"Knight Of Cups," A New Movie By Terrence Malick Reviewed By The New Yorker's Anthony Lane

Christian Bale Stars In New Film By Terence Malick

Beauty and Beasts

“Knight of Cups” and “Zootopia.”

BY ANTHONY LANE

The new Terrence Malick film, “Knight of Cups,” sets off in hearty English style. We hear the voice of Sir John Gielgud, intoning the opening lines of “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” and the celestial cadences of Vaughan Williams’s “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis.” Short of arranging for tea to be served during screenings, there’s not much more that Malick could do to establish his Old World credentials. It comes as a surprise, therefore, that the next two hours are spent entirely on the West Coast: Los Angeles, to be precise, with a brief excursion to Caesar’s Palace, in Las Vegas, where the progress of even the most steadfast pilgrim would be brought to a lurching halt.

Only by reading about the film, after the event, did I discover that the hero, Rick (Christian Bale), is meant to be a screenwriter. Somebody, possibly his agent, says to him, “You’ve worked long and hard to get to this moment.” But we never see him work, either long or hard, because employment—the daily drag of it, and the grit of its details—is not something with which Malick, on this occasion, is engaged. What Rick is really good at is drifting. If Los Angeles were Paris, he would call himself a flâneur. He whiles away the hours by ambling down streets, through clubs and fashion shoots, between the drinkers at parties, and along the beach, often gazing slightly downward, with a fraction of a smile. Some viewers will be charmed by this ruminative stance; others, less well-disposed, may ask themselves if Bale has forgotten his next line and is calmly awaiting a prompt.

Not that many lines make it into the open. Malick appears to have ditched the art of conversation, onscreen, for the sake of competing voice-overs. People get trapped in private bubbles of speech, as it were, bouncing off their nearest and dearest, although the likelihood that anyone will stay near and dear to anyone else feels increasingly remote. “All else is cloud. Mist. Be with me. Always,” we hear. Or, later on, by the ocean: “Find your way. From darkness to light.” True Malickians will greet this gnomic routine as an exploration of solipsism, but I am ashamed to confess that it reminded me of a TV sketch that Hugh Laurie did, long before “House,” with Stephen Fry. In a sublime pastiche of a perfume commercial, they pranced around a seashore, while a voice whispered aromatic nothings: “Between desire and reality. Between fact and breakfast.”

The film is split into sections, each bearing a title: “The Moon,” “The Hanged Man,” “The Hermit,” and so on. These are the names of tarot cards, as is the Knight of Cups, and each introduces someone known to Rick. “Judgment,” for example, brings on Cate Blanchett, as Nancy, his ex-wife, with whom he moseys around vacant Hollywood lots and the fringe of an airport runway. Freida Pinto turns up for “The Tower,” and Antonio Banderas is “The Hermit”—the most ironic tag, since his role is that of a playboy with unappeasable tastes. “Sometimes you want raspberry, then after a while you get tired of it, you want some strawberry,” he says.

The bad news is that he’s talking about women. I would love to claim that “Knight of Cups” holds that attitude up to scorn, but it just ain’t so. In this film, women do seem like flavors, scooped up in succession and sampled by the camera’s hungry gaze. They wear heels, long diaphanous dresses or other gauzy getups, and a dab of mystery. Few of them are granted the dignity of a name, and, for want of anything better to do, they run, sashay, curve around in slow turns, and leave their hands trailing in cool water or warm air. In some instances, I would go so far as to diagnose a case of skipping. This is not misogynist, but it is morally uninterested, and strangely monotonous to behold, and you couldn’t imagine Malick getting Mary Astor or Myrna Loy, say, to pull the same moves.

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The trouble is beauty, which, begging Keats’s pardon, enjoys a fraught relationship with truth. The aesthetic compulsion is so pressing, in “Knight of Cups,” that someone can approach a person, possibly homeless, who is sleeping on a stone bench, and lay down not a dollar bill or a sandwich but a flower. Malick’s pursuit of the beautiful was already devout in “Days of Heaven,” in 1978, and in recent decades it has grown more flagrant still. In “The Thin Red Line” (1998) and “The New World” (2005), it was touched with environmental anxiety, as the pristine glories of the world were menaced by war and by colonial invasion. Since then, in “The Tree of Life” (2011) and “To the Wonder” (2012), the impulse to seek out grace and loveliness—in weather, in women, and in rhapsodic flashes of the past—has all but blunted the dramatic urge.

