Kritiken

As the title suggests, Malick conjures an intense, empathetic curiosity with the rush of plain existence, a bid to see the world with the same ravenous excitement as its creator might. To the Wonder shares a similar, simple narrative bend as Days of Heaven and Badlands, but here his compositions are far more fluid and his sense of perpetual motion makes each frame feel thrillingly immediate and dreamlike. A trip through the aisles of Target has never seemed so ethereal, and yet so oddly carnal.

To the Wonder is Malick's most searching treatment of the problem of sex, or more broadly of desire, which is perhaps related to the fact that it is also his most religious film... To those of us who remain convinced by his art, Malick is working at a level so far beyond us that our aesthetic estimations can only seem petty in comparison to his vision.

For the most part, the spiritual transcendence sought after by the film and its characters is not attained. However, the film succeeds magnificently in showing the beauty of the physical universe, the natural world. You walk out of the theater noticing the beauty of the world around you. The film's most significant failure is on the level of performance. Malick films an actor the same way he would an animal or a stalk of wheat, looking for the essence of his camera subject.

I know this will sound as if I'm being perverse or contrarian on purpose, but in some ways I actually prefer "To the Wonder" to "The Tree of Life." It's a purer, clearer and more focused work, one that lacks the universe-encompassing, mind-blowing, post-Kubrickian grandiosity of the earlier film, but may be better off for it.

Malick, judging from the evidence, knows a lot about love and its pain. As he brings his love story to the screen, he also brings out serious ideas about the trials of the artistic life, about the conflict between the Catholic heritage and the Protestant one, about the tense mutual influence of Europe and America—and, most amazingly, he does it with images and sounds, not with speeches and drama. Malick here turns the very act of cinematic vision, of filming, philosophical.

[Modern vistas such as suburban backyards, strip malls and chain stores] are captured with a rapturous, incandescent glow by Malick and his regular cameraman, Emmanuel Lubezki. In one remarkable shot, a Sonic drive-in, seen at night and from a distance, beckons like some kind of culinary promised land. An ordinary supermarket seems a triumph of human ingenuity. Were an alien species to clandestinely survey our species for reports back to the mothership, it might look something like this.

To the Wonder", which Variety describes as "quasi-autobiographical," is so unabashedly maudlin and vulnerable that it's difficult to generate much animus. The movie may be a two-ton gossamer web, but it's spun from gossamer none the less.

Baseless comparisons to The Tree of Life notwithstanding, this film's closest relative in its director's own filmography is clearlyThe New World, with Marina sharing many of the same experiences as Pocahontas if not the same cultural DNA. There, what would soon call itself America came to our heroine; here, she comes to it. In both cases they are initially awestruck: Pocahontas by "floating islands" ferrying settlers to shore, Marina by the unnaturally bright and clean supermarkets.

The grays and blues of Mont Saint-Michel, the pinks and golds of the open fields of sun-drenched Oklahoma -- these and other elements of Malick's palette convey a world both blessed and fallen. For all the seeming meandering of "To the Wonder," the movie finally, and with a suddenly remarkable sense of purpose, delivers the viewer to an intimation of grace that's as powerful a thing as art has to offer, in the visual and aural form of a Christian prayer.

Many have mocked [Malick's] reliance on starry-eyed voiceover... and this film's unabashed, searching consideration of Love; others surrender themselves to his often demanding visual language—and to the journey of the title. I confess to logging considerable time in both camps and emerging a surprised admirer, less put off by this expressionist movie's willful limitations and more struck by its dance-like sense of movement and its visceral, almost subliminal expression of love's ardor and angst.

To the Wonder, Malick's second movie in the remarkable span of two years, is too awkwardly manicured to qualify as loose. It's ridiculous, pretentious as hell, and in places laugh-out-loud funny... He hasn't made a great movie. At least he's made a human one.

To the Wonder, [Malick's] latest (and, remarkably for a guy who took a 20-year break, his third film in seven years), is the top-to-bottom romance that's always eluded him. Like a balm, it's smoothed out the wrinkles: You'll blush like a teenager when you see Malick's exquisite style attached to scenes of a beautiful couple (Ben Affleck and Ukrainian stunner Olga Kurylenko) flirting on a train, filming each other with their phones, entwining arms in a sun-dappled Paris.