Cita:
Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett and Natalie Portman star in the story of a screenwriter trying to make sense of his strange surroundings.
Having swung so far out of orbit on To the Wonder to have been sucked into a creative black hole, Terrence Malick makes it about half-way back to terra firma with Knight of Cups. A resolutely poetic and impressionist film about creative paralysis, indecision, father and sons, female muses and life slipping away as surely as water down a river, the seventh feature from this takes-his-time writer-director is far more partial to free association and stream-of-consciousness notations than to conventional storytelling. The upshot is a certain tedium and repetitiveness along with the rhythmic niceties and imaginative riffs. But whereas his last work of real weight, The Tree of Life, achieved rarified moments of emotional and lyrical expressiveness, this one mostly operates on a more dramatically mundane, private and even narcissistic level. While the name cast will help, box office potential is still very modest.
Justin Chang, en
Cita:
Christian Bale plays a lost soul adrift in Hollywood in Terrence Malick's latest impressionistic drama.
You go into a Terrence Malick movie expecting a gorgeous collage of sound and image, but not necessarily the sight of a neon-lit strip club, a Caesars Palace pool party, or a fashion shoot where a model is told to pose like “a dirty f—ing housewife.” In other words, there’s something at once vividly familiar and strikingly different about “Knight of Cups,” a feverish plunge into the toxic cloud of decadence swirling around a Los Angeles screenwriter gone to seed. Having made contemporary American life seem both recognizable and alien in “To the Wonder,” Malick now extends that film’s tender romantic ballet into a corrosive critique of Hollywood hedonism — a poisoned valentine to the industry by way of a Fellini-esque bacchanal. Those who have had their fill of the director’s impressionistic musings will find his seventh feature as empty as the lifestyle it puts on display; for the rest of us, there’s no denying this star-studded, never-a-dull-moment cinematic oddity represents another flawed but fascinating reframing of man’s place in the modern world.
