Song to Song

Ryan Gosling and Rooney Mara on the set

 

Director Terrence Malick and Rooney Mara on the set

 

Director Terrence Malick and Natalie Portman on the set

 

Director Terrence Malick and Ryan Gosling on the set

 

Director Terrence Malick

 

SONG TO SONG            C              

USA  (129 mi)  2017  ‘Scope  d:  Terrence Malick                Official site

The woods had vanished; the earth was a waste of shadow.  No sound broke the silence of the wintry landscape.  No cock crowed; no smoke rose; no train moved.  A man without a self, I said.  A heavy body leaning on a gate.  A dead man.  With dispassionate despair, with entire disillusionment, I surveyed the dust dance; my life, my friends’ lives, and those fabulous presences, men with brooms, women writing, the willow tree by the river—clouds and phantoms made of dust too, of dust that changed, as clouds lose and gain and take gold or red and lose their summits and billow this way and that, mutable, vain.  I, carrying a notebook, making phrases, had recorded mere changes; a shadow.  I had been sedulous to take note of shadows.  How can I proceed now, I said, without a self, weightless and visionless, through a world weightless, without illusion?                       

—The Waves, by Virginia Woolf, 1931,  THE WAVES - Project Gutenberg Australia

Filmed back to back with Knight of Cups (2015), essentially the same film in a different context, arguably the least successful film over the course of his career, where, above all others, it has an air of pretension about it, showing no artistic growth, as it’s covering the exact same territory as his previous film, where too much of the same thing has dulled the senses in Malick films, continuing in a similar abstract, non-narrative stylization, where this is the only Malick film that actually felt painful to watch, as actors are constantly forced to spontaneously perform in front of the camera, to improvise and supposedly be interesting, yet it becomes excruciatingly painful to watch, as shooting without a script, it seems more like screen test shots, loose reflections of differing personalities captured before a camera, where they are playing out moods instead of developing characters.  Over the course of two hours, the professional limits of these actors are exposed, as their attempts at spontaneity become repetitive, where instead of a liberating experience, they feel more and more boxed in by their own human limitations, falling instead of flying, where it actually becomes uncomfortable to watch after a while, as they feebly resort to many of the same gestures and acting techniques over and over again.  While Malick continually resorts to a mosaic of impressionistic moments, finding beauty in the moment, where throughout the duration he is constantly changing the focus of attention, adding a stream-of-conscious narrative that is driven by fleeting images accompanied by haunting interior monologues that do form a more recognizable storyline, the truth is that our distanced unfamiliarity with the same characters and cinematic techniques do not grow or evolve over time, where this feels more like an exercise in futility, with viewers continually forced to beat their heads against a wall in protest.  Shot in Austin during the 2012 Austin City Limits Music Festival, there is a thread of indie music that plays throughout, along with cameos from rock icons Patti Smith, Iggy Pop, Johnny Rotten, and members of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, where the normally reclusive director conducted a Q & A interview along with actor Michael Fassbender hosted by resident director Richard Linklater following a screening just a few weeks ago at the SXSW Film Festival, Michael Fassbender & Terrence Malick talk about "Song To Song" at the SXSW (Austin, Texas) (31:38), and while nothing earthshaking is revealed, it is one of the few public interviews Malick has ever granted.   

