Song to Song

Summer Catch-Up

(Newer movies that I’m just getting to now)

Twerking in a Malick movie? It's a whole new world

Another year another Terrence Malick picture.  Oddly though they aren’t blending together in my mind.  Somehow I can remember the basic deals with all of them.  But this latest one is more distorted and really hard to love.

Song to Song deals with three main players.  Michael Fassbender (Blood Creek) is a slimy asshole music producer, Ryan Gosling (The Nice Guys) is an up and coming musician and Rooney Mara (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) is a woman who’s very into sex/part time musician.  Ok here’s the best I can tell what happened.  Michael and Rooney were fucking but not bf gf, Rooney then shacks up with Ryan but the three of them are good friends and like going places together, Michael then marries Natalie Portman (Goya’s Ghosts) even though she always looks uncomfortable to be around him, Ryan cheats on Rooney with LLykke Li (music shit), Rooney and Ryan break up, Rooney dates Berenice Marlohe (Skyfall), Ryan dates Cate Blanchett (Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull), Natalie Portman dies (I think), Rooney and Ryan eventually get back together.  Phew.

Malick tries mixing it up a little this time but the results aren’t great.  He introduces more story than he has since The New World (The Tree of Life had more ideas (space porn, dinosaurs, afterlife?) but not necessarily more story).  I think Rooney is supposed to be a sex addict but she has trouble finding pleasure in it lately.  Ryan and Michael are friends but they have a falling out when Michael copyrights Ryan’s songs in his own name.  Michael and Natalie’s relationship never seems right because Michael is a controlling cheating dick.  When Rooney and Ryan split up they both then date someone totally different.  Rooney dates a woman and Ryan dates an older woman (11 years older) who his mother doesn’t approve of.  It’s kinda too much story.

Any one of the above plotlines would’ve been enough for a movie by itself.  The problem is Malick introduces something else he hasn’t done in a while, scenes with actual dialogue.  Well maybe scenes should be in quotations because his crazy editing style has finally become a liability.  If you’re going to attempt “scenes” with dialogue and this much story and chop the whole thing up like a madman then it’s gonna be even harder than usual to follow what the fuck is going on.  You’ll get part of a “scene”, maybe the beginning, middle or end, and then we’re suddenly off to look at other shit or jump to someone else’s storyline.  The pacing becomes awkward and I felt like more stuff was getting by me than normal because all I have to go on are these snippets.

So the actors are going to say more than they have in the previous bunch of Malick films because we have the aforementioned dialogue but we also still have his customary soft spoken voice overs.  And what makes this particularly difficult is everyone had to make up their own lines on the spot (apparently like Knight of Cups there was no script) so almost all delivery comes off unnatural as hell.  Gosling especially feels out of place.  He’s a funny guy in his movies that says cheeky cutesy shit.  Malick doesn’t do that.  He definitely does playful but playful actions, not words.  Everything Gosling says sounds like it’s from another film.

All of the characters are one dimensional too due to there being not enough time to devote to each of them.  Things are hinted at but nothing really develops.  Supposedly the original cut was eight goddamn hours long which I suppose would’ve told us more about these people but who knows?  And boy I wouldn’t wanna be the one to conduct that experiment.

The celebrity cameos were distracting as well.  All of these love stories are trying to be woven together and then bam it’s The Red Hot Chili Peppers or Patti Smith or Iggy Pop.  Not that I was so into this one to begin with but that didn’t help get me involved.  Val Kilmer was cool to see for a minute though.  He plays a performer that’s supposed to be about stage gimmicks like cutting an amp in half with a chainsaw ‘n shit.  I think that was my favorite part of the picture.

Of course cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (The Birdcage, Birdman) makes this look gorgeous as per usual.  He and Malick always knew how to beautifully capture natural landscapes but with Knight of Cups and now this one they’ve mastered how to make even mundane urban environments look like the prettiest shit you’ve ever seen.

Alright one more thing.  The editing is off.  Yes it’s frantic like normal but the selection is odd at times.  Typically quick random shots are inserted in these movies but in the past they appeared to make some sort of sense in the overall scheme of things.  Here the chosen random shots are sometimes just too damn random.  It’s like the editing is on autopilot and the computer is choosing from whatever’s available with no rhyme or reason.

I know you’re thinking “what did you expect from that weirdo recluse director?”  Well I guess you got me there.  Malick’s style is starting to wear out its welcome a bit.  I can appreciate on one hand that he attempted to take a very tiny baby step towards making what we would all consider a conventional narrative film, but at the same time that baby step is not a good mixture of elements that really works.  The stilted unscripted dialogue, the flat characters, the overabundance of storylines, the over editing even by Malick standards and etc, it doesn’t come together.

It’s a youthful picture though.  Youthful in that Malick went for younger lovers, somewhat more progressive themes, more modern music, hell there’s even shots of folks moshing.  I mean there still isn’t very much modern technology in sight like cell phones, computers, etc but I can’t blame the guy for wanting to explore a newer world.  And I certainly can’t blame him for making whatever the fuck movie he wants in whatever the fuck style he wants.  On that level he’s still very inspiring.  This time unfortunately it didn’t work out.  It’s possibly his worst one but hey, I’m still sticking with the guy.  Let’s see where he goes from here.