Movie of the Week: SONG TO SONG (Terrence Malick, 2017)
Yearning, Malick-style
When I was sixteen and getting into movies, that first trailer for The Tree of Life (2011) had me in a kind of prolonged trance in the months before the film’s release. I spent that time also devouring each of Malick’s four previous features, which were made — rather infamously — over a period of nearly forty years. And so you can imagine the collective shock of Malick’s fans when in the wake of The Tree of Life he made not one, not two, but three new films between 2012 and 2017. What’s more: they were all contemporary stories in a filmography otherwise comprised exclusively of period pieces. The last of this loose trilogy, Song to Song, is perhaps the wildest of the bunch. Starring Ryan Gosling, Rooney Mara, Michael Fassbender, and Natalie Portman (with significant cameos from Cate Blanchett, Holly Hunter, Val Kilmer, Patti Smith, and Lykke Li), this romantic roundelay set against the Austin music scene pushes Malick’s form to extremes that make even the aggressive montage of To the Wonder (2012) and Knight of Cups (2015) seem conventional by comparison. It’s less a story about a group of people falling in and out of love than a two-hour video essay about four human archetypes: the Romantic (Gosling), the Sinner (Fassbender), the Innocent (Portman), and the delicate mix of all three (Mara). How many times in history has a filmmaker made something this openly experimental with stars and collaborators of this stature? Emmanuel Lubezki goes sicko mode with his wide-angle lenses; Jack Fisk and Ruth De Jong get to decorate every architectural marvel in Texas. Love it or hate it, there’s never going to be another movie like this. Song to Song is personal filmmaking at the grandest scale, and a work that turns Malick’s other great loves — music and philosophy — into the essence of his imagery. I leave you with my own modification of Bong Joon-ho’s quip about the “one-inch barrier” of subtitles: once you can overcome the cringe of Malick’s earnest, breathy voiceovers, you will be introduced to so many new cinematic possibilities.
Streaming on Peacock; available to rent on Apple, Amazon, and other major platforms.