Film Carew

With To The Wonder, Terrence Malick - as close to critically untouchable as any filmmaker - has been accused of self-parody; all those whispered voice-overs and swelling string-music and spinning camera gymnastics and shots of natural wonder and restless montage being taken, this time, as a hollow take on the same old song; the sixth Malick movie delivering all the signature froth of his cinematic daydreams, with none of the meat or meaning underneath. Malick has been accused of this, but there's no way I'm doing so. It's a little like saying God had reached a point of self-parody when it came to the platypus: either you can mock the absurdity of the creation, or just gaze at it in wonder.

I have no idea what the 'wonder' is in the title of To The Wonder - natural splendour, heaven, love, Mont Saint-Michel; none of the above - nor does it matter. At one point Javier Bardem says that marriage is a “holy mystery”, and the phrase is evocative; not just because it speaks of the central themes of the work, but also because it touches on the mysterious, the divine, the sublime, the unknowable and the unsayable; all qualities that Malick's particular form of heightened cinema is alive with, and alive to. To The Wonder is a film about erotic love vs divine love; about what it means to be in a relationship, to commit to another person; about the tides of marriage, the waxing and waning of desire; but it's not so much 'about' these things as to have anything resembling a linear plot, or even a story, particularly. It's not Malick in the realm of self-parody, but Malick at his most pure; unencumbered by the baggage of narrative, free to frolic endlessly in the autumn leaves, turning eternal circles whilst Olga Kurylenko pirouettes and pouts.

Cause sniffing someone's hair isn't creepy at all.

Kurylenko became, somewhere on the freeform journey of the film's making, its essential 'lead'; meaning, really, the actor to whom Malick's camera is most magnetically drawn. She plays a single French mother who follows Ben Affleck from Paris to rural Oklahoma, to a housing estate where giant, home-loan-pre-approved cathedrals rise out of the endless expanses of lawns, houses too big to be filled, where boxes remain half-unpacked, suitcases half-packed. When Malick stills his camera long enough to peer at the vast fields, the wide roads, and the buzzing transmission towers stretching to the horizon, he captures the oppressiveness of open space; this a prison in which the Parisienne woman is bound to feel stifled. Transplanted a world away, she's become the caged bird, slowly growing more wan as the year past; this a sad fate for a free-spirit, for a character who seems, at times, the child who never grew up. If she's a child, Kurylenko's character is the sensory-seeking child: cavorting, spinning, jumping on beds, tossing leaves, running her fingers through water and soil, swimming and riding bikes and squeezing things tight, licking dew off trees and hopping off rocks and yelling at cows, and dancing, forever dancing. So often given action-movie roles as glorified on-screen mannequin, Kurylenko is here handed sheer liberation, and it's hard to remember seeing an actor so lost in the throes of emancipation; so escaping the straitjacket of typecasting. She obviously, utterly delights in all she's allowed to do, and Malick delights in following her.

Few auteurs are as attuned to the sensorial as Malick, a filmmaker who captures the great ecstasy of being alive - of dreaming, of loving, of the dizzying splendour of life on this planet - like few others. He can make shagpile carpeting seem wondrously tactile, sunlight through Venetians as if God pressing in on man, going to the supermarket a climax of giddy rapture. When Bardem talks of God being a light that shines through us, it's no coincidence that it's matched to a pointillist mosaic in stained glass; people as luminous fragments forming a greater picture of humanity. Malick's recurring visual motifs aren't empty Malickisms, but obviously serve the themes: autumn leaves, forever blowing through frame as Kurylenko whirls, are there to symbolise time, decay, mortality; water, which is in seemingly every shot, symbolises love; whether it be flowing freely, stagnant, kept in a fishbowl, or returning out to sea. “I write on water what I dare not say,” someone says, in voice-over; To The Wonder filled with the wondrous poetry of things people would never say.

Bardem, who plays a priest, speaks aloud the idea of love-as-a-stream at one point, as he counsels people on marriage; but what's more amazing is the depiction of his own marriage, as long-suffering spouse to an absent God (he never listens!). Bardem's whispery, erotic voice-overs have exactly the same quality as those of our more corporeal lovers. The mid-film introduction of Rachel McAdams, as a rancher always in pearls, set against Bardem's character in the film's elliptical, rhythmic 'movements'; the sweet-nothings of each echoing the other; the love of God and the love of man growing easily confused.

Now there's some side-face sniffing going on. Seriously, it's creepy guys. C'mon!

