Movie review: Kinght of Cups - glass half empty

Knight of Cups leaves its viewers scrambling to find some semblance of a plot

While Terrence Malick’s films have always been an acquired taste, it’s his later career that proves to be most divisive. Since The Tree of Life in 2011, which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, Malick seems to have seriously upped his working speed (three films in four years as opposed to four films in 32 years before that). His latest work, Knight of Cups, celebrated its world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival last month. It has the usual Malick-esque themes and tropes and is, above all, an ordeal to sit through.

Christian Bale plays Rick, a Hollywood screenwriter who looks lost for most of the movie. Not all of it has to do with the plot, as Bale might just be clueless as to what he’s supposed to be doing or who he is playing in the film. Rick’s brother has died and it might be suicide. Rick’s other brother, Barry (Wes Bentley), is a violent man, constantly fighting with their father (Brian Dennehy). Cate Blanchett is Rick’s wife and Natalie Portman is someone else’s wife with whom he has an affair. Yes, that is pretty much all there is to the film.

Almost every frame with Rick is seeped with melancholy. Even when he’s drowning his sorrows with one woman after the other (this is a major point of contention with Knight of Cups, which gives one actress 10 to 15 minutes with Bale, until she is replaced by another actress), he looks sad, lost and forlorn. And none of this is particularly moving, because Malick isn’t interested in his actors. He’s more interested in how the camera can move or capture the surrounding landscapes. Sure, Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography is commendable as always, but why should we care for the characters if the director doesn’t?

And because of that, the characters don’t ring true at all. We watch them walk around, look at each other, cajole each other and hug each other, accompanied the entire time by hushed voice-overs that one can hardly understand. And all this time, there is no real sense of a movie. There is not even a real sense of what Malick wanted to do in the first place. Did he want to show what hollow lives famous people lead? But what good can come of that when the film-making itself is so lifeless and hollow?

The Tree of Life touched upon grander themes and concerned the entire universe, hence the profundity it grappled with was justified and achieved. Knight of Cups doesn’t require the same kind of pseudo-poetic approach, but Malick loves that. Not only does the film test the viewer’s patience, but makes Malick seem irrelevant now. That is surely the biggest loss. Once an exciting auteur, his next project won’t be met with the same kind of anticipation. And what is his next project? It’s about two intersecting love triangles. It’s about obsession and betrayal set against the music scene in Austin, Texas. It can only be better than Knight of Cups, but perhaps it’s best not to have great expectations.



Published in The Express Tribune, Sunday Magazine, March 8^th,  2015.