Review of Knight of Cups (2015) by Alonso A — 15 Mar 2016

I've always felt Terrence Malick treads a very fine line between cinematic art and self-parody and Knight of Cups is definitely closer to the latter.

Christian Bale plays Rick, a Hollywood screenwriter (not that this is evident in the film) who drifts around Los Angeles having affairs with beautiful women (Imogen Poots, Freida Pinto, Teresa Palmer and Natalie Portman), arguing with his father (Brian Dennehy) and brother (Wes Bentley), and wandering pensively through the desert in an Armani suit.

That's pretty much the long and the short of it.

After commencing the film in rather pompous style with Sir John Gielgud's voice reciting The Pilgrim's Progress, accompanied by Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, Rick is awoken by an earthquake and we hear Dennehy in voiceover mumble, "My son, you're just like I am. You can't figure your life out." And so the theme of the film is blatantly set. But don't expect it to be mined in any meaningful way. And don't expect to understand who Rick really is or what his issues are. We do, however, know that he's lost a brother but we're never given the sense that Rick is weighed down by a sense of loss.

Malick spurns conventional narrative structure and offers only snippets of scenes, fragments of dialogue, and plenty of alluring images of nature thanks to three-time Academy Award-winning cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki. The end result is either a kaleidoscope of selective memory flashes or the point of view of someone who gets around town high on a wicked 'E'.

In any case, Malick expects you to make sense of it all. Which is totally fine but just as you think you may appreciate what he's attempting to say, he quickly pulls the rug out from under you. Even Vaughan Williams' sublime Fantasia which comes back again and again never gets past its opening strains. Perhaps the boring repetition of Rick making love to beautiful women, and frolicking on the beach, and staring at the desert dawn, and spending way too much time at a party in a gauche Hollywood Hills mansion is the point: A privileged white hedonist realises his life is hollow. Maybe. But I'm sure that that could have been just as succinctly expressed in a short film.

Or perhaps it is that since the majority of Malick fans are most likely white and privileged he wants us to share Rick's ennui and reflect on our own meaningless lives. Maybe. But if that's the case, his message won't spread very far as not many people are going to recommend a film that uses boredom to make you feel guilty or shitty about your life.

When I told a friend the other day that I didn't like the film he said, "You just don't get it. It's Malick." Puh-lease! What a pretentious reasonless argument. If the film didn't have star actors and was written and directed by some dude called Terry Malicki I guarantee my discerning filmmaking mate would tear Knight of Cups to shreds. But to be fair, he was right: I didn't get it.