Reviews

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  ★★★★★ review by Eli Hayes on Letterboxd

  I believe the reason why Terrence Malick's aggressive cutting and fracturing of his footage -- the self-destructive, almost imploding nature of his editing process -- neutralizes his narratives and consequentially makes them feel so complete (as opposed to traditional narratives), is because of the way in which our minds perceive, dissolve and rebuild experience through memory; our lives, some so deeply incomplete and yet still the most generally complete notion that we're capable of considering, are but fragments and deconstructions and reconstructions and, thus, the crafting of this sort of splintered cinema is what renders his films so conclusive and absolute, for all we have to compare them to are our own shattered and superglued existences.

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  ★★★★½ review by Arielrocks5 on Letterboxd

  This is probably the loosest and most alienating I've seen Malick get (which is saying a LOT). The cuts are more aggressive and the actors are given full freedom with what they say and can do, so pretty much anything can and probably will happen, and it's all in the case of Malick to make a create a complete film out of it.

  Somehow, through his own magic, he pulls it off with flying colors.

  Probably the most enthralling piece of cinema to grace us this year, both from narrative and technical standpoints. Both floor the viewer with stuff previously seen in his previous installments ("To The Wonder", "Knight of Cups"), this time at full force and never stopping.

  Rooney, Fassy, The Goose Man, and the JFK's wife are all absolutely phenomenal, showing how the act of movement and their expressions can be enough to convey the deepest and darkest emotions their characters are going through.

  Music is off the charts too (when Danse Macabre by Camille Saint-Saëns started playing I nearly lost my mind), on top of the camera work and cinematography.

  But again, much like most of my experiences with Malick's film, I don't think one viewing is enough to get on his wave length with what he's trying to say and showcase, and it always leaves me hungry for more (these thing do NOT feel two hours long and it always makes me sad when they have to end ((also that final shot is so lovely)) ), so I can't wait to watch it again with friends later as the weeks go on.

  I can't recommend it to everyone, but for those willing to give it a shot, are in for an experience unlike any other they'll see this year...

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  Also yes; waiting this long to see Rooney's Belly under Emmanuel Lubezki's cinematography was SO WORTH IT.

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  ★★★★★ review by Eli Hayes on Letterboxd

  Malick's post-TTOL deconstructionist narrative trilogy has very little do to with the notion of traditional "character" or "character development" and more to do with utilizing human bodies as avatars to convey psychological complexities of the collective unconscious, not so much representative of individual people as representative of models embodying a slice of the autobiographical pie. His method is fundamentally opposite to how we're meant, or how we've been taught, to perceive "character" or the presence of bodies & minds on screen; rather than observing the whole of an individual, a complete picture of a person, and re-tracing our steps to uncover the smaller, more intimate psychological details of the individual's inner clockwork (the popular "character approach"), we're instead presented with those intricacies head-on and, from the smaller, experiental units & emotional complexities, we're asked to form the tossed aside, simpler shell of the "character," their entirety, what we've been schooled to believe is the necessity or bulk of a human being's cinematic personality, but what is really just skin which, once shed, leaves room to comment on not only the individual of focus but, through them, on their environment and the culture which has shaped them (and vice versa).

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  ★★★★★ review by Jake Cole on Letterboxd

  There are a small handful of filmmakers I would describe as Joycean. Terence Davies, despite never shooting in Ireland, captures the physical reality of Joyce's books: the creaking interiors, the spiritual weight of real and emotional death, the way that alcoholism and rage is both the manifestation and perpetuator of lower-class misery. David Lynch reflects the author's pathologized sexuality, the warped, half-glimpsed chimera of lust and repression that distorts perspectives into horrorshow abandon. (In more ways that one, Lost Highway resembles Finnegans Wake converted to film noir, replacing that book's transcendent motion with more base impulses of murder.) Add to that list Terrence Malick, who (since The New World, at least) has tackled the more probing, elemental, associative side of Joyce. His characters have increasingly become more autobiographical even as they have become less like recognizable humans than ever. From the moment that John Smith and Pocahontas emerged as an Adam and Eve for the virgin America, Malick's characters have regressed to catch-all archetypes who flit in and out of iconic and basic molds.

  In Song to Song, his HCE and ALP figures are housed in Ryan Gosling and Rooney Mara, and despite the staggering levels of A-list talent that Malick has easily scored over the years, this is the first time that his casting has felt of the moment. The two characters, musicians both, form less of a love triangle with Michael Fassbender's Dionysian label executive than some kind of cellular organism that is forever splitting, reproducing and re-combining in rapidly expanding permutations. With Mara's Faye something of the central character by default (she is, to my recollection, the only character actually named out loud the entire time), we roam jaggedly between her sexual relationship with Fassbender's Cook and her more romantic one with Gosling's BV.

  But if Malick works with periodic elements of drama, he then complicates things, so that it's difficult to get a bead on how Faye approaches each relationship, as the lines between lust and love break down and mingle. It's sad that a Hollywood film should feel radical for suggesting that a person can house intense feelings toward more than one person across an entire life, much less at the same time, but there is something bracing and forward about Malick using his characters' constantly mutating sense of self and his abstract and abstruse form of philosophizing to dig at a simple material reality of feelings.

  Each of them changes throughout, so that BV, initially seeming content with the kind of postmodern Lubitschian situation he shares with Cook and Faye, eventually rebels, while even Cook, whose wanton hedonism is the film's biggest nod toward Malick's supposed distaste for contemporary times, betrays moments of tenderness, or at least some self-awareness. Others pass through the screen, be they lovers or musicians, and all come in for the same Malick treatment, suggesting depths far beyond what he or Chivo can explore. Backstage, Iggy Pop nurses a nice glass of red wine as the camera scans his taut leather skin, his lean abs, and a network of scars that speaks to a hard life wholly at odds with the relaxed, amiable fellow chatting with Fassbender and Natalie Portman. Patti Smith is perhaps the film's most transfixing presence, offering a sad insight of wisdom into love when she discusses her relationship with the late Fred "Sonic" Smith. Her scattered appearances are jolting for how unvarnished they are, but also how her muted but lingering grief are just a part of her life, wrapped up into her poetry and her musicianship. When, toward the end of the film, she nods in BV's direction and tells Faye "fight for him," what would otherwise have been a clunker line of inspiration in a normal romantic drama absolutely surges with emotion coming from someone who is still fighting for her partner more than 20 years after his death.

  Details like that are not the detritus of the film, they are the film, and it's understandable that this peripatetic style is increasingly alienating even the most adventurous viewers and critics. And it's true that when you sift away all the style of his recent work you're left with a simple narrative: a story of divorce, of Hollywood bacchanalia, or of the push-pull drama of romances. But I do wonder how much of the backlash owes to the way that we interpret films. We're trained to look at the finished product and break it back down to the component parts, to suss out themes and motivations and individual camera movements/placements and maybe even to notice recurring thematic or aesthetic tics of filmmakers. Malick in the 21st century has increasingly relied on an approach that starts from those broken down elements and then to spiral them out in strange new shapes. That doesn't make them fundamentally simplistic any more than than we're half-banana just because we share DNA with it. I mean, hell, Ulysses is just a story about two horny dudes walking around town.

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  ★★★★ review by Evan on Letterboxd

  Where has blonde Natalie Portman been my entire life!?

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