To the Wonder 4 / 4 Concluding his attempt to define God, the universe, creation and destruction in the masterpiece Tree of Life, Terrence Malick has followed up that picture with one that dares to examine and meditate on the universal laws and physics of that powerful thing called love with their own start and end. To the Wonder is a masterpiece in its own right and serves somewhat as a companion piece to Tree of Life. That other film left us searching for our creator and took us on a time span stemming from the beginning of creation to the dying dreams of death and infinite. To the Wonder works off of that foundation laid in Tree of Life and has us asking the deepest questions of the soul and the spirit now that we are living on this Earth. If you know Malick, then you know he doesn’t use plots but rather takes premises and situations and uses them as springboards to make commentary on grander topics. His writing and direction is no less different here. Ben Affleck and Olga Kurylenko play a couple seemingly in love as their joined by the woman’s daughter from another man. As time goes on, we see them break apart and reunite amidst Affleck’s lack of accepting firm emotions and his silent hesitancy on cementing commitment to Olga and her daughter. In between, he reencounters a woman (Rachel McAdams) from his youth and while love develops between the two just like his last relationship, he finds a repetition in himself that will lead to an implosion between he and whoever becomes the love of his life. Meanwhile, Javier Bardem plays a pastor struggling to find God in himself and the world around him. Bardem’s relationship is to God, while Affleck’s, McAdams’s and Kurylenko’s is to each other. However you can see the parallel’s of both. To the Wonder is about the love and relationship from person to person and from us to God and God to us. Not since Hiroshima Mon Amour has symbolism been this massively defining in scope. Malick makes the case that marriage to another and to God is essentially interchangeable. He uses the earth with nature and connects them to the forming, broken and mended relationships in the film to mirror what our feelings become towards God and what his may be towards us. We see the wrong foundation for a subdivision used to state the false foundation of a marriage, while our yearning to find God is mirrored in the ocean life getting a peak of sunlight from our world above. We ask where God is amidst the troubles of our world and as we struggle with our actions to do right and wrong for him, we actually have those same struggles with our grasp of feelings towards other people and our own selves. We sometimes do right by one another while at other times, we betray and in finality, we redeem or perish what is broken in our lives. This goes the same for our connection to God. Malick isn’t giving us the answers but rather make us ask them in our own lives. Terence uses imagery and atmosphere to speak his message and tells it to us through the lives of four people. It all feels at once like a trancing, hypnotic dream. The filmmaker lets us feel what is happening by body language and only has us hear the crucial dialogue. His camera angles are nearly different for every shot and the editing of keeping the angles turning draws us in to the feeling of a landscape built from reality but molded for the cinema. He had this technique going in one of his first pictures from nearly 30 years ago in Days of Heaven; but his wisdom has grown light years since and will perhaps continue to grow into the Voyage of Time.
Posted on: Thu, 01 Aug 2013 17:33:19 +0000
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