Movie Review: "Knight of Cups" (Terrence Malick, 2016)

SALVATION by Bennett Campbell Ferguson

Above: Christian Bale stars in Mr. Malick’s new movie.  Photo ©Broad Green Pictures.

At the start of Terrence Malick’s “Knight of Cups,” a man stands on a beach.  It’s a crusty, rocky shoreline, and for a long moment, the man simply stares at it.  Yet his gaze is anything but vacant.  His searching eyes seem to probe everything he stares at, as if he’s hoping to find some greater truth in hidden in a craggy cliff face, or a speck of sand.

            The man’s name is Rick and he’s played to a stoic hilt by a bearded, shaggy-haired Christian Bale.  Rick works in Hollywood, though it’s not clear what his job entails (he might be a screenwriter).  Mainly, he just lumbers glumly through lavish parties and strolls along graying streets, drifting aimlessly in the fashion of prior Malick heroes.

            Mr. Malick’s movies are very much about men—their vanity, their fickleness, their outsized passion.  Yet he’s more entranced by women.  In “Knight of Cups,” the camera rarely lingers on Mr. Bale’s gently troubled face; like a heat-seeking missile, it’s drawn to Rick’s many lovers, who angelically twist, twirl, and dance their way through the movie.

Played by Imogen Poots, Cate Blanchett, Freida Pinto, Teresa Palmer, and Natalie Portman, these women come and go—Rick is not visibly cruel, but he loses interest quickly, often allowing romances to fade as he tumbles deeper into depression.  He certainly gives Johnny Martin (the movie star protagonist of Sofia Coppola’s “Somwhere”) a run for his money in the dreary ennui department.  Does this guy, you wonder, have nothing better to do than wander in the shadows of Los Angeles’ monstrous skyscrapers, moping about the meaninglessness of his life?  Apparently not. 

You can practically feel Mr. Malick seething at Rick’s surroundings—the garish billboards, the fashion models demeaned via vulgar catchphrases, the strip club drenched in icy blue lighting.  This stuff is like poison to Mr. Malick, a man whose movies often deify the beauty of rural landscapes and insist that salvation is found not in glassy urban towers, but beneath arching cathedral roofs and outstretched tree branches.

Maybe Mr. Malick’s contempt for the modern and the urban (and the risqué) explains why “Knight of Cups” feels less emotionally transcendent than his last film, 2013’s “To the Wonder” (which unfurled on the outskirts of a sun-kissed Midwestern suburb).  But that doesn’t diminish the fact that, like everything Mr. Malick lays his gentle touch upon, “Knight of Cups” hypnotizes you with its visual grace. 

Joyous frolics on cloudy beaches.  A leap into deep ocean waters.  Long stares at cliffs, open skies.  All of those ordinary things catch Mr. Malick’s eye in “Knight of Cups,” and he makes sure that you too feel their sweet, simple allure.  “How do I begin?” Rick wonders.  By doing what Mr. Malick does, the film says: seeing the beauty of everything around us.

Or, to quote a character in Mr. Malick’s groundbreaking 2011 cosmic opus “The Tree of Life”: “Love…every leaf, every ray of light.”