry still comprises human beings with recognizable histories — and souls. In the horrendous display of ego politics at this week’s Oscarcast — more demoralizing than ever before, as emceed by hipster clown Chris Rock — self-righteous political correctness vaporized any trace of morality and professionalism. But Malick’s film provides welcome perception and penetration.
At this callous, grievous moment in American popular culture, Malick elevates what ought to be our consideration of ethics and responsibility. A real discussion isn’t likely to happen, because few people respond to pop culture genuinely or take it seriously any more, but within Knight of Cups’ running time, Malick confronts viewers with personal accountability, which Hollywood, as the Oscar show demonstrated, has shamelessly abandoned.
Aside from some atmospheric soundstage and backlot scenes, Knight of Cups’ spiritual journey explores the larger world through real and remembered experience. Take the scene where Rick is awakened by earthquake tremors: When he goes to the street, the surprising lack of devastation reveals post-apocalyptic banality. This purgatorial shock complements the climax of Robert Altman’s Los Angeles–set Short Cuts (1993), which was, itself, a terrifying epochal vision.
At this callous, grievous moment in American popular culture, Malick elevates what ought to be our consideration of ethics and responsibility.
While being inside the Hollywood industry, but not of it (as devout Christians specify), Malick has been working on his own wavelength since his 1973 debut, with the American Renaissance classic Badlands, and the widely acclaimed, quasi-parable Days of Heaven (1978). Following a mythifying, self-imposed 20-year exile, he returned to film culture with a lament for the dead, The Thin Red Line, set during World War II, and then made The New World, showing the founding of the Jamestown colony as an animistic reclamation of the West. Since then, Malick has embarked on a personal, semi-autobiographical project — a trilogy about a family’s cosmic and emotional history in the films The Tree of Life, To the Wonder, and now Knight of Cups. The characters and themes overlap and cohere as one of the most conscientious and extensive ventures ever attempted by an American director.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=SI2j1FHCjtM%3Frel%3D0
Going back to Pilgrim’s Progress, Malick connects to one of the moral and literary foundations of Western culture (inadequately replaced these days by Star Wars and Marvel comics). Recalling Bunyan’s journey “from this world to that which is to come; delivered under the similitude of a dream,” he defies Hollywood’s current norms. Malick searches for form, structure, meaning. Identifying with Rick’s inward journey, he combines Christian allegory with the very Hollywood fad of Rick visiting a fortune teller, whose reading of a Tarot deck provides an outline for this non-narrative film. Each poetic sequence bears a card title: “The Moon,” “The Tower,” “The Hermit,” “The High Priestess,” “Death,” and “Freedom.” This semblance of order almost resolves the randomness that marred The Tree of Life and To the Wonder. Malick’s free-association style produces a series of vignettes — sermonettes on modern decadence — but now, given the appalling Oscarcast, they gain resonance and relevance.
Knight of Cups brushes up against Hollywood immorality. But it’s Rick’s spiritual test (he’s modeled after the Tarot figure the Knight of Cups), not an exposé or a roman à clef. Rick’s key regret — “We’re not living the lives we’re meant for; we’re meant for something else” — is philosophically sketchy, yet Malick’s prayerful/confessional voice-overs become palpably sorrowful expressions from characters whose gaudy, wealthy lives are tormented and unfulfilled. The affluence and arrogance on display at the Oscars are given the lie in scenes of private insecurity and extravagant dissipation: There are hostile business meetings and elaborate, alienating, celebrity-filled parties and hook-ups on great estates — including an ornate mansion straight outta Marienbad. (This is no coincidence; Knight of Cups approaches the majestic tempo and moralizing tradition of such masterpieces as Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad, and Antonioni’s L’Avventura.)
Malick’s Christian/Tarot-deck irony means to explore Rick’s fatigue; his cup runneth over in a life of erotic excess.
Malick’s Christian/Tarot-deck irony means to explore Rick’s fatigue; his cup runneth over in a life of erotic excess. Female conquests shame and deplete him (“You gave me what the world can’t give me. You gave me peace, mercy, joy — all else is cloud, mist”). Despite the poetic affectation, this is Malick’s most daringly sensual film: from a woman’s tempting, labial pink fingernails and her tramp-stamp tattoo “faith” to Emmanuel Lubezki’s confoundingly lucid imagery. Whether in Los Angeles or Las Vegas, Rick endures kitschy heaven-hells, and his cold voluptuousness contrasts with his constant self-flagellation (“Where did I go wrong?”).