This would have to be considered the Malick “Museum period,” as the director, through ace cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki in their fifth consecutive collaboration since The New World (2005), continually shoots extravagant, museum-like dwellings with glass floor-to-ceiling windows, looking completely immaculate, like super luxury accommodations featured in Architectural Digest magazine, set in beautiful locations with elaborate outdoor fountains or in this case, elegant infinity pools overlooking Lake Travis or the Colorado River, which both converge in Austin, where nothing is ever out of place, resembling an intoxicating, dreamlike image of unlimited wealth, where this is as far from a working class environment as one could find, inhabited by the so-called beautiful people who control the industry.  But instead of a scathing satire on Los Angeles and the Hollywood movie industry, consumed in artifice and superficiality, this is described as an experimental romantic drama filled with music, originally entitled Weightless from the Virginia Woolf passage, yet despite the title and the outdoor rock music setting, the film is not really about the music festival, though as Malick put it, “You can’t live in Austin and escape the music,” serving only as a backdrop for a larger story about the fleeting connectivity of our lives, shown through a series of random moments, as one character (Rooney Mara) puts it, “living moment to moment, song to song, kiss to kiss,” which may explain why so many different songs and locations are used in the film, where what’s shown onscreen are only brief fragments of a much larger picture that remains unseen, that each viewer must imagine for themselves, where perhaps a common theme heard throughout is the Delta blues song, “Rollin’ and Tumblin’,” Elmore James - Rollin' and Tumblin' - YouTube (2:27). 

Well, I rolled and I tumbled, cried the whole night long
Well, I woke up this mornin’, didn’t know right from wrong

Featuring a cavalcade of stars, including Michael Fassbender, Ryan Gosling, Natalie Portman, Rooney Mara, Cate Blanchett, Holly Hunter, and a strange appearance from Val Kilmer, where three women are Academy Award winners, the film doesn’t really have a story, and isn’t meant to, as there was never any guarantee any of the scenes would be used, with Malick filming them continuously, even when they weren’t acting, in keeping with his theme of spontaneity, with many not making the final cut, including Christian Bale, Benicio del Toro, Trevante Rhodes, Haley Bennett and others, including music groups Arcade Fire and Iron & Wine.  The film basically follows people on the periphery of the industry, Faye (Rooney Mara), herself a budding songwriter, seen early on having a JULES AND JIM (1962) style flirtatious relationship with two men, BV (Ryan Gosling), an up and coming songwriter and musician that she meets at a party, and Cook (Michael Fassbender), a wealthy record producer that is trying to sign him.  In Malick’s experimental phase, one never needs to buy into the religion or philosophy being discussed onscreen, as that’s all part of the transitional process “on becoming,” where artistically one delves under the surface to explore as much as they can to better understand the changing world around us, and who better than this director to help guide us through an inquisitive existential journey?  But that feeling of Malick euphoria or exhilaration is never achieved in this film, feeling more like masochistic indulgence, as one never believes in the actual romance, and any dialogue that does exist is simplistically awkward and trivial, as what’s missing are the essential ingredients of a healthy relationship.  While Faye is seduced by them both, a relative novice in the music industry, “I tell myself any experience is better than no experience.  I wanted to live. Sing my song,” this romantic interplay quickly moves from a free-wheeling innocence to one of more serious consequences, yet there’s no underlying credibility that it’s ever about love, as the emotional currency is money and power, as personified by Cook, who is something of a snake of a human being, who’s personal mantra becomes, “The world wants to be deceived,” where there’s not a shred of commitment or even relationship connectivity, as there’s never an extended conversation, the kind of thing relationships actually need to sustain themselves, instead it’s shown as a flurry of brief moments, like walking in on the tail end of a conversation, where much of the film is reduced to recognizable sound bites.  This simply can’t replace the real thing, so what we see is a cheap imitation, where the vacuous emotional distance between characters is more evident than ever, where the personal discomfort associated with watching the film actually feeds into this perception.     

Near the end of the film, like something you might find in a Jarmusch film, Faye reads aloud a passage from William Blake’s poem The Divine Image from Songs of Innocence and of Experience, 1789:

For Mercy has a human heart
Pity, a human face:
And Love, the human form divine,
And Peace, the human dress.

