Song to Song (2017)

Terrence Malick's Song to Song drifts through the Austin music scene like a fever dream that forgot to take its temperature. Two couples entangle, disentangle, and entangle again. Faye plays guitar. BV plays guitar. Cook produces records and ruins people. The camera wanders. Someone whispers. The whole thing is gorgeous and almost entirely weightless, which suits a picture once titled Weightless. The ensemble is stacked with talent and genuinely varied faces. The film does nothing with that variety. They exist, they brood, they move on.

The one place the film applies pressure is the business of music. Cook holds the copyrights, BV does the labor, and the arrangement sours when the songwriter learns he owns nothing he made. Here the movie offers a mild indictment of industry exploitation, the executive feasting while the artist starves. It is a familiar complaint, delivered without much heat. The women in the frame have desires and make choices, though the film never turns that into an argument about power. It is too busy watching Rooney Mara stare at a horizon.

Elsewhere the ledger is bare. There is no environmental sermon, no reckoning with race in a Texas that surely has some, no inquiry into queer identity despite a brief detour into one, no celebration of bodies outside the slender norm, no attention to neurodivergence, and no revision of the historical record, since there is barely a record to revise. Malick is a philosophical filmmaker, but this outing favors atmosphere over argument. It lectures no one. It hums, beautifully, about very little, and asks us to feel something we cannot name.