Reviewed: To the Wonder and Cloud Atlas

We are the world.

To the Wonder (12A); Cloud Atlas (15)
dir: Terrence Malick; dir: Tom Tykwer
Andy Wachowski, Lana Wachowski

While watching To the Wonder, it’s important to determine whether the film is artistically and intellectually derelict or if its director, Terrence Malick, responsible for a handful of modern masterpieces, simply has further to fall than most. In the spirit of this wishy-washy movie, I’d say it’s a bit of both. The Malick ingredients are all here: soaring choral music with invocations of divinity, the emphasis on nature and light, lots of elliptical editing and fragmented narration. But when one discontented character observes wanly: “There’s something missing,” it’s as though the movie is giving itself a three-word review.

While the viewer grapples with a loss of faith in the director’s methods, the film touches on other kinds of crises. Marina (Olga Kurylenko) has left Paris to live in Oklahoma with her lover, Neil (Ben Affleck). Not that she has forsaken her inner Amélie; all the adults here are like children, gazing at the sky or engrossed in play – spinning one another around in the street, crawling through leaves, listening to each other’s heartbeats. No one expects characters in a Malick film to be shown unblocking the toilet but this insistence on the whimsical infantilises them.

Eventually Marina realises she has fallen out of love with love and seeks the counsel of Father Quintana (Javier Bardem), who is himself experiencing a crisis of faith. “How has hate come to take the place of love?” Marina sighs in one of the breathy voiceovers that replace dialogue so fully that no one ever exchanges more than an occasional word. In this context, we feel grateful for anything tangible, such as when Neil and Marina’s blissful courtship gives way to tantrums, or when Neil angrily smashes his jeep’s wing mirror. (It’s restored to its original state a second later – presumably divine intervention rather than a boring old continuity error.)

Malick’s storytelling style has often resembled a slideshow of snapshots held together by a cumulative emotional potency. But characterisation and meaning are so opaque in To the Wonder that the film never feels any deeper than a photo-strip love story, albeit one published in American Cinematographer magazine rather than Jackie or My Guy. It was to be expected that Malick and his cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, would conjure up rhapsodic imagery: the sun flashing stroboscopically through the spoke-like legs of a cartwheeling child; a prisoner’s thick, tattooed forearms draped on the sill of his cell like dozing boa constrictors. Even here, though, Malick is not immune to the banal. The fingertips-trailing-through-wheatfields shot was already a cliché when Ridley Scott used it in Gladiator. The swooping Steadicam that felt fresh in Malick’s last film, The Tree of Life, has hardened into mannerism.

Something has happened to this director’s work since he lost interest in the friction between sound and image from his first three films (Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line), where the dislocated narration went against the grain of the lyrical photography. With it has gone the tautness of his vision. A film doesn’t necessarily need solidity but in the absence of momentum it does require philosophical weight, and To the Wonder is as ephemeral as dandelion spores.

What a rum state of affairs it is when a new Malick picture can be eclipsed in the audacity stakes by a movie from the siblings responsible for the Matrix trilogy. Andy and Lana (formerly Larry) Wachowski have divvied up the directing duties with Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run) on their adaptation of David Mitchell’s sprawling novel Cloud Atlas. It’s far from perfect but then a certain amount of unevenness is to be expected from a three-hour film that intercuts six stories whose settings include the South Pacific in the mid-19th century, 1970s San Francisco and a savage island civilisation 106 winters after the Fall, possibly on a Thursday. Cloud Atlas spans genres, too, incorporating science fiction, espionage, farce and several love stories; the casting is no less elastic. Tom Hanks takes on six parts, including a nuclear-power whistleblower, an Irish thug-turned-novelist who hurls a critic off a rooftop and an actor starring as a fictionalised version of a professor played earlier in the movie by Jim Broadbent. (Do keep up at the back.) Hugh Grant’s roles include a curlyhaired, runny-eyed Cockney gangster and a futuristic warlord; Ben Whishaw and Hugo Weaving get to hop back and forth across the gender divide. The whole shebang is like fancy-dress day at Rada.

It isn’t clear that this mix-and-match casting adds up to anything more than a guessing game for the audience à la The List of Adrian Messenger (where Frank Sinatra, Tony Curtis and Robert Mitchum appeared in disguise). Certainly the intended message that these are the same souls at different phases of evolution gets obscured. The rapid movement between the different plot lines emphasises parallels between characters divided by oceans and millennia even as it risks turning Cloud Atlas into a restless trailer for itself. But the sweep of the film, its naive charm and compassion, is intoxicating. I wasn’t bored.