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I liked Knight of Cups a lot, though I don't necessarily say that should be taken as a casual recommendation as it is so earnestly about the 'big themes' of life, the universe and everything that it can come across as seriously solipsistic and pretentious unless you buy into its protagonist's existential troubles (and as much as I don't want to endorse the 'perfume ad' accusations of earlier in the thread, it does also come dangerously close to the same with its whispered voice over across impossibly beautiful, windswept people caressing on a beach that it sometimes becomes almost impossible not to hear: "Love, beauty, passion: Indulgence by Calvin Klein"! Luckily the film is in colour, as black and white would only have solidified that sense!)

They're troubles involving someone who appears to have everything one could ask for in terms of lifestyle, yet he's troubled by a kind of (spiritual?) restlessness. The (many) women in his life appear to stimulate aspects of our main character's personality and disappear again just as suddenly, as if with the tide.

While it is aesthetically at entirely the opposite extreme I started to think that Knight of Cups has a lot in common with David Lynch's Inland Empire. Its got the same preoccupations of a privileged soul slowly waking up to having daydreamed through a lot of their life, left somewhat adrift in a world where great wealth and opulence co-exists with homelessness. Where the beautiful women, or discussions about whether the pink nail varnish looks good contrasts with Cate Blanchett's characters job in a clinic tending compassionately to mutilated black men, who take their physical diabilities with good humour.

And there's also that sense of reality and fantasy co-existing together. Everything is about looking through frames. I felt this sense as early as that aquarium scene, in which the image of the fish swimming all around is so overwhelming that it could almost seem like a kind of projected image as much as really existing. I guess it would only take smashing the glass to find out if the fish were really there or not! But that sense carries forward into the way that Blanchett's serious and troubled character is associated strongly with the fake, eerily empty New York street set on the stuido lot, or later on the way that the carefree stripper girlfriend eventually (and inevitably for the film) leads Rick to the ultimate in glitzy surfaces: Las Vegas!

Rick feels sort of in a witness role - he doesn't actively participate as much as Laura Dern's actress character does in Inland Empire, but more is the centrepoint of the universe of the film around which the other character's revolve. His presence, and attention, sort of brings the world alive around him, but it feels like there's nothing going on in his absence. That's what I mean about the film feeling solipsistic, which isn't entirely meant in a negative sense as (in all of Malick's films really) it is emphasising the experience in the moment and what that means to the individual in their different environments over a wider context. Something like Sissy Spacek's voiceover in Badlands romanticising her new life runs through here to the questioning voiceover as Rick (and his father, and the various women who take over each section of his journey and make it their own) question and probe into what they really want out of their life and their relationships.

I got the sense in the various subplots running through the relationships that its all about (as in Inland Empire) people trying to figure out the roles that they are needing played in their lives. Rick is sort of the empty vessel here while others ask him for answers to the impossible: why can't we turn back time to have met earlier, as its too late now. where were you when I needed you? why weren't you the son and/or brother I need to make my life have meaning? will you support me? will you just forget about everything, stop being so serious and just relax? would you make a good father yourself? And all of those questions have the further question within them: why are you making me suffer by not being the person I need you to be?

But can anybody be the person who can calm someone else's fears of abandonment, aging, responsibilities and inevitable death when nobody really knows those answers for themselves. In some ways Rick is moving through different approaches to life (which all lead back to the same place: the beach and the primordial ocean) and finds all of them difficult to make compatible with one another. Its not that any of the relationships seem particularly bad, it just feels that Rick is the kind of person who always wants to be somewhere other than where he currently is. That s beautifully suggested by the film in all those shots of being inside buildings and looking outside to see other gatherings of people, or even more significantly passing traffic and helicopters and planes zooming past, rushing along to their 'important' destinations. Those vehicles have speed and purpose - it does't matter where they're going to, and in fact its better not to be disappointed by seeing them reach their destination, better just that they are zooming through our field of vision off to some unknown destination.