It must be said that Malick as a director doesn’t do romance well.  While DAYS OF HEAVEN (1978) is in a class by itself, with a scintillatingly radiant Brooke Adams and a ruggedly handsome, young Richard Gere providing the thrust of the love story, BADLANDS (1973), The New World (2005), and To the Wonder (2012) may be his next best romantic efforts and in each instance love quickly collapses, as it simply has no foundation.  The same might be said for Kubrick, by the way, as both men are simply too ponderous, where their expertise is in exploring the stratosphere of thought and personal perception, where they are much better in visualizing the transcendence of the universe and the emotional chasms between people.  As she did in Knight of Cups (2015), the introduction of Natalie Portman as Rhonda sends the film into a downward trajectory.  A working class kindergarten teacher earning extra money waitressing, Cook decides to plant his hooks into her, dazzling her with the opulence of his home, making her his pet project, devoting all his time and energy in a larger-than-life courtship, finally convincing her to marry him, where we see glimpses of Holly Hunter as her more grounded but financially struggling mother, seemingly less impressed with Cook’s dazzling showmanship, even after he buys her a new home, where it’s all an act, a charade, as he soon makes a mockery of the marriage.  Consumed by three-way sexual trysts, stringing his wife along for the ride, even including prostitutes, becoming a sleazy portrait of Sodom and Gomorrah, he shows no regard whatsoever for the demoralizing effect this has on his wife, thinking only of himself, while she feels humiliated and ashamed.  Cook pulls the same con act on BV, making behind-the-back maneuvers that undermine his legitimacy, as he’s a conniving liar who will openly deceive you to your face, never showing an ounce of remorse.  While there’s an interesting connection to struggling parents, Faye’s father (Brady Coleman), ostracized from his own family, basically encourages her not to make the same mistakes that he made, while BV’s mother (Linda Emond) speaks out of turn, causing irreparable damage to an existing affair he’s having with Amanda (Cate Blanchett).  In fact, everyone sleeps around, with Faye having a girl-on-girl fling with the French-accented Zoey, Bérénice Marlohe, a James Bond girl in SKYFALL (2012), while BV has unfinished business with a former girlfriend Lykke (Swedish singer and fashion model Lykke Li), where personal betrayal becomes routine.  While there are side trips to Mexico, with a few days shot in the Yucatán, mulling around outdoor street scenes including food vendors, revealing a stark poverty in the daily lives of locals, each seems so willing to throw away their youth in the prime of their lives, finding it gone in the blink of an eye.  A montage of small moments, there’s really no compelling character in the bunch, so when they run astray, like Icarus flying too closely to the sun, there’s no real sense of tragedy or a feeling like something important has been lost, as there was not much of a connection to begin with.   One has to say it — this is downright average, on par with the rest of the bad movies.      

2013 Top Ten List #9 Top of the Lake

TOP OF THE LAKE – made for TV        A     

Australia  Great Britain  (350 mi – 7 episodes) 2013 d:  Jane Campion and Garth Davis   

You can be very hard. And what I don't like is that you think it’s strength.    

—Robin’s mother Jude Griffin (Robyn Nevin) 

There’s no match for the tremendous intelligence of the body.     —GJ (Holly Hunter)

