Song to Song (2017)

6. Song to Song
You’re either over it or you’re not when it comes to the late-career output of Terrence Malick, and you’re probably justified either way. If nothing else, he’s a master of the “Your mileage may vary” movie. But for those still sticking with him, Song to Song, the director’s elliptical account of three lovers wandering in and out of the Austin music scene, is his most sincere, romantic movie in years (especially compared with the cynical Knight of Cups). Rooney Mara, Ryan Gosling, and Michael Fassbender star as a porous love triangle that expands and contracts across career highs and lows, a marriage, too many benders, and too much disappointment. It’s about falling in and out of love, which, for Malick, has all the sudden and unsparing weight of gravity. It’s also about people who find themselves terrified of who they’ve become—a good ole spiritual crisis movie. As per usual for Malick, these characters are a composite of the blink-and-you-miss-it moments, the forgotten gestures, and the quiet inner voices. It’s a movie that makes me feel like I’ve seen everything. Not everyone buys that. But Song to Song awaits you, if you do.

22 - Song to Song
The shift of Terrence Malick’s stories toward more contemporary settings and his aesthetics toward increasingly experimental directions reaches new heights with Song to Song, a romantic drama of such spatial and temporal fluidity that it could accurately be described as Joycean. Career ambitions, romantic longing, and self-doubt—all common elements of the romantic drama—are fragmented and reconfigured in radical ways, filtered through a stream of consciousness where desires and feelings are in constant flux. Lovers crisscross the screen with fleeting intensity, leaving vapor trails of sense memories as markers of their presence. Guided by an erratic breadcrumb trail of such moments, Song to Song is a pointillist study of the interactions that shape its characters’ lives. There’s so much to process here, a reflection of the impossibility of understanding the significance of any given event or relationship as it happens in real time. As such, what wisdom and clarity there is to offer comes from the older rock stars who litter the film’s periphery, as in a scene of Iggy Pop speaking soberly about his experiences as the camera scans the latticework of scars on his chest that testify to a hard road taken toward peace of mind, or Patti Smith’s heart-wrenching odes to her late husband. This is Malick’s most radical feature to date and, as a nearly one-to-one match between image and feeling, the purest expression of the style he’s been chasing for more than a decade.

25. “SONG TO SONG”

“Song to Song” is as gorgeous and meandering as any recent Terrence Malick movie, but the way his wayward characters eventually arrive at a new beginning makes it feel all the more urgent and unique for his usual bag of tricks.

9. Song to Song
Directed by Terrence Malick
Terrence Malick keeps leaping further and further away from traditional storytelling, and while his post-Tree of Life work has been hit or miss, with Song to Song the enigmatic filmmaker finally gets into a fascinating experimental groove. The Austin-set romance hops between music festivals, hotel rooms, and desert vistas charting Rooney Mara’s Faye through various relationships. Watching Song to Song feels like tumbling through a woman’s diary as she reminiscences on past lovers, echoing the looseness of a daydreaming mind. Malick turns that into a sensory experience, mimicking the way music can conjure emotions and transport us back to a specific place and time with a single song. It’s hard to put into words why exactly this film speaks to me so much (admittedly, it’s not for everyone), but the way it understands how we’re never quite free of the imprints relationships leave on us, both the damaging and the transformative, made it one of the most evocative experiences I had at the movies this year.

SONG TO SONG
Love him or hate him, no one makes movies like Terrence Malick. As a result, when it comes to his dream-like explorations of human existence, you're either on his whisper-soundtracked, roaming camera-shot, attractive actor-starring wavelength, or you're not. Song to Song won't change anyone's minds, but those eager to go along for the ride will find the iconic filmmaker in top form in this particularly prolific phase of his career. Partially set and shot at SXSW, and featuring Michael Fassbender, Ryan Gosling, Rooney Mara, Natalie Portman, Cate Blanchett, Iggy Pop and Patti Smith (among others), Song to Song proves an intoxicating dance-filled picture with oh-so-pretty folks coping with the complexities of love and life.

10. Song to Song
Over his last three narrative features (To the Wonder, Knight of Cups, and now this), Terrence Malick has basically transformed into an experimental filmmaker, championing small, radiant moments over character or plot. I consider Song to Song the best of these three movies—there's a precision to the emotional content that the other two lack, and it contains a sharper sense of place than anything Malick has made since The New World. "What does this all add up to?" I wrote in March. "A celebration of the abundance of existence and a representation of the fleetingness of human lives within it."

