It’s Terrence Malick time again! Already? Previously, a Malick film came along roughly as often as a new pope. And with an equivalent quantity of reverence, at least to the ultra-orthodox faith of film geeks, who probably wouldn’t fill St. Peter’s Square but could definitely pack one of your larger linen closets.
These days Malick is working at a frantic Woody Allen pace, leaving us not even two years to ruminate upon his last one, “The Tree of Life,” before delivering today’s “To the Wonder,” with at least three more films about to tumble out of the chute.
A Malick film, to be only slightly reductive, means lots of wafting through tall grasses bemoaning the mysterious, beautiful sadness of it all. Variants include bemoaning the mysterious, beautiful sadness of war (“The Thin Red Line,” 1998) and bemoaning the mysterious, beautiful sadness of colonialism (“The New World,” 2005).
But the wafting through the tall grasses: That’s non-negotiable. “Days of Heaven” (1978) might be the grassiest film that didn’t involve Cheech and Chong, a triumph of the turf.
So, “It’s like watching grass grow” isn’t really a riposte to the stately, placid, dreamlike “To the Wonder.” You might as well complain that Quentin Tarantino films are violent.
Typically, “To the Wonder” seems mostly locked in the thoughts of its characters, whispered so only we can hear, with no more actual back-and-forth dialogue than would cover the back of your ticket stub.
As for story, there’s this: An American guy, Neil (Ben Affleck) is wafting around Paris (and the nearby abbey in the English channel at Mont St. Michel). His co-wafter and girlfriend Marina (Olga Kurylenko of “Quantum of Solace”) has a tweener daughter. They move to Oklahoma, where they break up. He hooks up with childhood pal Jane (Rachel McAdams), and they do some wafting. But Marina comes back, so out goes Jane. Neil and Marina can’t get married (she already has a husband), but they do anyway, twice. Also, there’s a community priest (Javier Bardem) questioning his faith.
And that’s it. It’s pretty much a waft-o-rama. “Makes ‘Tree of Life’ look like ‘Transformers,’” was the ruling of one critic — Ben Affleck.
I can’t disagree, and I would no more recommend “To the Wonder” to a Malick virgin than I would advise Lindsay Lohan to choose “Ulysses” to be the first book she’ll ever read, but after 40 years of Malick films, I’ve become pro-wafting. If it didn’t sweep me away, “To the Wonder” swept me along, dazed but never bored.
It doesn’t have much of a narrative, but then again a piece of music or a painting doesn’t generally have one either. Yet the film isn’t abstract art, as it does feature a series of events, albeit separated by lots of woozy meandering. Central are the images, from Neil’s point of view, of Kurylenko and McAdams beckoning, dancing, reproaching, fading and evaporating like time. In one startling moment of vicious clarity, a walk up a staircase (to a sleazy motel for a grimy mingling of bodies) reprises a walk up a very different set of steps to a place of heavenly tranquility and love. Sex: It can be sublime or sordid.
To me, Malick powerfully captures how memory and regret work. We dip into moments that dissolve unaccountably into barely related episodes. Little snatches return to us instead of whole scenes. Together, these memories make up a life, and as you age it starts to hit you how evanescent it all was, how little you mean to the earth. There are glimmers of beauty and joy, but mostly memory is a burden, an inescapable awareness that all of these moments, the rapture and the sorrow, are lost forever.
I’d guess a young viewer would be especially unlikely to respond to what Malick is doing because they won’t recognize the feeling, haven’t yet built up the tower of regrets that shadows everything. Like the Bardem character, though, Malick hasn’t given up. He just keeps struggling, contemplating, wandering, wondering.
kyle.smith@nypost.com