Since Knight of Cups uses both familiar moral binaries and an old-fashioned non-narrative format, it isn’t exactly a groundbreaker, plus it meanders. Malick repeats his Tree of Life and To the Wonder faith-and-fidelity themes, which were evoked more romantically in Wong Kar Wai’s My Blueberry Nights. Still, there’s a God’s-Lonely-Artiste sincerity in Malick’s meditative style. His actors (including Natalie Portman, Antonio Banderas, Cate Blanchett, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Brian Dennehy, and Wes Bentley) are frequently seen pacing, pivoting, glancing around and behind, caught in public and private searching. “Look at the palm trees. They show what’s possible,” Rick muses about their natural, towering reach and skyward stretch. In such images, Pilgrim Malick has distinctly mastered the cinematic prayer.
* * *
How awful was the Oscarcast? Several people told me they would never watch it “ever again.” To maintain NRO civility, I’ll just say it was a perfect foretaste of hell — what the world will be if liberals have their way. Reducing everything to political correctness — a social goal for some — leaves no room for honesty or true diversity. But conformity has its benefits: It exposes the inanity of PC cheerleaders.
Host Chris Rock, long favored by black and white race hustlers, took to his undeserved role as court jester like Topsy. Rock’s undistinguished film career has been supported by no less than Steven Spielberg, seen grinning in the loges. As always, Rock said everything white liberals want to hear — both black griping and black unreason. He set the pace for an evening of aggressive political grandstanding.
Who didn’t take to the podium to show off his partisan arrogance? Singer Sam Smith embarrassed gays (and Rock slung a George Michael look-alike joke — as if!). Louis C.K. inadvertently embarrassed Hillary supporters. Veep Joe Biden couldn’t embarrass Lady Gaga (no one can), but his parade of sex-abuse victims squeezed out acting veteran Gena Rowlands, who, apparently, was honored because she portrayed countless pre- and post-feminist victims in movies no one watches. But that’s fitting, ’cuz the survivors’ song was from a movie no one watched (it was a harbinger of disaster to come).
Leonardo DiCaprio stumped for Al Gore. The writers who won Best Adapted Screenplay for The Big Short assured themselves that their hopscotch screenplay had explained the recession (to an audience of millionaires, though not to the still-hurting public). Even Sylvester Stallone’s comeback in the good but shockingly unpopular Creed got rejected in favor of Mark Rylance’s performance in Spielberg’s apology-tour Cold War drama Bridge of Spies. And Alejandro González Iñárritu, who won Best Director for The Revenant, used his acceptance speech to chide U.S. racism, despite the fact that his own films ignore Mexico’s dark-skinned indigenous people.
#related#Cheryl Boone Isaacs, Affirmative Action Academy president and eternal flack, justified expelling senior white members who had upheld the Academy’s liberal principles, while several Rock skits ridiculed the “seriousness” of last year’s films rather than celebrating efforts toward cinematic art. Rock repeated his shtick of interviewing ghetto moviegoers who were ignorant of mainstream film culture — another “diversity” point that could equally have been made with fanboys, Amish, Mormons, immigrants, or elderly folk. The audience of designer-clad swells seemed dumbfounded at the nonstop temerity — including Girl Scout–cookie entreaties disguised as black panhandling. Some tried to maintain a good face (David O. Russell exaggerated laughter while Jennifer Lawrence seemed puzzled). But, as critic Gregory Solman said, they all “looked dispirited.”
Truly, there was nothing to celebrate among the mediocre-to-rotten movies in contention. The best films of 2015 had been overlooked, and the nominated movies simply represented big-budget year-end promotion. I would brag about predicting Spotlight’s Best Picture win if only the movie itself weren’t so lousy. Thanks to Knight of Cups’ subtheme of family discord (Rick, his father, and his brother clash while bound in secular and religious anguish), one recognizes the Academy’s collective misguided desperation — and its self-destruction. Malick’s film revisits Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1961 L’Avventura. “Eros is sick,” Antonioni explained more than 50 years ago. Now Malick declares: Hollywood is sick.