Knight of Cups (2015)

Terrence Malick's Knight of Cups arrives with its tarot deck shuffled and its chapters numbered, ten of them, running from the Knight of Cups through the Hanged Man to a closing card called Freedom that exists in no deck. Christian Bale plays Rick, a screenwriter who drifts through Los Angeles mansion parties, Las Vegas excursions, and a rotating cast of women who serve as stations of the cross. The film quotes The Pilgrim's Progress and the Hymn of the Pearl. It is a dream vision with no interest in the concerns that animate contemporary cultural discourse.

For our purposes the ledger is nearly empty. There is no racial consciousness here, no climate anxiety, no LGBTQ+ thread, no body politics, no neurodivergence, no historical revisionism. The women, played by Blanchett, Portman, Pinto and others, are interchangeable muses; Stephanie Zacharek observed that Malick understands very little about women, and the film does nothing to refute her. Freida Pinto and Antonio Banderas appear as ensemble members in a drifting mosaic, which registers as ordinary multicultural casting and nothing further. The film does offer a corrosive view of Hollywood hedonism: the ketamine parties, the virtual reality headsets, the executives who want Rick to accept a larger chair. That critique stays moral and spiritual, never political, and it earns modest credit on the ledger.

Malick lectures no one. He whispers, he quotes scripture, he cuts away to a woman walking on a beach. The film gestures at philosophy and never converts it into instruction. A viewer hunting for a sermon on social justice will find only a man in a nice suit staring at the Pacific. This is a picture of spiritual exhaustion, made with real visual conviction and almost no interest in the arguments of its own decade. We file it accordingly: a beautiful, airless object, culturally inert, and quietly pleased with itself about that.