10 - Song to song
Aggregating members of the film desk's separate top 10s allowed me to sneak this one into tenth, it being my personal pick for the year. Largely loathed by critics, Terrence Malick's experimental exploration of how absolutely awful we can be to each other when love or lust is at play will either hit you like a ton of bricks and change your life, or else just infuriate you. I was not a fan of his recent efforts Tree of Life or Knight of Cups, but his auteurist style - the camera roving where it pleases like a documentary-maker after dropping a couple of tabs of acid - finally clicked here, perfectly encapsulating desire and alienation against the backdrop of the Austin music scene.

15. Rooney Mara (Song to Song and A Ghost Story)
Leading the latest films from two Texas-based filmmakers, Terrence Malick and David Lowery, Rooney Mara’s performances in both are a difficult task. As Song to Song and A Ghost Story deal with fractured, but elegantly constructed narratives, Mara becomes much more than a cipher for grander themes of loss and love. Seemingly bringing forth the entirety of the human experience in these two roles–whether it’s watching her dance to various rendition of “Rollin’ and Tumblin'” or witnessing grief-stricken moments of pie eating and moving on–she further proves to be one of our generation’s greatest actors. – Jordan R.

5. SONG TO SONG – For those willing to meet director Terrence Malick halfway and open themselves to engaging with the film, SONG TO SONG offers a moving emotional experience. Its dialogue is lyrical poetry that works perfectly in concert with Emmanuel Lubezki’s stunning cinematography, an expertly balanced soundtrack, and wonderful acting performances all around. This may be some of the least abstract and aimless work Malick has ever produced, but it is also among his best, and quite possibly my favorite. SONG TO SONG is a film that needs to be more than just seen, it demands to be felt.

Song to Song
After the disappointing Knight of Cups, Terrence Malick returned to form in 2017 with the stunning Song to Song. Shot in 2012, and starring Ryan Gosling, Michael Fassbender, Rooney Mara and Natalie Portman, it featured Malick’s trademark non-linear narrative structure and flowing, meditative and ethereal cinematography. The original cut was just over 8 hours long, meaning that Malick had to return to his financers for additional funding on several occasions. But his struggle was well worth it, as the final film is well worthy of its place in the canon of one of the greatest living filmmakers.

2. Song to Song (Terrence Malick)
A clear divide in his approach to filmmaking before and after The Tree of Life, also causing a rupture in the admiration of his films, if you’d read my previous year-end top tens, then the inclusion of Terrence Malick’s latest should be no surprise. What personally astonished me, however, was just how ravishingly fractured, open-hearted, and piercingly moving the experience was. As innocence gets eroded and redemption is sought, this is the most sonically impressive and emotionally honest a late period Malick film has been. I also encourage one to read Josh Hamm’s theological reading of the film–the best analysis I’ve seen–in which he explores how “philosophy is distilled into emotion.

21. Song to Song
A visually luxuriant art film from writer-director Terrence Malick, Song to Song is a devastating and delicious love story about anguish, grief, loss, and just being alive. Set within the music scene in Austin, Texas, Malick presents two entwined couples; music magnate Cook (Michael Fassbender), and troubled waitress Rhonda (Natalie Portman); struggling but up-and-coming singer/songwriters BV (Ryan Gosling) and Faye (Rooney Mara). As their lives interlace amidst a panorama of music, temptations, and deceptions.
A moving miracle, and a deeply idiosyncratic one, of course Song to Song isn’t a movie for everyone (interjections: aren’t “movies for everyone” just comforting, non-confrontational vanilla anyways?), but it is a movie that exalts and haunts (Holly Hunter’s reaction to her daughter’s suicide sent me sobbing).
Malick, for reasons I won’t delve into here, has made films as of late that needle and annoy as many audience members as her delights and vivifies, and if you’re in the latter camp, Song to Song is his best work since 2011’s The Tree of Life. This is a film for Antonioni fans, for dreamers, for wanderers, for artists, and for lost causes, and it’s sublime and it will grandly outlive us all.

Song to Song
A further advancement in the recent experimental catalogue of the legendary Terrence Malick, Song to Song generated mixed feelings at the time of its July release. We, however, felt that the music festival-fuelled sense of vertigo and confusion was nothing if not augmented by the daring dance of the camera in its electric music video-like montages. The highs and the lows, the dizzy and chaotic landscape of youth in a manipulative industry and an authorial style which masterfully stood the test of time has you, if anything, on the same rollercoaster as falling in love. And did we mention Patti Smith, Iggy Pop and Lykke Li are in there?