Its a textural, elemental film. And each of the supporting characters around Rick have their own environments that they introduce him too, or are most associated with. The beach is the one commonality. That wider context surrounding the cut-up relationships is still important, but it gets abstracted into an elemental plane. Its less about what the location means and more about the almost tactile feel of a location, from the opulent white mansion to the neon strip club. The early earthquake scene is interesting here, with Rick sinking to ground and holding onto it as if to feel something solid and tangible in a fluid universe. But even the earth isn't truly solid. It is constantly going through its own changes, albeit on a grander timescale.

While there's a bit of Antonioni in here, as a J.G. Ballard fanboy who relates almost everything to his work (so take the following with a pinch of salt!), I particularly liked the almost Ballardian sense of focusing in on environmental elements to in some ways express the abstracted relationships. The film is less about the 'narrative' moments than the feel of those moments (while the Natalie Portman segment, with the pregnancy and 'who's the father' issue, is perhaps the most 'narrative' section, even Portman's tearful breakdown is less important than the texture of her clothing or the way a flock of birds flies past in the background at just the right emotional moment to create an almost impossibly beautiful image). I love those moments in which characters just reach out and touch the texture of the ground, the concrete, shells embedded in the pavement, or are framed against rich fabrics. Then in the desert scenes the textures of rocks and outcroppings, with the few areas of life standing out all the more richly against that barren landscape. The ocean and the desert being two opposite ends of the spectrum, with the swimming pools and motel rooms in between.

There's also the way every woman in Rick's life is seen through a Crash-style car ride, where the frame of the car is just as important as the bodies in it. The reveries about low flying aircraft too. The visions of sprawling freeways and car parking garages. The abstract, towering and cold modern architecture and concrete plazas against bucolic visions of suburban streets. The cosmic being expressed in the insignificant. That all felt very Ballardian to me, and that might be why I like the film so much!

I'm also curious what Malick thinks about the work of Alan Watts!

Well as a big fan of the director, my problem with his two recent films is that
A) Malick repeats most of his philosophy from his earlier better films
B) His expressionist language has been taken to a too far place
I think Tree of Life was the perfect middle point between his earlier (and to me perfect) films and this last two.
In ToL he managed to create actually interesting character that while they are ciphers for his themes also proved to be as affecting, no doubt helped by a superb cast.
Yet his two last films take away his fascination and awe of the world and people in it and just focus on two males who have lady problems. At least that's what I felt while watching.
True his films are still beautiful and it was nice seeing the modern world done by him (even though it's present in ToL), but two hours of whispering, twirling in Golden hour light and feeling the ennui of the modern world isn't really interesting to me.
I think a perfect example would be Cate Blanchette. She is in the film for about five minutes, but is the only character and actor who manages to feel reall and alive and not just another woman for Bale's character.

I pretty much agree with A, and while I disagree with B, I think we may be interpreting a similar reaction in different ways. In terms of his own cinematic syntax, I don't think he was going too far, partly because I don't recall anything he was doing being that different from what he did in The Tree of Life. But it did feel a bit aimless to me because what he had to say within that syntax seemed thinner and flimsier.

Well Tree of Life did have actual talking between characters and had actual interaction between the family members, while also having more than one person's voice over. But also the scenes had a beginning and end to most of them, while To the Wonder and this were more free flowing visual poem with only Bale's character (and while not only Affleck in that film, Olga's and Bardem's weren't really essential) being expressed.
I just think he has been taking his cinematic and visual language to a more extreme and expressionistic state. I feel rather sad to be criticizing one of my favorite directors for trying to find a new language and going to new places it's just that I found everything up to tree of life so magical and personal that his last two just felt hollow to me.
But it looks like a documentary on the universe is the right move for this new "Malick"

I actually haven't watched The Tree of Life and To The Wonder yet, so I've probably jumped straight into the 'harder' stuff with this one! I found the incessant fast paced editing a little wearying, generally refusing to let any fragment of a scene play out for longer than a few seconds, but eventually liked the way that it feels as if it plays into the restlessness of the main character. As if the details and specifics of situations (and people) are blurred into a constant barrage of imagery sliding past but there are still moments that make an impression even on Rick's addled mindset! (And there is always time to note the helicopters flying past!)

