redacted’s review published on Letterboxd:
An assortment of images, symbols, memories, vague and distant conversations from one’s psyche played out through film. Notice how you can never recall an entire conversation that occurred years ago, you only remember slight details, where the individual you spoke to was standing, the clothes they wore that day, the way they held your gaze, a sentence whispered in passing. Lubezki’s shots serve as the distant gaze, glued together by an arrangement of existential thoughts on faith, love, and happiness. If The Tree of Life was about the joys of life and memory ultimately outweighing the trauma and negative attributes of life, then To The Wonder is the result of one questioning one’s purpose in life, their role in the grand scheme of things. We are brought into this life, but at a price.
Malick’s characters here are vessels and are much like the houses they occupy in the film. On the outside, they are a whole solid structure, an entity, that should have emotions and feelings and connections. But on the surface, we see it’s all a facade. Deep down, they are empty vessels, incapable of connecting further than intimacy and physical touch; they lack the emotional and mental connection between one another.
“There is always this invisible feeling that ties us so closely together”
Empty rooms with nothing more than a dresser or a few car board boxes represent the feelings and emotions Affleck is unwilling to unpack. The characters form merely physical connections but struggle to make lasting personal connections. We see that when Ben Afflecks character struggles to relate and sympathize with Olga. Body language screams at the distance between characters.
“I feel so close to you, like I could almost touch you”
The second the spark from physical connection has died and the flint has gone cold, our main character looks for his next meaningless connection, because that’s what he craves. Like Malick himself, one would imagine, this character played by Affleck performs like a sensual male who forms his understanding of people and the world through a vignette of segments of sensory overloads that can often be mistaken for pure bliss, longing, and love.
Similarly, Javier’s character also struggles to form connections. Not only with the people he prays for and the people he councils for, but God himself. To him faith isn’t enough, believing but not seeing isn’t the answer.
“You’re within me. Around me. And I have no experience of You. Not as I once did. Why don’t I hold on to what I have found?”
Again like our sensual director, Bardem must make a tangible connection with God and seeks to reach out and touch him, if he ever wishes to be happy. He has no true “experience” with God based off his understanding of “experience”. To him, how can his heart ever defrost when God hasn’t been around to offer him warmth. As Malick once said himself in a letter to Scorsese following his 2016 film, Silence, “What does God want from us?”
“How long will you hide yourself? Let me come to you. Let me not pretend. Pretend to have feelings I don’t have”
“My soul thirsts for You”
21st Century Disconnect Trilogy
TERRENCE MALICK RANKED
Rewatched 8/11/20