To the Wonder
Malick follows The Tree of Life with an underwhelming trifle.
Terrence Malick (USA, Special Presentations)
Monday, September 10, 7 p.m.
Princess of Wales (300 King Street West)
Tuesday, September 11, 3 p.m.
Princess of Wales (300 King Street West)
Sunday, September 16, 9:45 p.m.
TIFF Bell Lightbox 1 (350 King Street West)
Given that Terrence Malick’s 40-year career had previously yielded just five features, the announcement that his follow-up to 2011’s The Tree of Life would arrive within 14 months seemed too good to be true. And, in a sense, it was. To the Wonder, it turns out, is The Tree of Life’s hastily dashed off B-side, and the first minor effort from one of cinema’s undisputedly major talents.
Formally, thanks to Emmanuel Lubezki’s luminous, balletic lensing, To the Wonder has plenty in common with its Palme d’Or–winning forebear. But the film shares nothing of its predecessor’s profundity, despite a faltering bid to draw parallels between romantic infatuation and religious faith.
Markedly lacking its director’s customary ambition, To the Wonder is the relatively slight story of a turbulent love affair, featuring Olga Kurylenko as an oddly pirouette-prone Parisian beauty, and Ben Affleck as the aloof Oklahoman who marries her. (Blink and you’ll miss Rachel McAdams, despite her prominence in TIFF’s supplied still.) Dialing up his elliptical, impressionistic style to the point of near abstraction, Malick succeeds only in conveying the faintest suggestions of his protagonists’ fraught passion. Meanwhile, stripped of their typical gravity, his attempts at lyricism here verge on self-parody.
