★★☆☆☆
Terrence Malick’s latest, Knight of Cups, is perhaps less a film and more a magnificent photographic collage of a spiritual journey as Christian Bale searches for his soul as a scriptwriter in the fleshpots and ennui of Los Angeles.
While Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography is worth a ticket alone for some Malick fans, the plot is not merely lost here, but abandoned to its own devices, since the great director made this movie without a script. Malick has always been a maverick, famed for throwing away entire characters in the cutting room, but here he sometimes handed actors one line on a piece of paper and told them to improvise.
The result is that Knight of Cups is irritatingly incoherent and pretentious, and I speak as a huge fan of Malick’s last great drama, The Tree of Life, which also tackled grief, loss of purpose, Christianity and the cosmos.
Malick punctuates his non-narrative with tarot cards as chapter headings, including the Hermit and the Knight of Cups. A whispery voiceover tells the story of a fairytale knight who came from the east in search of a magnificent pearl, but drank from a fateful cup that sent him into a deep slumber.
This is clearly a reference to Bale’s character, Rick, coming from New York to find fame and fortune in Hollywood and losing his integrity along the way. Rick has, we gather, lost a brother, failed as a son and entered the land of the lotus eaters.
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When he’s not making vague deals on the fake-city backlots of studios (why not in an office?), his stupefied slumber involves sleeping with a lot of gorgeous younger women, including Imogen Poots, Freida Pinto and Natalie Portman, and his ex-wife, Cate Blanchett (absolutely wasted here).
The women are mere ciphers, almost interchangeable, and Malick’s camera mostly follows as they leap airily on the beach and paddle in the sea. He also has an unexpectedly raunchy taste in underwear. In the end the parade of pointless women, exquisite interiors, Sunset Boulevard sunsets and empty dialogue is just enervating.
Despite curious Christian overtones, and extraordinary juxtapositions of Grieg, Chopin and Debussy with scenes of pole-dancing in the clubs of Los Angeles, you wonder: is this a profound insight into the decadence of Hollywood or a slightly out-of-touch older man’s fantasy of it?
Terrence Malick, 15, 118min