There has been a gradual introduction of movies made for television into film festivals, where the Melbourne and Telluride Film Festivals were among the first to program the three films in the RED RIDING TRILOGY (2009) made for British television, while the full-length, 5-hour French version of the Olivier Assayas film Carlos – made for French TV (2010) premiered at Cannes, and the Venice Festival premiered Todd Haynes’ MILDRED PIERCE (2011), all to critical acclaim.  This year Jane Campion’s feminist noir TOP OF THE LAKE became the first television series to ever premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, later screening again at Berlin, a 6-hour jointly produced BBC and Sundance Channel film TV miniseries spread out over 7 episodes, though the pacing and burning intensity are much more effective when compressed into a single viewing, especially without having to undergo commercials and the repeating credit sequence.  Since it had been four years since she made a film, Campion reveals her thoughts on finding more freedom working in television from the Hollywood Reporter, “Feature filmmaking is now quite conservative. The lack of restraints, the longer story arc:  It's a luxury not there generally in film.”  Campion’s An Angel at My Table (1990) was originally produced as a New Zealand television miniseries, but was re-edited and released internationally as a film.  Set in Laketop, a small town set on a gorgeous lake in a remote and mountainous area of New Zealand (actually shot by Adam Arkapaw at South Island’s Moke Lake and the cities of Queenstown and Glenorchy, including Lake Wakatipu seen here:  1,280 × 960 pixels), Elisabeth Moss plays Robin Griffin, a big city Australian police detective from Sydney with a specialty in child investigations, who happens to be visiting her mother who is stricken with cancer, but it’s also something of a coming home experience, as she grew up in the region as well.  Called in for an emergency, the local police, under the command of Detective Sgt. Al Parker (David Wenham), have a pregnant 12-year old Thai girl named Tui Mitcham (newcomer Jacqueline Joe, supposedly discovered at an Auckland swimming pool), who may have been attempting a miscarriage or drowning herself in the lake.  What’s immediately clear is not just the plight of the child, but the antiquated male-dominated police procedures where women continue to be leered at as sexual objects, routinely called sluts (or worse), and crimes against women are not really taken seriously by anyone in town, seen more as the usual sport between a man and a woman, so no one respects Robin’s authority on the case and can be heard making snickering comments on the side.  No one, for instance, takes the crime of rape against a 12-year old girl seriously except Detective Griffin, where they all heartily agree to her face that she’s right but then make no effort whatsoever to find the rapist.

It’s no accident that the best episodes are directed by Campion herself, including the first, fourth, and final two episodes, feeling almost mythical, featuring some stunning performances, where the richly detailed pieces of information unraveling in the opening few minutes are nothing less than intoxicating, filled with the beauty of the landscape, local color and plenty of eccentric characters.  Echoes of David Lynch’s TWIN PEAKS (1990 – 1991) are evident, especially in the exotic setting, the small town mindset, a body washed ashore, the toxic effect of holding onto secrets, strangely offbeat characters, and the presence of an outsider, in each case an abnormally astute police detective.  Like Laura Palmer, Tui is at the heart of the film, attractively appealing and the picture of innocence, as no one knows the truth about her, especially after she reveals the name of the father is literally “no one.”  Through Tui, Campion seems to be suggesting that women’s behavior in particular is a product of family dynamics, the surrounding community values, and the random events that comprise our lives.  What’s perhaps most frightening is the callously disturbing and pathological behavior of her father, Matt Mitcham (Peter Mullan at his most sinister), the town’s drug lord whose two sons are equally psychopathic in carrying out his dirty business (where the patriarchal family circle is actually Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John).  We see evidence of their nonchalant brutality in an opening scene, where they haven’t an ounce of concern for human life, living in a heavily armed fortress compound protected by modern surveillance equipment and intentionally starved pitbulls that run rampant.  When Tui quickly disappears, we begin to understand what it might be like as a girl growing up in this town.  This exact same subject is then explored through black and white flashback sequences, as Robin suffered her own share of childhood trauma growing up in this town, where the parallel lives of Robin and Tui remain linked throughout the film.  Interestingly, Elisabeth Moss was not the first choice for the film, as Campion offered the part to Anna Paquin, who declined due to her pregnancy, and when the part was offered to an American actress, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation pulled out of the project, insisting that it would only fund the film with an Australian or New Zealand lead actress.  The choice of Moss is literally perfect in the role, where it’s hard to think of the film without her, largely because she never overacts or displays too much, and though she is deeply scarred, reminiscent of Jodie Foster’s tenuous predicament as Clarice Starling in THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991), she continues to be defined by her intelligence, constantly guarding her thoughts, where the impact of others can easily be read upon her face, an opaque presence that mirrors the world around her, remaining mysteriously vulnerable and even fragile while standing up to a dominating male presence.