It will take a few more viewings but I think that as well as picking out single gestures or moments in individual shots we're also getting quick fragments of single scenes shattered apart and scattered through the entire film. The relationship between the brothers and their father seems particularly 'scattered' in such a way, building up slowly over the course of the film, while each of the women more have brief control over their sections of the fillm that follow their particular preoccupations before Rick then moves on.

I found the incessant fast paced editing a little wearying, generally refusing to let any fragment of a scene play out for longer than a few seconds

That was the main reason for me why I didn't finish watching the film, the first time I've ever done it with a Malick film. I found it very exhausting.

The fast paced editing feels like it could be a bit of a problem for a film like this in the sense that it is constantly jumping from one completely different location to another completely different location (and then back and forth again for seconds at a time) with only a brief idea of through narrative created by linkings of abstract gestures (a camera move, the placement of a figure in the frame, the focus on a tiny detail which magnifies its seeming significance) and the narration to suggest a reason for a particular shot being in that particular place. It takes a lot of work on the viewer's part to continually reorientate yourself into a context that changes every few seconds or so, though it becomes a little easier once all of the main locations and plot strands have been introduced. It also makes everything much less philosophically concrete and at least I found myself more in the role of a viewer faced by the 'puzzle' of working out where imagery fit rather than feeling more of a participant in a particular character's storyline. Perhaps the closest recent comparison to Knight of Cups that I can think of is Enter The Void, in the way that imagery is 'presented through' (rather than 'interpreted by') a kind of sleepwalking main witness character, with it being difficult to tell how they are reacting to their environment and reminiscences (or even, perhaps damningly, whether they are thinking at all. Though Christian Bale here, even in a passive-though-central role, is providing at least some semblance of a character having reactions to what they are witnessing throughout the film!). It feels like it is expecting the audiences to fill in the blanks directly, yet simultaneously there is an actual central character there who presumably has a say in their story too!

I wonder if it is an attempt to transfer the action film sense of 'intensified continuity' (in which the specifics matter less than the flow of the editing to make a point) to a more dramatic subject.

But I don't think its a failure, just a film that is as easy to laugh along with as much as follow earnestly! On that note I found the most amusing moment of the film was that brief mid-point part where Rick wanders back home to his apartment to find it ransacked (much like the earthquake at the beginning wrecked his ordered life and sort of inspired his introspection) and in the process of being robbed by two armed thugs! Who proceed to not find anything of value while Rick just stands there as a passive observer, as he does with almost all the other characters! Then seconds later the scene changes, the armed robbers have disappeared and we're just on to Rick picking up a book from his ransacked office! There's no particular follow up to that event at all, and I kind of love that in the face of existential ennui and reminiscences over past relationships, an armed robber just cannot really compete for attention!

Or how about the slightly crestfallen looking cleaning lady in that very early swimming pool party scene (very briefly shown in the scene where Rick is tumbling over the couch) trying to sweep up all the glitter and confetti only to immediately have one of the carefree Asian girls Rick was with dance through the scene throwing more everywhere! The cleaning lady disappears for the rest of the scene as if in exasperation at this point! There's a sense of humour there, but its very much in the margins of the frame (perhaps something that prepares us for the way the various women in Rick's life are always shown in the distance, walking off or just on the verge of leaving the shot just as it begins).

Against all odds, I thought this was astonishing -- the first Malick film I've loved since The Thin Red Line. I'll need at least another viewing, and some time, before I could really mount much of a coherent defense or analysis of it, but for now I feel enriched by the beauty of this film. It strikes me as very much the culmination of the style Malick had been increasingly pursuing since the new millennium. Whereas I often thought the last couple films cut too quickly, giving a arbitrarily fragmented feeling, Knight of Cups maintains a genuinely poetic rhythm to the editing which never lets up. Rather than be frustrated, I am intoxicated by each tiny glimpse of some new and beautiful sight. The effect I got from this is almost like Antonioni's The Passenger (an important film for me) -- that is, the film imparts a sense of the beauty of life's banality, leaves one somehow inspired and refreshed and in a state of pure Zen perception of the world. The sound design in this one is also superb, and together with the images helps create such a trance-like, dreamlike atmosphere which sustains the entire picture. It's just a rapturous experience, it leaves me totally nonsensical and crazed, it's abstraction in the extreme and its affects are very difficult to put into English. But I think that it will endure as one of Malick's masterpieces.

oh yeah wrote:I often thought the last couple films cut too quickly, giving a arbitrarily fragmented feeling, Knight of Cups maintains a genuinely poetic rhythm to the editing which never lets up. Rather than be frustrated, I am intoxicated by each tiny glimpse of some new and beautiful sight.

