Declan's Blurred Circle - A Review of "Knight Of Cups"

When you’re a director, making a unique and original product is walking a tightrope because more often than not, true attempts at real originality, especially in the world of filmmaking, can often result in movies that are both drastically flawed and utterly pretentious. And then there’s Terrence Malick. I’ll be completely honest. I didn’t know anything about Malick or his body of work prior to seeing Knight of Cups. I just knew that it would be an experimental movie. That really didn’t prepare me for the kind of experiment I was watching. And up until the very end, I found it to be a slow jog of discontinuous images and pieces of dialog, filmed exclusively at canted angles with a fish-eye lens while characters matter-of-factly stated their existential crises exclusively through whispers. It was disorienting and broke all the rules of conventional storytelling. There was no three act structure and a protagonist whose motivations seem rather paper thin and transparent on the surface.

Christian Bale plays a tortured screenwriter dealing with the presumed but not proven suicide of his first brother while copulating with a string of attractive women that he fails to develop a real attachment with. But the story isn’t told in the way you would naturally expect because it’s disjointed by design and intentionally breaks almost every rule when it comes to narrative structure and character development. There are some truly great scenes between Bale and Cate Blanchett, as well as the excellent Natalie Portman, but they are very brief, no more than a few minutes or less, consistently fleeting away right when we think we’re about to understand them as people.

But that’s exactly the point Malick is making. Life is a series of fleeting moments that we try to comprehend but slip out of our grasp before we get the chance. It goes back to the philosophy that life isn’t comprised of continuous motion but rather the illusion of such, instead driven by isolated incidents in time that are simply strung together in a sequence. And this is exactly the way in which Malick constructs his film. The cinematic style is emblematic of Bale’s character’s dilemma. He’s trying to sort out the problems in his life, but just as one insight begins to blossom it’s blown away by something completely different. Isolated incidents strung together into the illusion of continuity, but not continuity itself. Instead of the dialog and plot telling the bulk of the narrative and story, the visual imagery, cinematography, and rather brilliant editing do this. And because of that, the level of engagement required on the part of the audience is very intellectually demanding. We have to consciously interpret every passing moment as it’s taking place, analyzing as we are witnessing. We become active participants, and the level at which we do so is the level in which we can gain emotional insight into how we empathically relate to Bale’s character. This movie is clearly not for everyone. If Saving Private Ryan is the most contemporary example of cinéma vérité in recent memory, Knight of Cups is the point that it is farthest from. It wasn’t until the last thirty minutes or so that I began to realize the brilliance of Malick’s methods. The way that he went about constructing his work showed that there are a lot of things discontinuous storytelling can accomplish that three act structures can’t, and if done correctly it can be just as powerful as the norm if not more so. Please don’t watch this and think that it doesn’t have any complex composition in regards to its artistry. What Malick has pulled off is not something that any director can do, and it is not as mindless and random as many would perceive. This is really something you have to go into with an open mind. And it’s honestly one of the most illuminating experiences I’ve had watching a movie in a long time, and a revealing dive into exploring the nature and idiosyncrasies of the most powerful thematic element that a movie can articulate: the human condition.

Knight of Cups