What distinguishes this film is the densely plotted novelesque quality, where even comically drawn secondary characters are significant to the overall portrayal of humans desperately in need, where there’s an untapped ferocity of spirit seen in both Tui and Robin.  Adding to this picture of a lone voice in the wilderness is an inspired idea to create a separatist women’s collective, a Greek chorus of damaged women living together in trucked-in shipping containers at a lakeside retreat called Paradise that sits on disputed land, as Matt claims they’re trespassing, a rag tag group of exiled women led by Holly Hunter as the dispassionate GJ, a guru-like presence in pants spouting Zen-like philosophic utterances, as if she can read each person’s future, but possessing the deranged personality of a social misfit herself, often seen pacing the grounds while off in the distance a few naked women are continually seen running free.  The lustful nature of the women is part of the untold story, including the sexual promiscuity of several of the women living on the compound, including a memorable scene from Geneviève Lemon (the 7-minute woman) who played the lead role in Sweetie (1989), as the men in town are perceived as testosterone fueled adolescents, especially in the moments Robin spends enduring endlessly abusive taunting by men in bars, yet woman have to find their place in an existing contemporary landscape, including Robin’s own sexual desires, seen developing for Johnno (Thomas M. Wright), a childhood sweetheart and one of Matt’s offspring, a good son that rejects the maniacal nature of his tyrannical crime boss father.  The two are a sexual force bonded together by her childhood trauma, where Johnno was her high school prom date and suspiciously absent afterwards on a night she was brutally gang raped by four drunken men.  This trauma gives her all the more reason to protect Tui, even if the town has given up looking for her, suspecting she must be dead after the passage of two months.  There’s an interesting thematic projection of men’s fears and limitations, expressed through the perceived effects of hostile elements, as no one thinks she could survive out there alone in the cold, while the repeated mention of the lethal quality of the water is always described as so cold that “no one could survive in that water.”  Yet somehow, just when Robin is told her mother has terminal cancer, easily one of the key moments in the film, intimately captured with the camera holding completely onto Robin’s face, at that exact moment when all hope is lost, there is also a chance that Tui has somehow survived.  

Tui’s absence changes the nature of the film, as her unseen presence, Robin’s own personal trauma, and her mother’s impending death all blend together and continually haunt Robin, who becomes the film’s dominant force, as events are continuously seen through her eyes.  The on again and off again relationship with her boss, Al, always seems to be of secondary importance, part of the police procedural component of the film, as their presence together is usually mandatory.  But his exclusively male take on events offers a differing viewpoint than her own, but Campion is careful not to make him one-dimensional, where he’s one of the more complexly drawn characters in the film, though never entirely likeable, especially as he’s seen to be in cahoots with Matt’s criminal empire, usually protecting him or tipping him off about upcoming police activities.  But Robin doesn’t know this and continually exposes a vulnerable side to him, where her life is an open book while we know almost nothing about him.  His extravagant home offers a clue, and is the setting for one of the more controversial events in the film, as he invites her over for dinner where she stupidly drinks too much and eventually passes out, waking up alone in his bedroom the next morning wearing one of his shirts.  He reassures her that nothing happened, that she vomited all over her clothes, so he was forced to wash them, all of which sounds like a perfectly acceptable explanation.  And that’s the problem with Al’s character, as his answers are too pat, sounding overly detached and too well reasoned ahead of time, never speaking passionately in the moment, where what comes across is an arrogant and pompous man that’s used to getting his way and never having to answer for it.  Al typifies the male mentality of the town, even if Matt is the Alpha male, while he sits quietly lurking in the background collecting his cut of the overall operations, running a secret Ecstasy and amphetamine lab underneath Matt’s home.  In contrast to Robin and Al, Matt has his own sexual experience with one of the women from the compound, Anita, Robyn Malcolm, who simply craves male companionship.  Their hallucinogenic outdoor experience in the woods on Ecstasy is unusual for how it sensitively portrays a ruthless crime boss at his most vulnerable state, used much like the LSD cemetery sequence in Easy Rider (1969), where the dealers are seen under the influence of their own drugs, often haunted by impending thoughts of death and mortality.    

