FILM REVIEW: To the Wonder

It took Terrence Malick 20 years to follow up his second film Days of Heaven with The Thin Red Line in 1998. Since then he's produced The New World (2005) and brilliant Tree of Life (2011).

To the Wonder

Director: Terrence Malick

Cast: Ben Affleck, Olga Kurylenko, Javier Bardem, Rachel McAdams

So To the Wonder, which was made last year but releases here now, is an anomaly in so far as it's only separated by a year from Malick's last outing.

As a devout Malick disciple, I was looking forward to this new film. In the season of blockbuster schlock which regular readers of this page will know I have little time for, a new film by a gifted and distinctive filmmaker is like a great dessert at the end of a mediocre meal - well worth the wait.

In the beginning there was darkness and Malick said let there be light and there was.

It was awe-inspiring but far too soon into this exploration of the meaning of love, the contradictions of faith and a demonstration of the best way to use Ben Affleck (silently), something goes terribly wrong and, by the end, no one really cares.

Taking into account that a reclusive, intensely focused director such as Malick may be more heavily criticised than others when he gets things wrong, what's lacking in this study of the relationship between Affleck's Oklahoma engineer and Olga Kurylenko's Ukrainian immigrant is empathy for the characters and their predicament.

Neil (Affleck) meets Marina (Kurylenko) in Paris, falls in love in cinematic wonderfulness and then brings her and her daughter to live with him in Oklahoma. It soon turns out to be nothing like Paris, leading to problems for the couple.

Parallel to the story of the couple's disillusionment is the tale of a local priest (Bardem) who is having a major crisis of self-doubt.

The film is beautifully shot by Emmanuel Lubezki and features the oblique, theological voiceover that has characterised many of Malick's films.

However, while To the Wonder has all the beauty and cosmic pondering that place its director firmly in the company of 19th-century transcendentalist poets like Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson, its story is too thin to carry it beyond the realm of a disappointingly elongated image poem. For a hardcore Malick devotee and cineaste, this film is the equivalent of the moment when you first beat your father at chess.

WHAT OTHERS SAY

LIKE all of Malick's late films, 'To the Wonder' is slow, ponderous, and lyrical. - Jon Baskin, LA Review of Books

YOU might well mistake it for a pretentious perfume advertisement. But no other director could make such a beautiful drama about a fractious relationship in midwestern suburbia. - Nicholas Barber, Independent

ON THE RADAR

ART HOUSE

Jack Kerouac's 'On the Road' finally comes to the screen thanks to Brazilian director Walter Salles. Beat diehards may be disappointed but there's plenty to enjoy in this youthful and beautiful road movie. The film will be showing at The Bioscope in Johannesburg from June 28. For more information go to www.thebioscope.co.za

TAKE IT HOME

Quentin Tarantino's hugely enjoyable and willfully politically incorrect take on slavery 'Django Unchained' is now available on DVD and BluRay.

TRAILER OF THE WEEK

Martin Scorsese re-teams with Leonardo DiCaprio for 'The Wolf of Wall Street', due out later this year. Watch on www.youtube.co.za

BOX OFFICE

If you haven't already seen Kathryn Bigelow's riveting and controversial 'Zero Dark Thirty', do so this weekend. It is available on DStv's Box Office. - Tymon Smith

ALSO OPENING

SPUD 2

FOLLOWING in the tradition of movies about boarding school shenanigans, 'Spud 2: The Madness Continues' crams in material writers think readers and audiences expect from the genre. It's all boys acting badly, toilet humour and idiotic parents.

Spud Milton (Troye Sivan) is now 15 and a fully fledged member of the Crazy Eight, a group of boys whose mission is to concoct crazy schemes to earn the respect of the other boys in the school. An added bonus is getting their dorm master, Spare Rib (Jason Cope), peeved.

The performances of the boys are convincing, and they carry the slapstick interpretations of other characters in the film, like Spare Rib, who is constantly in an impotent rage, and Spud's dad, who is hammed up as the typical South African loser.

Cleese, the big name of the production, is affable as ''The Guv" .

The plot is juvenile and the performances, except for those of the Crazy Eight, are caricatured.

But for some mindless, light entertainment with good production value, 'Spud 2' is an okay way to waste an hour-and-a-half. - Andrea Nagel