Terrence Malick continues search for meaning of life in Knight of Cups

Terrence Malick is one of the great living American film-makers, so why is his latest film almost impossible to see?

Cate Blanchett plays the ex-wife of a Hollywood screenwriter (Christian Bale) in Knight of Cups.

People sometimes ask if I have seen a film in recent times that I rate five stars out of five, as I would William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (1959), Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972), Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978), Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull (1980), Istvan Szabo’s Mephisto (1981) and Sydney Pollack’s Out of Africa (1985), to name a handful.

This year I’ve seen two that went close-ish, the French-Algerian drama Far From Men and the war on drugs thriller Sicario (directed by French-Canadian Denis Villeneuve), though the one everyone is raving about, Trumbo, is not out until February. Last year one went even closer: Richard Linklater’s extraordinary Boyhood. But the most recent film I would give five stars is The Tree of Life from 2011, written and directed by the singular Terrence Malick.

From his 1973 debut Badlands, in which Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek go on a robbery-murder spree in the mid-50s American midwest, through to the elegiac love story Days of Heaven (1978), the visceral World War II epic The Thin Red Line (1998), the Pocahontas drama The New World (2005) and The Tree of Life, (2011), Malick, now 71, has stamped himself, despite himself, as one of the great living American filmmakers.

The handling of his latest film, Knight of Cups, is therefore puzzling, to put it charitably.

The Australian distributor, Roadshow, refused to hold media previews or make the film available to reviewers ahead of its release in a pitiful number of cinemas. I saw it late last week at the one cinema in Sydney where it was showing. It has since opened at a second Sydney cinema and is on at a handful of venues in other states. I think it is superb, a near masterpiece, and I recommend it to anyone who cares about filmmaking and likes to be provoked with questions of what it means to be human.

When so much rubbish is so extravagantly promoted, it perhaps is no surprise that a challenging film by someone such as Malick is not. Consider the trailer for Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s Birdman last year, which promised what it was defiantly not, a superhero film. No doubt that sleight of hand lured more people through the door, and they got to see a very good film. But to more or less discourage people from seeing Malick’s movie is something else altogether.

If you have seen The Tree of Life, a non-conventional film that explores our most conventional story — the meaning of life, in a cosmic as well as lived sense — then you may share my high esteem for it, or you may think I have rocks in my head. I still remember leaving the cinema after seeing it, feeling so alive, in the sense of being aware of the glory of existence and the interconnectedness of all beings, and charged and changed, even if only temporarily.

This is worth mentioning because I think Knight of Cups can be seen as a companion piece to The Tree of Life, even a loose sequel. The thematic concerns are the same: questions of why were are here and how we should live our lives; explorations of family, especially fathers and sons, and other relationships and the damage we do to each other, and ourselves. So is the fragmentary, disassociated, God-like nature of the director’s design, one in which he again is aided and abetted by Mexican cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, who when not making movies with Malick won back-to-back Oscars with Gravity and Birdman. I read an article in which Christian Bale, the actor at the centre of Knight of Cups , said he and the rest of the cast were often given no script and just “torpedoed” into scenes. Watching the film, I believe it, and I find it thrilling.

Bale is Rick, a Hollywood screenwriter who seems to have made a mess of his life. He is successful and has women throwing themselves at him, but he also bears the pain of a failed marriage that perhaps should not have failed (a wistful Cate Blanchett is his ex, Nancy), an associated regret at his childlessness (a theme throughout) and a difficult relationship with his brother (Wes Bentley) and father (a broken and magnificent Brian Dennehy, channelling his great performance as Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman). Most of the film is narrated by the father, who could be an update of the Brad Pitt character from The Tree of Life, though at other times we hear Rick’s voice or that of his ex-wife.

Other characters come into Rick’s life: a married lover (a melancholic Natalie Portman); a pole dancer he takes to Las Vegas (Australia’s Teresa Palmer, full of sass). Another Australian, Jason Clarke, pops up, as do Antonio Banderas and Ryan O’Neal. While there’s no firm chronology, this is a more straightforward viewing experience than The Tree of Life, but no less deep.

The title refers to the tarot figure — the artistic, dreamy, readily bored, easily distracted knight — and to a story told to the young Rick by his father. The film is divided into segments based on tarot cards, such as The Hanged Man, The Hermit, Judgment and, in a brilliantly realised sequence that looks hard at mortality expected and unexpected, Death. Yet for all the existential agonising — or as a result of it? — the film ends, for me, on an optimistic note.

“You reach a certain age and think things will start to make more sense,’’ Rick says at one point. “But you are just as lost as before. I suppose that is what damnation is: the pieces of your life never come together.’’

That sounds a bit hopeless, but what if the pieces of your life are not meant to come together, and that’s OK? This, it seems to me, is a question this restless, driven, complex filmmaker is asking. I left this remarkable film energised by the thought that we are not one thing but many things.

Knight of Cups (M)

4 stars

Limited release