Knight of Cups

Terrence Malick – 2015 – USA 

More than the film itself, I really love that it is so widely hated, and so vehemently.  This is the way it should be.  There is no heavenly law brought down from a mountain declaring that all films must appeal to everyone, nor that every film must be as lucid and graspable as possible, nor even that every film must have a plot.  That’s what we’re used to because that’s primarily what’s out there; but it’s not all there is.  We should be skeptical of the movies that pander to the widest demographics; they were not made by artists but by committees of executives whose purest idea is simply to try and replicate the success of others.  I’ll be fair; despite worshipping Buñuel and loving Warhol, Brakhage and even Maya Deren, I’m not exceptionally tolerant of overly arty and indulgent cinema.  For me the most perfect movies were made by the likes of Hawks and Hitchcock.  So the test I have for myself is to ask if I would admire, or even endure, the film I’m watching if it was made by an unknown college student instead of a beloved 72-year-old auteur.  In the case of things like David Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006) and Jean-Luc Godard’s Goodbye to Language (2014), the answer was absolutely not.  For Knight of Cups, it was ‘yes.’  While the presence of so many famous actors is a little distracting in such a stream-of-consciousness film, I nevertheless got caught up in it and watched with fascination to the end with no awareness of the passage of time.  Malick’s cinema has always been about celebrating the little moments of meaning and enlightenment that seem to pop up in daily life, which are missed by most but caught by those who are particularly primed for some type of transcendence in an otherwise mundane existence.  Knight of Cups has been hilariously condemned as a feature-length perfume commercial by some movie-goers.  That’s valid, but what does this really tell us?  Where did the airy, arty, uber-chic style of the cliché perfume ad come from?  It came from the European art film of the 60s; especially Feliini’s La Dolce Vita (1960) and 8½ (1963).  These would surely have been an influence on the young Malick, whose first feature, Badlands (1973) already stressed his interest in muted drama and the heaviness of the natural environment.  So, even though I don’t like seeing someone of Malick’s stature being insulted left and right, it also pleases me that he has the ability to annoy people so much, and I admire that – at his age – he seems quite adamant that it is his right to do whatever he feels like doing whether anyone likes it or not.  I, for one, hate movies that telegraph everything so blatantly that there is no opportunity for a slight variance of interpretation let alone mild uncertainty.  God forbid the dimmest fool in the audience might be confused about something.  Movies are dreams.  They are not meant to be rational.  The importance of crowd-pleasing practicality today signals the victory of the film school mentality, which has choked the art right out of the industry, and spit out generations of filmmakers who have been brainwashed to believe that the plugging of plot holes and methodically preempting criticism are the predominant values in cinema.  So let Malick be booed and despised.  If dopey celebrities come to ignore his calls, he would still find a way make films exactly like this.  They might not be as polished, but they’d be his.