At some point, and one barely realizes when it occurs, the focus shifts from the overly destructive and malicious behavior of the adults to the often misunderstood and more innocent motives of kids, where a strange young girl (Georgi Kay) dropped off at the women’s compound is continuously seen playing an electric guitar in various natural outdoor locations, NEW Ipswich- Georgi Kay (live) (4:50), offering voice to a new and different force that hasn’t been seen much or heard from, namely the next generation, Tui’s generation.  Robin interrogates a young boy for shoplifting, Jamie (Luke Buchanon), seen crossing the lake in a kayak, suspected of bringing food to a drop site, significant as he’s one of Tui’s best friends, perhaps even the father.  Jamie has the unusual habit of not speaking to adults, so Al tries to knock some sense into this kid, using decisively forceful measures until he’s thrown out of the interrogation room by Robin.  The kid disappears the next day, along with all the food in the refrigerator and kitchen cabinets, leading to a kind of idyllic Lord of the Flies gathering of kids in the woods without the presence of a bullying leader, where we discover the re-emergence of Tui along with boatloads of friends.  But Matt and his gang are soon on to them, forcing a very pregnant Tui and Jamie to escape, only to lead to certain tragedy, which has a horrific effect, especially within the women’s compound.  The slowed pacing also reflects a kind of impasse, a turning in the tide, where some of the women are finally willing to stand up to these powerful men, refusing to be scared or intimidated by them.  In a memorial sequence for one of the lost kids, Georgi Kay - Joga (Top of the Lake - Jamies memorial scene ... (2:40), featuring Mirrah Foulkes as the distraught mother, some may be shocked or confused at just how unmanly the women are, as they don’t go the Eastwood vigilante route and demand justice through the power of a gun or through brute strength, which is what movies have trained us to expect, but this psychological transformation has been slow in coming and continues to evolve at an excruciatingly slow pace, yet it’s among the more unique scenes in the film, as the women collectively express a quiet desperation without any hint of violence, viewed as an exclusively male domain.  

The finale goes even further down that road, where the discovery of a date rape drug figures prominently into the tortured lives of teens, many of whom in the past have ended up dead under mysteriously unexplained circumstances.  It’s all a bit alarming, but it also figures into Robin’s own past, where it doesn’t do her any good to dig too deeply into the heart of her own trauma, never wanting to meet the child she gave up for adoption as she never wanted to explain to a child that they were the product of a gang rape, thinking this revelation could induce suicidal thoughts of zero self-worth, deciding it’s better to “Fuck the truth,” where life is so much more complicated than we could ever imagine, where human behavior is simply too despicable.  One theme Campion appears to be advocating is that the more attention paid to pain, the worse things often become.  The movie can be shocking at times with its spurts of sudden violence, but in this film it’s not about women chasing after vengeance, where the obsession for justice only creates more injustice, as it’s so easy to lose sight of the arc of your own life, but it also shouldn’t be some inhumane evil that we continually answer to.  In the end, the film veers into an ambiguously disturbing road movie, like a journey through an existential wasteland, actually discussed at great length in the women’s group talkathons, which are almost a parody of self-help groups, where GJ often berates their whining and moaning, claiming they’re “madder than ever,” saying she needs to “just get away from these crazy bitches,” getting as far away as she can, yet still taking us on an interior journey more self-reflective and psychologically complex than what we’re used to from crime dramas, like say the highly successful THE MILLENNIUM TRILOGY (2009).  Actually it’s more like the continuing arduousness of The Odyssey, a prolonged journey filled with epic challenges, where the hero survives only by extraordinary cunning and perseverance, where likewise the collective effect of this film is an assault on the senses, causing a shock to the system and a rewiring of the circuitry, finding oneself at the center of a great human tragedy, offering no societal cure or moral answers, nothing more than the brave choice of learning how to discover our own humanity, often the last one thing we pay any attention to as we’re so busy navigating our way through life.  But in the end, eerily enough, someone, perhaps even Robin, is going to be in a position to help raise a child that is the product of gang rape, as the cycle of life continues where we’re continually forced to face our worst fears.