This is a great insight that I hadn't noticed. The pacing of the editing really did work well here.

I kind of liked this. I basically disagree with everything Malick has chosen to do with the result coming across as inappropriately ugly and overly literal without developing a critique to go along with its fairly generic thesis (Dom mentioned Sofia Coppola before and that's about as accurate a comparison as you'll get). So this is definitely many degrees below To the Wonder, but I liked this all the same because it feels like Malick has seeds of where he wants this bit of self reflection to represent more than the narrative affords him. Aim isn't really a reason to call a movie good especially as it flops in successfully communicating that to the level of this film, but fortunately I don't need something to be good to like it. Maybe on future rumination I'll like it more or less (certainly memory has reduced Tree of Life by an insanely significant amount) fixing that contradiction but I doubt it. I do think the main third person father's narration was quite good and I would love to see it a lot more in the future instead of the characters' inner monologues.

Also it was nice to see Frieda Pinto in a movie again. She's incredibly underutilized despite being great in everything including this nothing part.

That reminds me of that great moment in Freida Pinto's interview on the Blu-ray where she mentions that she was excited to be acting with Christian Bale only to be a bit shocked and nervous to find out that he had no dialogue to speak of, and it was all going to be about her performing in front of his observational character! (She's great as almost another 'seer' character similar to her Phaedra in Immortals!)

That's a great video! You know, the other thing that came to mind while watching Knight of Cups was that Liebestod sequence from Aria (NSFW). Its sort of got everything in Knight of Cups condensed into six minutes: Las Vegas, distanciation, car driving, relationships coming to an end, bleary eyed gamblers stumbling into the early morning sunshine, and the contrast with the desert (I even think the final image on the road in the Liebestod segment is in the location where Knight of Cups filmed decades later!). Though of course as the above video mentions Knight of Cups is more about stasis rather than any kind of grand final gesture!

As a novice to this board, and something of a long-time lurker, let me just begin by saying there is a lot going on in this thread--whether a debate about the structure of the film, the merits of the film, if any, Malick's sources and inspiration, the nature and history of Romanticism, etc, etc. I will simply start by saying I've seen the film for a second time recently and thought it improved on a second viewing (this time with subtitles and the volume "loud").

I agree with the opinion that Malick's films move in a much more poetic way, and I definitely agree that he falls in line with a kind of Christian Romanticism, and by that I mean the Romantic conception of subjectivity, imagination, and potentially their definition of "culture" (the term Romantic is a very, very broad term and could in some ways be applied retroactively to Shakespeare, then to Keats, Dickens, Whitman, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and even my username-sake, Nabokov; it's a debated topic that might not be completely appropriate here).

That being said I tend to think that his films are the closest thing to Whitman's poetry put on film, which might offer some perspective to both the positive and negative reaction. Like Whitman, there is a concern with the "big themes" of life: love, inspiration, identity, memory, even the origin of the universe/cosmos (not to mention American civilization...another Whitman concern). These themes are linked in a kind of collage, along with a stylistic fluctuation--Malick's cuts are like Whitman's ellipses. Both of them tend to refer to the soul, whether it is an individual's soul, such as Bale's father reminding him of his soul near the end of the film, or the universal (potentially democratic?) soul spoken of at the end of The Thin Red Line.

Anyway, I want to close out this comparison to note that many of Whitman's greatest scholars and admirers will readily admit that he often wrote some bad poetry. The type of mockery aimed at Malick's voice-overs earlier in this post have been noted to one of Malick's obvious literary references.

