*spoilers!
To the Wonder in a nutshell is about the "manic pixie dream girl" wanting to get married and then hates her married life, or that is what i took away from this film. IMDb has the plot summary as, "after visiting Mont Saint-Michel, Marina and Neil (i didn't know their names until the credits) come to Oklahoma, where problems arise. Marina meets a priest and fellow exile, who is struggling with his vocation, while Neil renews his ties with a childhood friend, Jane." i got that plot, but it was lost in between Marina (Olga Kurylenko) dancing EVERYwhere. good grief.
i knew what to expect going into this film, so i wasn't taken by surprise. after all this is what a Terrence Malick film is. epic shot after epic shot of a beautiful tragically thin women dancing lyrically through a wheat field or forest or grocery isle, set to a piece of classical music. it could almost be a modern dance piece, but it is not a modern dance number. it is a film that is trying to tell some kind of story that i inevitably have to visit Wikipedia after i see it to try and comprehend what i just saw. i'm looking at you Tree of Life because i did not understand that film at all. i actually left the theater feeling very stupid because the boy totally got it and thought it was the most amazing thing ever. sure, it was beautiful beyond belief, but what the fuck was it about?
this may come to you by surprise but i love Malick, i do. i loved Badlands, adored The Thin Red Line and was enchanted by The New World (i never saw Days of Heaven.) Malick's vision and how he tells a story through images and music is right up my alley, and i fell in love with each of his earlier films. you can get lost in his films, and i love that feeling like you are connected to his art. i feel, however, that the older i get the less i buy into this pretentious bullshit from artists. and i feel that Malick has fallen into that category for me with these last two films of his.
i was young when i saw Badlands, The Thin Red Line and The New World. i ate them up with vigor. i was a pretentious college student who only enjoyed art-house films or foreign films. hell, i think my last few years of high school and into college that was all i ever watched. me and the boy would spend all of our money at the independent cinema in Minneapolis. but i got older and saw Tree of Life and thought to myself "i think i must have been much smarter when i was younger because this shit lost me at the dinosaurs. where did my brain go?"
To the Wonder just annoyed me. the entire time i kept on thinking that if i ran into this Marina women i would want to kill her. she is manic and all she does is play, like she is a child. i get that her character is actually supposed to be manic. she seems to be having problems that could steam from her IUD (a contraceptive), so her emotions are all over the place. but i just wanted to slap her.
at the beginning of the film we see the couple, Marina and Neil (Ben Affleck), on the train. Marina is standing on the train's table, she is sliding off her seat and under the table, she is climbing all over Neil, she is being all cute and playful. i just thought, "how fucking annoying. i feel bad for all the people who are sitting by them." when the couple move to Oklahoma, we see them do a lot of domestic life stuff like grocery shopping. again, we see her dancing up and down the isles of the grocery store. if i saw a women acting that way in the grocery store i would call the cops and inform them that "we have someone on LSD, come and pick them up."
i personally could have used more Javier Bardem and Rachel McAdams because both of their stories seemed really interesting to me. a priest who is having a crisis of faith and a women who is trying to save her ranch because her deadbeat husband lost all their money gambling and who has lost a little girl. but i don't want to sit here and critique this film because it is what it is, a Terrance Malick art-house film. and with all art each person takes away their own experience, they'll either love it or hate it.
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