Having already dealt with the tainted beginning of American civilization in the New World and its WWII-bombed end in the Thin Red Line, then exposed his own cosmic insignificance in The Tree of Life, there weren’t really many places left for Malick to go but back into hiding. He’s still here, though, looking for rainbows in curved air while sculpting in time, following actors around with a camera in hopes of being able to slap together some editing room philosophical tract on ancient spiritual suffering afflicted by modern world malaise.
Possibly riffing on his years as a screenwriter, Knight of Cups follows Christian Bale as Rick, a Shane Black and Joe Eszterhas in the 90’s rich LA screenwriter as he flits between the weight of his ailing father’s legacy and the disposable, beautiful women he left behind. There’s something about inertia and the false promise of escapism, being unable to envision running away from marital, familial, material problems, most hilariously summed up by Rick watching OJ’s freeway chase while Imogen Poots wanders his bedroom clamoring for attention. Purely subjective and operating on an internal logic that freely associates between memories more than it does between characterization, it suggests 8 ½ as directed by late period Godard if he discarded his lifelong battle against capitalism and state violence but kept the one against his exes.
The spiritual and material preoccupations of Cups almost refreshingly renders it free of what Thom Anderson, in Los Angeles Plays itself, points to as LA cinema’s cynical disempowerment where the city’s fictional backroom conspiracies, as opposed to historical public ones, are ultimately too diffuse to fight. Unfortunately, when Malick juxtaposes Cate Blanchett’s voiceover description of Rick with a clinical diagnosis fit for a black burn victim she’s treating on screen, the juxtaposition between empty architectural monoliths housing lavish parties and wide open streets housing junkies feels less like agony over being complicit in the structural design behind class warfare than aristocratic melancholy.
Once John Hillcoat used Malick’s style by way of David Gordon Green to sell Levi’s as the savior of Braddock, Pennsylvania’s unemployment crisis, the collapse between art, advertising and social import was sealed. Knight of Cups, which drops “Pilgrim’s Progress” over unaffordable Air B&B advertisements also recalls Levi’s earlier advertisement featuring Walt Whitman’s “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” over diverse young models running in jeans with an American flag. Cups mainly plays like a sad reminder that late capitalism has rendered an undergrad degree in the humanities as a mere kickstarter for holistic re-branding. When Rick listens to zen koans while walking through a Japanese sculpture garden or watches Freida Pinto practice yoga, it becomes clear how unbalanced power dynamics lead discomfiting wealth into new-agey self-improvement instead of communal engagement or redistribution.
One thread, where a girl hits Rick with a belt, another puts a foot put in his mouth, yet another drags his body across a beach, and he himself gets in a cage at a strip club almost suggest a sadomasochistic fetish born of material shame (which would’ve been a good riff on Batman) but Malick never really goes there, or anywhere, except perhaps insult to injury when Rick listlessly watches a video of a model applying black paint to herself to the point where it’s basically just blackface. It’s unfortunate, since Malick’s style, if applied with more thematic variety, could provide novel ways to explore how various communities and individuals within navigate the structural impositions on otherwise open space. I wonder, say, how Malick would approach science fiction, or the Cold War spy film, or the horrors of Heidegger’s Germany, and then thank the cosmos for sending Zulawski to do all three instead.
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