by Frank Calvillo
When acclaimed director Terrence Malick’s 2013 effort To the Wonder was released, I struggled in vain to embrace it. I wanted to connect with the characters and their plights. Unfortunately I, along with many who saw the film, felt that the various artistic flourishes with which the director chose to tell his story were distracting to the point that they all but alienated the audience. Unorthodox camera angles, never ending amounts of voiceover in place of actual dialogue, and no clear linear structure made To the Wonder one of the more disappointing cinematic experiences of the year. Miraculously, though, it’s those very elements which make Malick’s latest outing, Knight of Cups, work as incredibly as it does.
In Knight of Cups, a Los Angeles-based screenwriter named Rick (Christian Bale) finds himself coming to a crossroads in his life after having had enough of the city’s excesses. Through an exploration of a series of failed relationships with various women (Cate Blanchett, Natalie Portman, Freida Pinto, Imogen Poots, Isabel Lucas, and Teresa Palmer), as well as the fractured connection to his brother Barry (Wes Bentley) and his father Joseph (Brian Dennehy), Rick struggles to repair himself and find meaning in everyday life.
The heart of Knight of Cups is a man trying to reconcile himself with the past and specifically the women who have helped to shape it. Each of the women, from Palmer’s stripper Karen to Blanchett’s ex-wife doctor, represent another chapter in Rick’s life and ultimately another layer of his tortured psyche. More than just a series of exes, however, the group of women in the film act as a life-changing guides for Rick and help him to discover who he is and what exactly is his place in not only his industry, but also in the city and life he has chosen for himself.
Beyond just focusing on Rick’s collection of failed relationships, there’s plenty of attention placed on the damaged relationships the screenwriter has with his family. This includes a highly compromised relationship with Barry and a nearly non-existent one with Joseph. The sequences with Rick and his family felt incredibly powerful thanks in part to the lack of conventional dialogue-driven scenes. Again, while the method was maddening in To the Wonder, here it works perfectly. There was never a moment when the anger and frustrations shared between the three men, bound by blood but little else, were difficult to decipher.
Throughout the course of Knight of Cups, I couldn’t help but notice an ongoing connection to the works of controversial author Bret Easton Ellis. The postmodernist writer who authored the now-classic novels Less Than Zero and American Psycho made his name by delving into the disconnection with the shallowness and plasticity of modern life.
Here Malick seems to be echoing many of Ellis’s ideas in a number of ways, such as in the casting of his leading man (Bale famously played the main character in the film adaptation of American Psycho) and the extended sequence in which Rick attends a Hollywood party straight out of Alice in Wonderland. This sequence proves especially hypnotic as we watch Rick wander aimlessly through the rather surrealist gathering, which includes the likes of Nick Kroll, Ryan O’Neal, and Fabio in attendance and sees guests in gowns and tuxedos jumping into the pool. Yet the strongest Ellis connection can be found in the deep emotional impasse Rick has discovered himself to be at with regard to his very own existence.
By this point in his career, Malick has become famous for not giving his actors any sort of script or pages of dialogue to work with, but rather a general outline which oftentimes sees them improvising to such an extent that they’re practically dictating the course of the film. Such a tactic is nothing short of brilliant as it sees his cast left with nothing but their own acting abilities to use as tools with which to craft their characters. It’s a test for sure, but one which every cast member of Knight of Cups (in particular Blanchett and Portman) passes. The highlight of the cast, unsurprisingly, remains Bale, who gives his most vulnerable and poetic turn on screen to date.
There’s an ongoing motif of tarot cards (hence the film’s title) as well as the questioning of chance and fate as major players in an individual’s life that’s present throughout the film. Yet it becomes a bit easy to overlook such themes thanks to the way Malick has so carefully and beautifully constructed his most visually stimulating film in ages. The same storytelling approaches which made To the Wonder feel like a bit of a closed-off letdown act as the ONLY fitting way to tell a story such as Knight of Cups thanks to its otherwordly setting and the dizzying nature of Rick’s struggle.
