When Terrence Malick returned to filmmaking after a two-decade hiatus, the result was 1998’s The Thin Red Line, which is in many ways the most Malicky of all his movies: all gorgeous imagery and pantheistic reveries, with only a few thin sticks of plot and character to serve as scaffolding for the visual brocade. It’s a beautiful film, but ultimately a tedious and unsuccessful one, and its failures suggested that the long hiatus had left Malick’s artistic gifts intact but robbed him of his discipline.
Something similar seems to be at work with Whit Stillman, whose new film Damsels in Distress represents his first cinematic foray since The Last Days of Disco in 1998. Everything that earned Stillman’s earlier work its cult following is present in his latest movie: the elaborate, elevated dialogue; the young actors playing old souls; the running critique of conventional wisdom in all its varied forms; the gently reactionary spirit. Indeed, in many ways Damsels is the most unmistakably Stillmanesque film the director has made yet. But it’s also in many ways his weakest movie: uneven in its comic tone, unfocused in its plotting, haphazard in its characterizations, and generally lacking a narrative that makes sense of its individual scenes and set pieces.
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