Hollywood loves to celebrate itself and its culture of excess, but every now and then an insider comes along with an exposé of the dark side of Tinseltown’s flashy exterior. Throughout film history, from Billy Wilder to the Coen brothers to David Lynch, directors have explored the false promises and broken spirits behind southern California’s dream factory.
Now we can count Terrence Malick among their midst. In his new film Knight of Cups, the director behind such awe-inspiring movies as The Tree of Life and Days of Heaven attempts to diagnose a case of Hollywood malaise as a spiritual problem. While that promising premise delivers some eye-catching sequences, the end result is more often than not exasperating: A film that treats philosophical and theological ideas as potpourri with which to decorate the well-furnished room its characters wander in and out of.
Knight of Cups takes us on a magic carpet ride through Los Angeles and environs with Rick (Christian Bale), a directionless screenwriter seeking meaning and contrition for his hedonistic lifestyle after his brother’s death. Across eight chapters named after tarot cards, Rick shares brief, epiphanic episodes with his ex-wife (Cate Blanchett), his father (Brian Dennehy), his brother (Wes Bentley), and a married woman (Natalie Portman) in between dalliances with a parade of starlets and strippers. While many Malick protagonists have trod similarly wayward paths, Rick’s life of womanizing and thrill seeking is a far cry from the chaste nature wandering and cathedral-worshipping of Malick’s former creations.
Indeed, Malick acolytes who gaped at The Tree of Life’s rapturous depiction of the creation of the universe may be thrown by Knight’s manic diversions into Los Angeles nightlife. Though compared to the increasingly more vulgar self-portraits Hollywood churns out year after year, Malick’s impression of this world is charmingly modest; the image of a topless model anointing Christian Bale’s forehead with champagne just isn’t as lurid when it’s set to Malick’s choice of dainty classical music.
The contrast between what kinds of stories we’ve come to expect from Malick and the story that Malick wants to tell now is perhaps what makes Knight of Cups most mystifying. All the hallmarks of a Malick film are here: beautiful people wandering around in beautiful places, contemplative voice overs, gorgeous orchestral scores. The difference this time around is that Malick has swapped out the beauty of the infinite—those works of nature and architecture that point towards a higher power—with a fleeting, terrestrial beauty. The man-made palaces of Knight’s various locales are beautiful by the standards of a West Elm catalog, not by the standards of human or natural history. And whenever the film does venture out into nature, a vast desert of muted colors is all there is to be found—a suitable choice to complement the story of a man grappling with the spiritual desert of his soul.
It’s worth noting though that when Malick ventures into the seedier corners of this universe his visual style remains empathetic—even loving. Most of the shots in Knight are bathed in a shadow-banishing natural light, and when the story takes to the streets or the strip clubs at night, fluorescent pops of color keep the characters illuminated and out of total darkness. The lack of shadow play in cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki’s photography seems to reflect on Malick’s theological leanings. Even when his characters descend into the darkest corners of their souls, Malick refuses to let the viewer see them in anything less than the light of some sort of divine revelation.
It is inspiring that Malick would deign to set his spiritual sights on a character struggling to find meaning amidst boundless pleasure. Yet Knight fails to be as engaging in practice as its story is in theory because Malick gives us both too much and too little to grapple with. Rick’s story is difficult to engage with because his diversions are so random and his backstory so minimal. The film’s incursions into Rick’s memories and dreams of a more fulfilling life, while breathtakingly cinematic in execution, only make an already hard to follow story more obtuse.
Likewise, Malick’s spiritual convictions are vague and ill defined. As supporting characters spout off canned insight from diverse schools of thought—New Age, Zen Buddhism, LSD—Rick wades through the noise towards a more Christian understanding of his sorrow and aimlessness. Yet just as the film starts to take a serious turn into Christian imagery and theology, it culminates in a vexing conclusion that sheds the theological framework the movie seemed to have been building to. We’re left with a spiritual mélange that befits the movie’s setting but frustrates viewers trying to make sense of Malick’s genius. There’s an exciting thesis buried in here somewhere, but just like Malick’s characters it wanders too far afield to reach satisfying conclusions.
