Knight of Cups

Directed by: Terrence Malick
Written by: Terrence Malick
Starring: Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Natalie Portman, Brian Dennehy, Antonio Banderas, Freida Pinto, Wes Bentley, Isabel Lucas, Teresa Palmer, Imogen Poots
Drama/Romance - 118 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 9 Mar 2016

Knight of Cups is not for everybody. If you’ve experienced a Terrence Malick film before, then you already know if you can palate his particular brand of cinema. If this is your first Malick film, you may be one of the dozen or so walkouts I saw leave the theater I was in. Malick is not offensive, violent, or loud; he’s philosophical. Hollywood trained movie-goers to expect a story with a beginning, middle, and an end. Malick unattached himself from this rubric and offers a more cerebral, freeform meditation. Even though the audience watches the same screen, no two viewers will leave the theater with the same interpretation. We filter the scenes and sounds through our peculiar lenses and provide our own meaning. This idea scares anybody who goes to the movies to avoid effort and mental gymnastics.

A reviewer friend of mine says the best way to watch a Malick film is to sit back and let it wash over you. Mindful of this, I couldn’t do it. I leaned forward and worked. I puzzled through the spacy voiceovers, studied bit characters for clues, and tried to attach significance to the setting. Leaving the screening, I felt I walked out of a two hour test. This doesn’t scare me; however, and for folks who truly enjoy originality in their movies, they don’t mind putting in some mental effort either. While this style is specific to Terrence Malick, it is not truly original because we have seen versions of his cinematic stream of consciousness before.

Compared to Knight of Cups, The Thin Red Line (1998), The Tree of Life (2011), and To the Wonder (2012) contain rock solid plots and digestible dialogue even though upon their release, audiences were confounded by their opacity. Knight of Cups ventures way beyond opaque. Known as the poet of American cinema, Malick frequently refuses to create a film with a steady rhythm or any discernable coherent structure. He focuses on mood, atmosphere, and feeling. There was no script. Malick directed lead actor Christian Bale (The Big Short) to react to whatever characters were thrown his way and to improvise. No wonder Knight of Cups spent two years in post-production.

What the film lacks in vocals it makes up for in visuals. Three time in a row Best Cinematography Oscar winner Emmanuel ‘Chivo’ Lubezki, who has shot all of Malick’s films since The New World (2005), let’s the camera walk around. It has the attention span of my three year old. If Christian Bale stands still, then the camera will spin around him. Often, the frame tilts a couple degrees off the vertical axis or shakes or cuts to a still of a massive tree or building. The camera work feels completely improvisational; I cannot imagine the storyboard behind such haphazard editing. Chivo also employs multiple mediums including 35mm film, wide-angle lenses, and even GoPro cameras whipped around by the cast. Coming off his Oscar win for The Revenant and all of its hype about realism and naturalism, Chivo also shot Knight of Cups using natural light.

The scenery behind the actors is contemporary Los Angeles, not only one of the few times Malick has gone current, but so local. There are a couple downtown shots but the vast majority of the time Bale is out and about in the nearby desert, hopping around in the ocean fully clothed, or checking out any number of out of the way curiosities. On top of the visuals of man and nature is Hanan Townshend’s symphonic score, a pleasure to listen to since the music is conspicuously overt as the characters don’t talk over it. I don’t want it to sound as if nobody talks, but it’s usually bits and pieces of a sentence said by those around Bale as he mopes and ponders.

Bale, playing a very successful Hollywood writer named Rick, mopes and ponders because he is smack in the middle of a ‘what does it all mean’ crisis. His most common line is something akin to “Who am I?” The walkouts started when he launched into an explanation including the line, “See the palm trees. They tell us anything’s possible.” Rick looks for answers and it appears he thinks he will find them through a series of impossibly gorgeous women. Professionally and outwardly successful, Rick is personally afraid and adrift. The women’s voiceovers habitually tell him how scared he is and this gem from girl number one played by Imogen Poots (Need for Speed), “You’re not looking for love. You’re looking for a love experience.” I did not major in philosophy; I am thankful for that because there is no way I could begin to parse the meaning of that sentence.

Cate Blanchett (Carol) and Natalie Portman (Thor: The Dark World) get top billing on the movie poster behind Bale, but be warned, they each get about five to 10 minutes of screen time. Knight of Cups is Bale’s vehicle with Malick picking and choosing what the story will look like. Even though folks said it was hard to understand, The Tree of Life gained significant attention and dissection. Knight of Cups won’t even sniff that level of notoriety because I have a hunch early adventurous screeners are going to warn their friends away. My overall interpretation is a memory journey. Imagine you’re 80 years old and you’re looking back on it all. This is probably what it looks like: bits and pieces of sentences, uncertain camera angles, half-hidden faces, and only broad outlines of understanding. This may be way off, but there is no way someone can point to the film and prove me wrong.

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