Letterboxd.
4/5
Went in thinking I wasn't going to like it. Surprised at how inviting the film was given Malick's style. Mara and Gosling are amazing and had me wishing that she starred in La La Land instead of Emma Stone. The rest of the cast held up wonderfully and Chivo's work was as good as always.
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4.5/5
I think it's incorrect to say that Terrence Malick has fallen into self-parody. The reality is, that probably already happened two movies ago. I think it's a bit more accurate to say that his style is infuriatingly easy to mock and ridicule. The parody themselves have become eyerollingly obvious. A shot of some tall grass, a whispering voiceover, and you've got a cutting take down of the filmmaker. Except not really. It is easy to slip into this kind of dismissing in Song to Song. At one point, Rooney Mara wistfully intones "we were people ... we did things." Such completely vague musings suggest that Malick is a philosophically empty filmmaker. His films are pretty, but they lack any depth. His films feel more like Vanity Fair cover shoots than actual films.
I'm not even going to say such claims are incorrect, but instead respond to them, "Okay, and the problem is?" These critical reservations suggest something is lacking, but why would one approach a Terrence Malick film looking for a rich and detailed character study of individuals with psychological depth? It is deeply amusing to me that nearly all of his films are casted with hints of middlebrow Serious Hollywood Film aspirations when he so strongly resists it. Even compared to contemporary foreign and arthouse work, his films are maddeningly opaque. Keith Uhlich is right to compare this to Adam and Eve, as the characters (whose names are mentioned once, twice, or not at all) feel like people you hear about in passing, perhaps as myth and legend, rather than people you learn about and "understand." There is some truth to the detractors that paint Malick as hollow and superficial, but the depth they seek is something superficial itself.
There's (allegedly) a rough-cut of this film that features a more linear story. One that makes clear the motivations of the characters, the tensions they share, and justifies the quarrels they have. Such a film would be too thick, overwhelmingly serious, and likely to collapse underneath its own weight. Malick's lightness comes from his unique disinterest in time. Song to Song plays like an extended riff on the bedroom scene in Godard's Breathless. 80% of this film is lovers playing with each other, but the film never plants a mark in a conventional timeline. Things happen at a feverish pace, and never is the audience afforded the pointed dramatic weight such events would command in other films. The entire 150 minutes of Song to Song feels like the film's concluding montage.
Having said all of this, some stretches of the film work better than others. It feels stupid to criticize a particular narrative strain in a film that is so steadfast in resisting a conventional narrative pull, but Michael Fassbender's bits of tragic excess felt like they had wandered in from Knight of Cups. It might just be that Malick's mastery begins to feel too easy. In a way, it's easy to take what he and Emmanuel Lubezki accomplish for granted after awhile. Everything seems too perfect to the point that certain stretches are a chore, while others are completely hypnotic. Malick has gotten as Malick as ever, so yes, even more parody-able, but that's because he has retrieved further from the expectations of those who never really loved him in the first place. This is a maddeningly opaque film, but constructed with an unequal clarity and sophistication. It needs to be seen and studied over and over.
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4/5
Ok. Wow. The last thing I expected was to really like a new Terrence Malick movie, especially after despising Knight of Cups. The past few days I finished the remaining movies of his I hadn't seen. I went from only liking one (Tree of Life) to liking half of them. There was something about this that struck a chord with me, and it might've been the actors. Besides Michael Fassbender, I liked everyone in it.
My problem with Malick's movies before was that I didn't know what they were about, or what they were trying to say (with the exception of Tree of Life). And I've come to the conclusion he's not trying to say anything. He's documenting people's lives, and there's something incredible about that. Maybe in real life it's boring, but through Chivo and Malick's lens it's spellbinding. Now that answer may not work for some people, and I understand that, but it does for me.
Many thoughts are eluding me now that swirled in my head last night when I saw this, so just some parting thoughts. I think I'm extremely jealous of Terrence Malick. I'm about to direct a short film for my film production class that I don't think will be good, I didn't write, and without actors I'm crazy about. I've been worried about structure, shot composition, directing real actors, and Malick is just able to pick up a camera and film huge actors walking around improvising with elaborate set pieces. He doesn't care about a shot representing something. He just films with that wide lens of his and lets you see what's going on. There's something admirable about that. It reminded me there are no rules, just entertain the audience. This entertained me, so it succeeded in a movie's most basic task.
For the past 7-8ish months I've been watching mostly old Hollywood movies. So I've been very used to structure, and as a filmmaker I've been thinking in terms of normal structure. In high school, my shorts were experimental. Good or not, I loved doing them. Senior year I made a more linear short, and after that I haven't made anything since. This movie made me want to go back to making experimental stuff. There is a definite need for structure, and one shouldn't stray too far away from it because it's a wonderful tool, but this was a reminder I needed to have at this time in my life. At the beginning of this review I said it was probably the actors that made this strike a chord with me. That certainly helped, but it was its free spirited, rule breaking attitude that did.
Also: Rooney Mara is now on my list of actresses I'm in love with.
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3.5/5
Bravura filmmaking but a diffuse second half kept me at arms length for far too long.
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4.5/5
A very good movie, but that's obvious. With Song to Song, Malick strengthens and reinvents the medium with a distinctive yet simultaneously abstract method . His sense of narrative time and space ebbs and flows like the fragments of conversations that it is entangled with. The whispered and hushed reflective voiceovers function like score to further explore and express the deep emotions embedded. While Knight of Cups translates as an expression of working memory, and is in a sense a new way of approaching the medium both in terms of structure and seeing, Song to Song, while borrowing some of its tricks and techniques, differentiates itself by painting a portrait more akin to natural emotion and hyper realism. A clear work of art and innovation by Hollywood's most esoteric provocateur. Song To Song is a movie that fetishizes youth, love, experience, and freedom. It is a daringly romantic film and one that breathes life into a dwindling artform. It shines bright as a relentless exploration, an honest work and a complete fearlessness of criticism and transformation. It is a masterwork of expression and one i look forward to revisiting very soon. Malick made not only the best of film of 2017 but shockingly also the most contemporary and the one that feels the most fresh.
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Adam and Eve in Austin, with Michael Fassbender as the devil and Patti Smith as patron saint. I could hardly ask for more.