When McAdams swans into frame, To The Wonder gets a matinée feeling, even if there's a strange, unexplained sequence where she shines a flashlight in a dark house. Her pearls glint like her white, white teeth; the light suddenly becomes more luminous as it catches her blonde hair; and the mix of intimacy and environmentalism shines just as bright. Whether they're making out, fighting, or staring wistfully at the horizon, McAdams and Affleck go swimming through long-grass and tumbling in autumn leaves, and Malick's camera either sets them deep amidst the landscape, or smooshes up close, in the foggy hot breath of their passion. Affleck is in almost the whole film, but there's not a single Ben Affleck, Leading Man shot in the entire picture. Malick, instead, gets so close to his celebrity actors that they become abstracted parts: ears and neck, freckles and breath, shirt-collars and hands. He effectively shoots these people as if he's in love with them; or, moreso, sees them as we see our lovers, pressed up too close to be taken in whole; look at his figures as we study our paramour's bodies, as if the great truth of life can be divined on their skin.

Whilst Kurylenko is alive in her role, Affleck is, deliberately, a counter; a taciturn American, reserved and distant. It's possible that he doesn't actually speak a line of dialogue in the whole film - you could make a case that, save for a slightly-jarring sequence with ultra-gabby gal-pal Romina Mondello, no one does - and this builds to a character who starts to seem almost spectral, so removed that you wonder if he's a memory, if not a ghost. He's well-rounded enough to be given a day-job, as an ecologist (or journalist?) checking for levels of toxicity in all these newly-excavated suburban allotments.

Whilst each of the leading ladies stay trapped, kept, Affleck and Bardem move amongst the people, and Malick crosses lines of vérité as he gets vox-pops from real pedestrians, real toxic-environment victims, real down-and-outers, real prisoners. There's an interesting juxtaposition between the more squalid, sordid mores of 'reality' and the dreamlike reveries of Malick's celluloid fantasies; but it's less a jarring juxtaposition than a sly piece of social/theological commentary (both Man and God capable of great beauty and great misery). And an evocation of the human experience; at how being alive ricochets between the banal and the breathtaking, between the corporeal and the spiritual. Life doesn't look like a Terrence Malick movie; but a Terrence Malick movie still looks like a river of dream and memory, forever rushing forward.

I've got to look my best while I'm at the Embassy. All day. Everyday.

You could make a case that Alex Gibney, the hardest-workin' documentarian in the world, has become as important chronicler of recent human history as any single figure; films like Enron: The Smartest Guy In The Room, Taxi To The Dark Side, and Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence In The House Of God capturing the tenor of modern life, in which institutions of power and oppression - Wall Street, the American military, the Catholic Church - seek to repress the hidden, awful truths of the cost of doing business. This makes him a natural for We Steal Secrets: The Story Of WikiLeaks, though it certainly doesn't make him a flag-waving Free Julian Assange evangelist. Instead, his film is essentially a study on the alienation of the whistle-blower: Bradley Manning, the military turncoat who turned loose millions of classified files, met his downfall by reaching out to another, and ended up in solitary confinement; Assange, who willingly adopted a rock star role and turned his once-democratising organisation into a cult-of-personality, grew increasingly paranoid, and has ended up effectively 'imprisoned' in a single room of an Ecuadorian embassy. Gibney throws a lot of thematic and philosophical irons in the fire, and that serves the film well in so many ways; but anyone expecting a tale the elusive Assange to be hammered into shape will be left grasping. Instead, We Steal Secrets works in broader ways whose moral greys are less dramatically pleasing, but more thematically satisfying; this a discussion on the flow of information, corruption, and what we're willing to tolerate in service of a supposed noble cause.

Whoa the hokey pokey!

The title of Matteo Garrone's Reality is suitably satirical, the auteur turning from Gomorrah's portrait of the multi-layered 'system' of Neapolitan organised crime to another scourge on Italian society: Big Brother. Unexpectedly, it begins as a bubblegum fairytale, with Elfman-does-Burton-esque score from Alexandre Desplat, and a jolly local-neighbourhood fishmonger trying out at a Big Brother casting call at a local shopping centre. Soon, he becomes consumed with the prospect of being on television; a delusion which leads the film towards dark obsessions and detachment from reality in a fashion that recalls Garrone's work with 2003's diet-abuse First Love; even if the tone is comic, near King Of Comedy-esque. Lead Aniello Arena is a first-class clown - though, in reality, he's a convicted mafia hitman who filmed Reality on prison day-leave - and as he grows more pathetic, the film becomes not just about little people with big dreams, but about the essential existentialism of modern society's performative culture: I am on screens, therefore I am.

We are family.

In The House betrays its theatrical genesis: lit teacher Fabrice Luchini and his gallery-owning wife Kristin Scott Thomas becoming obsessed with the creative writing essays of Luchini's teen charge Ernst Umhauer. Umhauer writes gripping, slightly-creepy tales of a growing obsession with a classmate's family, and as Luchini instructs him in the art of storytelling, he does so knowing it'll have ripple-on effects and real-world ramifications. It's an exercise in storytelling, in the writer authoring reality around them, and in being held hostage by an unreliable narrator. Director François Ozon has touched on this terrain before, with Swimming Pool, but where that film still held traces of the early perversions of his provocative begins, In The House backs off any time it gets anywhere too uncomfortable; instead just becoming a piece of entertaining pseudo-thriller fluff where the stakes never get too high.