Knight of Cups

Directed by Terrence Malick, United States, 2016

For the first four decades of his career, Terrence Malick completed only five films. From 2013 through 2018, he will have released five more. This newfound productivity is totally unexpected from Malick, now 73 years old. His latest films, To the Wonder and Knight of Cups, feel slightly different from earlier works like The Thin Red Line or Days of Heaven. Those were rare events, from a perfectionist and visionary who took years between masterpieces. In comparison, Malick's recent work, though no less visionary, is sketchier and slighter, more autobiographical and idiosyncratic. With Knight of Cups, Malick has moved further than he ever has from traditional narrative - there is a story here, but told as a stream of recollected memories, a cinematic collage driven by music, narration and nonlinear editing.

Knight of Cups follows Rick (Christian Bale), an L.A. screenwriter in an existential funk. Rick is hardly even a character - we never learn what he writes about, his hobbies or opinions, and Christian Bale barely speaks in the role. He is an autobiographical stand-in for Malick and a placeholder for an emotional state - he is searching, restless and dissatisfied, which is all we really need to know.

The poster tagline for Knight of Cups is simply "A Quest". The film opens with narration from John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, the story of Christian who must travel through the City of Destruction and Vanity Fair before arriving at his desired destination, the Celestial City. It is, of course, an allegory for the spiritual journey of a Christian, who must navigate dangerous temptations through the course of their worldly life before reaching heaven. As the words of Bunyan fade, another allegory is narrated to us - the tale of a prince who is sent West from the East to find a pearl by his father the King. But once in the West, the prince drinks from a cup and falls into a deep sleep - he forgets the pearl, and forgets who he is. But the King does not forget his son, and sends messengers to remind the prince of his quest. It's a hybrid of two ancient spiritual texts - "The Hymn of the Pearl" from the apocryphal Acts of Thomas, and A Tale of the Western Exile by medieval Persian mystic Suhrawardi.

Seemingly disassociated imagery plays underneath the narration of these allegorical quests. We see Rick wandering an empty desert landscape, and shots of Earth from orbit. Then we see VHS-quality images of children at play, maybe distant memories from Rick's childhood. And as we hear of the prince forgetting his mission, we see the adult Rick, stumbling through a lavish L.A. party in a drunken stupor. There is a brief stop-motion animation scene - an art installation playing at the party - of a topless model covered in black paint, taking on and off an unnerving mask, seeming to lull Rick to sleep and a visual representation of an unfixed, mutable postmodern identity. This prologue tells us to view Rick's journey as an allegory - he is our Christian and Prince, the Celestial City and Pearl his destination, and the Angelenos he meets are tempters and guides in his quest. Knight of Cups belongs to an ancient, archetypal storytelling mode - the moralistic and religious allegory - but tells it through a radically modern style, as influenced by avant-garde art as traditional cinematic grammar.

The title, Knight of Cups, is also the name of a tarot card that sums up Rick's personality. The Knight of Cups, when upright, represents a romantic adventurer, a seeker with high principles. When reversed, it represents a person who is easily distracted and cannot discern the truth from lies. Knight of Cups is split into chapters named after tarot cards, each centered around Rick's relationship with a different character. They all have a unique philosophy or lesson to share with him that aligns with the meaning of their chapter's card.

The mix of Christianity and tarot is intentionally baffling. Knight of Cups is about the search for meaning in a postmodern, pluralistic society. In 21st century Los Angeles, radically different forms of belief rub shoulders. Looking for answers, Rick visits a Catholic priest, a tarot card reader, and a friend who eloquently speaks of Buddhist monastic life. He witnesses the prayers of his Christian father and a Buddhist girlfriend. He is surrounded by religiously devoted hedonism - fashion shoots worshipping beauty, lavish parties sanctifying pleasure, billboards evangelizing consumerism.

If this all sounds very esoteric and obscure, that's because it kind of is. From its opening minutes, Knight of Cups is a take-it-or-leave-it enterprise, whose unabashedly grandiose themes and approach will variably leave viewers intrigued, puzzled, or rolling their eyes. But Terrence Malick, particularly when collaborating with genius cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, has a visually distinct, sensual style that grounds his lofty ideas. His films capture a vivid sense of place, whether 1950s Texas suburbs, 17th century London, or the jungles of Guadalcanal. Malick's eye, when turned to present-day Los Angeles, yields fascinating results. The rich lounge in decadence in Hollywood Hills mansions and unnaturally clean, towering skyscrapers. The street level is a different, much less glamorous world, strewn with trash and poverty, seedy strip clubs and curiosity shops.

Modern urban life looks alien through Malick's camera. Everything is transitory, impermanent, on the move. Knight of Cups often returns to bird's eye views of buzzing traffic, and ground-level shots of crisscrossing overpasses. Nearly every shot of the sky shows airplanes and helicopters in the distance, always on the move - but to where? There's no still center to this world. In one scene, Rick wakes to an earthquake shaking his apartment. He stumbles outside with his equally unsettled neighbors, aftershocks still rumbling - an alarming reminder of what an unsteady edifice the city is. A brief detour to Las Vegas is surreal - it's a ludicrous monument to artifice, an enormous desert mirage that somehow hasn't disappeared yet.

The temporary nature of modern civilization is contrasted to the stillness and permanence of the natural world. The towering desert mountains outside L.A., which were there long before the city at its foothills and will outlast it. After the hectic Vegas sequence, Malick's camera lingers on one of the mysterious sailing rocks of Death Valley, a path cut behind it from its patient, slow journey forward. In particular, Knight of Cups always returns to the ocean. Every chapter of Knight of Cups has its characters return to the beach, to play in the waves and look in awe at the waters' expanses. Going to the beach is a regular part of L.A. life, sure, but in Knight of Cups it has symbolic meaning as well - an attempt to commune with something eternal and unchanging.

But Knight of Cups ultimately resists total dichotomies between the natural world and human civilization. His camera is too curious to be very condemning. We see the hollowness and instability of modern cities, but they are also places abuzz with life, creativity and playfulness. Malick doesn't seem to nod in stern disapproval at all the Hollywood bacchanals (which are ultimately not very extreme) so much as find them amusing and misguided - an absurd expression of adults' desire to return to a state of childish play.

Knight of Cups finds small signs of the eternal within the temporal. Angels appear in unlikely places - a statue hovering over Vegas, a hungover partygoer wearing wings, a model's back with a chintzy wings tattoo framing the word "Faith". Commonplace L.A. swimming pools are filmed like holy places, backyard baptismal waters. Knight of Cups is much less black-and-white in its allegorical meaning than Bunyan. Does the City of Destruction really need to be escaped, or can the Celestial City be found within it? The transcendent and mundane, holy and sinful, worldly and spiritual might not be so easily extricated from each other.

Many of Malick's previous films build to a moment of cathartic revelation, like the heavenly reunion in The Tree of Life or the priest's monologue in To the Wonder, but Knight of Cups does not provide any answers or point towards one way of truth. However, the last chapter, "Freedom" (the only chapter not named after a tarot card), is distinctly different from the rest of the film, more serene. It's not because of a change of settings, which remain the same, but how they are filmed. The camera is no longer whirling and lunging, but staying still. The shots last longer. The soundtrack, filled with repetitive classical music, is replaced by sounds of the city and nature. The L.A. streets and skyline look suddenly peaceful. Rick has somehow found inner calm, and the film reflects it.