Emmanuel Lubezki) is to feel at once astonished and mildly deflated it’s as if he were encouraging us to look at our everyday surroundings anew, but also working overtime to extract something profound from the overriding banality of modern life.Īt the same time, given how few filmmakers of Malick’s stature have made this kind of moral and spiritual inquiry so central to their work, it’s hard not to be taken with a movie that opens with an audio excerpt from “The Pilgrim’s Progress” (recited by John Gielgud), then pauses for some stunningly beautiful images of the aurora borealis as seen from outer space, before settling on the figure of a bedraggled-looking Christian Bale walking around a lonely desert landscape. To see our 21st-century reality from Malick’s exalted perspective (mediated once again by the superb eye of d.p. Absent the grand historical subjects of “The Thin Red Line” and “The New World,” or the cosmic glories of “The Tree of Life,” the director has turned his focus on attractively forlorn wanderers set adrift in the present day, pursued by a restless, roving handheld camera that blurs their visions, memories, private moments and encounters with others into one convulsive stream of consciousness. With “To the Wonder” (2012) and now “Knight of Cups,” plus a still-untitled drama and the documentary “Voyage of Time” still to come, Malick has settled into a deeply personal and unusually productive vein, albeit one that all but his staunchest admirers may find wanting compared with his celebrated earlier work. Those who have had their fill of the director’s impressionistic musings will find his seventh feature as empty as the lifestyle it puts on display for the rest of us, there’s no denying this star-studded, never-a-dull-moment cinematic oddity represents another flawed but fascinating reframing of man’s place in the modern world. Having made contemporary American life seem both recognizable and alien in “To the Wonder,” Malick now extends that film’s tender romantic ballet into a corrosive critique of Hollywood hedonism - a poisoned valentine to the industry by way of a Fellini-esque bacchanal. You go into a Terrence Malick movie expecting a gorgeous collage of sound and image, but not necessarily the sight of a neon-lit strip club, a Caesars Palace pool party, or a fashion shoot where a model is told to pose like “a dirty f-ing housewife.” In other words, there’s something at once vividly familiar and strikingly different about “ Knight of Cups,” a feverish plunge into the toxic cloud of decadence swirling around a Los Angeles screenwriter gone to seed.
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