Review by Stephen Tronicek
Terrence Malick makes films that are almost all ambient which means they are almost all mood, and as mood pieces they are masterpieces. Starting with 2012’s TO THE WONDER, (THE TREE OF LIFE still being firmly rooted by a script and still containing a semblance of pre-planned structure) Malick has started to move away from the more focused narrative efforts that defined his early career and find himself in a more ambient experimental territory. Both KNIGHT OF CUPS and SONG TO SONG find themselves deeply nestled in a lack of cohesion, but this lack of cohesion allows both films to present the emotions of their characters with striking clarity. Whether or not you’d like to experience those is up to you.
SONG TO SONG is a frustrating film, that is intentionally so to give its audience emotional clarity. The film focusses on the relationships of four individuals in the Austin, Texas music scene: BV (Ryan Gosling), Faye (Rooney Mara), Cook (Michael Fassbender), and Rhonda (Natalie Portman) and these relationships are messy. People sleep together, they break up, they hold some emotional misunderstanding of their relationship and therefore cannot be happy. It is a frustrating time for the characters at the center of the film, so it is a frustrating time for the audience. Through this, as well as the film’s cinematography and performances, the audience is swept up and forced into the emotional reality of the characters. This, of course, is often the fact with Malick. He wants to explore this frustration and spread it to the audience. To give them a piece of life. For all the frustrations of films like TO THE WONDER, KNIGHT OF CUPS, and SONG TO SONG, they all have the ability to show you a part of what it means to be human, whether this is love, loss, or the isolation of feeling empty.
The cinematography, done by Emmanuel Lubezki of THE REVENANT, seems almost typical as he has defined his career through the sweeping, yet intimate shots that he notably employed in THE NEW WORLD and THE TREE OF LIFE. It is integral to the film, allowing each cut, and each shot to continually hold our attention. It breaks down the barriers between the audience and the characters allowing for these raw emotions to bleed into our minds. There’s such craft between Malick, Lubezki, and the cast and crew that the film can’t help but feel satisfying even though it continually frustrates. The fact that the emotions connect so bracingly and the film astonishes so consistently is enough to make this a great film.
SONG TO SONG, much like KNIGHT OF CUPS or TO THE WONDER, will most likely take many viewings to understand fully, with the precision of its audience manipulation standing at the top of its strengths right now. It’s a film that takes you into a spacey, fragmented view of reality that comes from living in the moment or as the characters say it “song to song.”