Whether the telling of a story, even in fragments, continues to serve Malick’s needs is open to question, and to find fault with his narratives may be beside the point; he’s more of a naturalist by now, paying no more than fitful attention to the human. That is why actors come and go so fleetingly in “The Thin Red Line,” killed off less by combat than by the director’s impatience with the whole business of sustaining a character, and why his camera lingers so avidly on trees, not just in “The Tree of Life” itself but in the latest film. They last longer than men and women, after all, and their arms are opened wide.

Despite this, there are treasures in “Knight of Cups.” It’s worth seeing just for the underwater shots of dogs as they plunge, mouths laughingly agape, into a pool to grab a tennis ball. Further up the evolutionary scale, we find Brian Dennehy, as Rick’s father. Dennehy is seventy-seven now, but his jaw has not lost its determined jut, and there is a sad grandeur simply in the way he rises to his feet. What a tremendous Lear he would make. Given that Brad Pitt, playing a patriarch, was the best thing in “The Tree of Life,” I looked forward keenly to Dennehy’s scenes with Bale, yet their encounters, like so many in the new film, are cut off in their prime. “I gave my life up for you kids,” the father says, only to be faded out. And why? Because Malick cannot stop shuffling the deck. He flips through memories, arcana, sudden visions, and spasms of music in the hope of revelation. Much of the movie, likewise, is filmed in extreme wide angles, as if to guarantee that nothing escapes the frame—the camera recruited to the cause of Emerson’s “transparent eyeball,” seeing all. Such, I guess, is the hazard of the full-time transcendentalist: sooner or later, you run out of stuff to transcend. Terrence Malick gets to the wonder, and he does it in style, but how much of ordinary life does he pass over, or ignore, in his longing to get there?

The new Disney film “Zootopia” is a carnival of the mammals. They alone inhabit the land where the tale is set. No Mowgli spoils the view; humans are neither mentioned nor seen, and, for all practical purposes, they do not exist. Yet the animals live like us and do humanoid jobs, allowing the directors, Byron Howard and Rich Moore, to throw sidelong glances at our own imperfect world. The sight of rodents filing out for a lunch break, in orderly haste, from a building labelled “Lemming Brothers Bank” earned a knowing laugh. Kids won’t get the joke, but their parents will be looking for the cliff.

Judy Hopps, voiced with gusto by Ginnifer Goodwin, is a bunny cop—the first rabbit to become a police officer in the soaring city of Zootopia. She comes from the country, and, as far as her parents are concerned, she should have stayed there, with her two hundred and seventy-five brothers and sisters. (Her father, a contented carrot farmer, praises “the beauty of complacency.” Something else to make the young ones frown.) But Hopps has dreams, and recovers quickly from the bummer of being assigned to parking-ticket duties by the chief of police (Idris Elba), a Cape buffalo. Soon she is on the spoor of a missing otter, with the aid of a scam artist named Nick (Jason Bateman). Nick is a fox, and Hopps, at her father’s insistence, carries fox repellent in her holster. Just in case.

“Zootopia,” like its heroine, is zesty, bright, and breakneck, with chase scenes and well-tuned gags where you half expect songs to be. Then, there’s the underlying conceit: mammals, we learn, are no longer split into predators and prey. That is an attitude stranded in prehistory. The mayor is a lion, for instance, and his deputy is a sheep. (“You think when she goes to sleep she counts herself?” Nick asks.) But now that harmony is under threat, and rumors persist of a return to savage ways. As Woody Allen once said, “The lion will lie down with the lamb, but the lamb won’t get much sleep.” All this feels politically pertinent without straying too often, by Disney’s standards, into the preachy. As for the sequence set in a vehicle-registration bureau, it’s perfect; all the clerks, taking hours to deal with your inquiry, are sloths. Of course they are. ♦