Terrence Malick (2017)
The shape of Terrence Malick’s filmography is exceptionally odd. The more prolific he becomes in the current decade, the more oddly shaped the filmography gets. Born in 1943, Malick made his first feature, Badlands, just before he was thirty. Days of Heaven followed in 1978. Twenty years elapsed before his third picture, The Thin Red Line. In the decade or so that followed, the intervals were shorter but still considerable: The New World was released in 2005 and The Tree of Life in 2011. In the six years since, four Malick features have appeared – three dramatic (To the Wonder (2012), Knight of Cups (2015), now Song to Song) and one documentary (Voyage of Life (2016)). His next film, Radegund, is due to be released during this year. I’ve not been very keen on any of the Malicks I’ve seen – Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line, The Tree of Life. Not having been to anything more recent than the last-named, however, I’ve been missing plenty. I thought I should try Song to Song.
In spite of appearances, this film is something of a throwback to the days when Malick took a long time to complete a project: it was shot mostly in late 2012 and early 2013, then in post-production for over three years. In terms of critical reception, however, it’s definitely later Malick and has cemented the polarising effect of his recent work. Rotten Tomatoes includes for Song to Song, on the one hand, several call-me-philistine-but-this-is-self-indulgent-twaddle-type reviews; and, on the other, raves from the likes of Richard Brody, whose adverse criticism is often acute but who, as an enthusiast, tends to make a film sound like a pretentious wank even when it’s nothing of the kind. The setting of Song to Song is the music scene of Austin, Texas, where Malick went to school and where he now lives. There are cameos from, as well as Cate Blanchett, Holly Hunter et al, big names from rock and punk, as themselves – Patti Smith, John Lydon, Iggy Pop. The principal characters are a successful music producer (Michael Fassbender), two struggling aspiring songwriters (Rooney Mara and Ryan Gosling), and a waitress (Natalie Portman). The story revolves round the relationships involving these four – and ‘revolves’ is the right word: the narrative of this ‘experimental romantic drama’ (Wikipedia) goes round in circles. As Song to Song went on, I kept wondering what to write about it, which is always a bad sign. I found it increasingly and punitively boring but told myself to avoid the temptation of being merely sarcastic: it must have involved an awful lot of hard work on Terrence Malick’s part. Resorting to that kind of defence is a bad sign too.
Malick and the DoP Emmanuel Lubezki shoot people, buildings and landscapes from often extraordinary angles and to sometimes distorting effect. The various sexual interactions include lesbian but not male homosexual ones. Rooney Mara has repeated changes of hairstyle and hair colouring. Her character is particularly prone to existential reflections (‘I want to take back all the wounds … I played with the flame of life’), in meditative voiceover and in conversation alike. She and Natalie Portman are remarkably different in how much they seem to need other actors. You wouldn’t have predicted it from Mara’s early roles (The Social Network, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) but she more and more tends to register only as a complement to stronger performers (Carol and The Secret Scripture, as well as this film). Portman, in contrast, is not only an acting powerhouse but a self-contained unit, somewhat disconnected even from the person she’s pretending to be. Michael Fassbender seems the most grounded in the music world of the film, though this could be thanks to his passing resemblance to Sting. Ryan Gosling has more natural humour than his three co-stars. I’ve seen enough of him doing waggish, zany routines (Blue Valentine, La La Land) yet I still missed Gosling when he was absent for some time during Song to Song.
These observations are evidence that I was paying attention of a sort but they don’t add up to any kind of assessment – I hadn’t a clue what Terrence Malick was trying to achieve or express. I noted characteristics of the main actors because I was so disengaged from them – not surprising because most of what Malick asks them to do seems to consist of drama-class mini-exercises, holding poses, other bits of business. I might just as well be merely sarcastic after all. Perhaps the key line of Song to Song comes when Patti Smith (?) is demonstrating something on a guitar (?) to Rooney Mara and says, as if on behalf of the film’s writer-director, ‘I can play a single chord for hours’.
19 July 2017