Movie Review: 'Song To Song'
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- First the bad news:
Respected, indulged, but sometimes detested writer-director Terrence Malick's eighth film, Song to Song, is just as outrageously awful as his 2015 outing, Knight of Cups.
Next the good news: there's a bit more of a narrative to Song to Song than we've come to expect from audience-ignoring Malick.
Then more bad news: the film is still pretentious and boring, offering more storytelling with no story, more navel-gazing with no navel.
The movie and its makers seem to think the film is poetic and/or profound. But serious viewers may well find it putrid.
The structure is that of two overlapping love triangles, involving obsession and betrayal against the backdrop of the music scene in Austin, Texas.
Sounds almost conventionally accessible, doesn't it? But let's not forget that this is Terrence Malick we're talking about.
When, late in the film, a character says, "I wanted to go back and start over," it sounded like a movie writing its own review.
Ryan Gosling and Rooney Mara play aspiring musicians who meet at a party thrown by a mutual friend, manipulative, powerful, perhaps corrupt record producer Michael Fassbender, with whom Gosling is attempting to collaborate and who, it just so happens, used to be romantically involved with Mara.
But Gosling and Mara fall for each other.
Meanwhile, Fassbender marries, then drops, schoolteacher and waitress Natalie Portman, whom he is very cruel to.
Oh, and Cate Blanchett stops by late in the game to enhance the marquee without much actual effect.
The issue of trust in loving relationships seems to be on Malick's mind. Maybe regret and forgiveness as well. And the chase for success is front and center. But none of that is followed through upon to the point where it registers. Malick uses the music scene more or less metaphorically, and doesn't even bother with the particulars of the milieu. The setting could have just as easily been a hardware store, anywhere.
And if the setting is on the vague side, the characters are even worse, none of them even approaching three-dimensionality. They merely chase success while the impressionistic and infuriatingly running-in-place movie chases its own tail.
With characters this thin, Malick's talented and accomplished principal cast – Oscar winners Portman and Blanchett, and Oscar nominees Fassbender, Gosling, and Mara – are reduced to the equivalent of overqualified models at a fashion-mag shoot.
And as before, Malick (Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line, The New World, The Tree of Life, To the Wonder) is unconcerned with the fluidity of the narrative or the coherence of his story.
Memo to Malick: folks are actually watching this. Why not give them – us -- a break.
So we'll record 1 star out of 4. In this repetitive and aimless curiosity, Terence Malick goes from scene to scene, character to character, and idea to idea without any apparent rationale or purpose. Song to Song is, once again, sadly, severely self-indulgent. So what else is new?