And the same can be said of some of the films already referenced in this thread. Almost everyone here picked up on "the emptiness of life" films of Antonioni or La Dolce Vita, even Antonioni's "Eros is Dead" could probably be referenced as a possible source for this film. While we might say this has all been done before, I will simply add that I could never imagine Fellini or Antonioni starting their film with a reference to an epic Puritan poem, for whatever that's worth.

I'm in the like it lots camp, in the midst (I hope) of my life looking for the way way. I've enjoyed reading the thread, as J. Shade suggests, what a lot and romanticism to boot. Lots of great posts, sorry I cannot reference all the bits I liked, mostly as I feel lazy. I'm looking forward to the article mentioned in the writing and any other poems, research or books that may be spawned. I'm drifting.

I do think Malick has a political aspect - I read a great analysis of To the Wonder once that explained its relation (as someone else has said) to the land, and what especially struck me was, to events that gained that land for present incumbents from those previously incumbent and now to a much lesser extent present. Until I read this I had flirted with the ways of reading him, much as I enjoyed seeing the movie, but as being a bit too loose in what he was doing, and this made me think again,. What had I been thinking.

I've seen Knight of Cups twice now - I agree in some ways that Hollywood is not the main thing - it may be Hollywood as the pinnacle of a strand of contemporary political economy and culture, what goes with that. I find that a very political interest - and how we may be attracted to it, even in our knightly (or lady)-ness. Lost in it - but then that's a much longer subject than capitalism has had it for, as the film also reminds us.

But there is so much more. I find him poetic - and in some ways I think that goes beyond whether modernist or romantic or symbolist or whatever. Lyrical, but is there also something epic? I think so. He's concerned with personal experience of the world, reminds us of it, but situated in the world. He's interested in a big picture but I think it is dangerous to dismiss the detail just as its not highlighted or explained more clearly. In a way that seems very important in his approach - not losing the big picture in the detail, but he's not disrespectful of the detail at all, it's still vital, just in a different focus - it's a bit like a historian's approach or reading a journal, his entries are almost as though in a journal, written in the golden hour, but then put into a poem and gaining generality.

I wonder if some of the degrees of acceptance are to do simply with how far his way speaks to the way you are engaged with life in a similar way - some just don't like it this way, or having it given back this way. But no one has the whole bandwidth, director or viewer. For me I like that I like this -- and any repetition of themes is only natural, such is the way of the world, of poets, of all, and its as rich as we let it be, infinitely variable maybe.

Several people (I think) mention Malick's golden hour light - and excuse me if I have missed this -- but we haven't said much of it. He seems very interested in moments of clarity, of understanding our place in the world and coming to that - and also not understanding it even when standing in the clarity of the light and trying to. LA a place known for its light too. His interests seem the largest, the deepest or most important to me, they may have personal biographical aspects for him but also go beyond that, what is personal is most general (Carl Rogers said for one), he's looking at what is going on under the sun, nothing new.

I'm going to refuse to try to prove what cannot be proven - for me if I lost patience with this film in a way I'd be out of touch with an important part of me, with life. I feel rich watching it. I feel good to know that others are thinking and feeling this way, things that in many ways the modern world doesn't bother to show us as important it can feel, with its concern for product ahead of process. In that it is like Tarkovsky, but it's his own and in some ways doesn't seem to go as far as Tarkovsky. When I write that i wonder if he ever has to compromise...but maybe it is me compromising him in my view of him to wonder that.

I've meandered, you may find it loose, what the hell.

domino harvey wrote:The notion that the film is tantamount to secret (or, from the rarified responses here and elsewhere, sacred) knowledge is either laughable or insulting, probably both. Some of us aren't engaging with this film as a game changing or exemplary work of art because it's not one. If you think you've just seen the second coming of cinema, that's fantastic, I look forward to hearing a defense that isn't just deriding those peasants too dumb to understand the brilliance of Christian Bale poorly imitating Lost in Translation while suffering the horribly ignoble fate of having countless beautiful women wander in and out of his life, his paramours frequently stopping to wade ankle-deep in a nearby shore or letting the wind whip their hair into the camera lens, and always wordlessly talking while a monotonous and meaningless narrator prattles on about the winding rivers of the heart or whatever.

Is it wrong that I completely agree with this, and I adored the film?