To the Wonder (2013)

The cinema of Terrence Malick has, over the decades, settled into a dependable mode: whispery voice-over, fields of wheat, and unhappy people rotating slowly against a sunset. To the Wonder, his 2012 offering, supplies all three in abundance. Ben Affleck, an actor not usually cast for interiority, drifts through Oklahoma as an environmental inspector, an occupation that sounds like the setup for a crusade and turns out to be a job. Olga Kurylenko spins through the grass. Rachel McAdams minds a failing farm. Javier Bardem, a priest in the grip of doubt, stares at the poor and wonders where God went. What we have is a love triangle rendered as a shrug.

A lesser film might have converted the environmental inspector into a sermon about the planet. This one uses the job to look at dirt. The bankrupt farm is a plot fact, not a thesis about capital. The cast is international by accident of romance, not by design. There is no racial reckoning, no examination of the body, no diagnosis of the mind, no revision of the historical record. Marina is a woman with her own money and her own visa troubles, and the film treats her as a soul in transit, not a case study. The nearest thing to a political position here is a serene indifference to politics.

What the film does possess, in quantity, is talk. Characters murmur about love, God, and the failure of both, frequently while walking backward into the camera. A priest addressing the imprisoned is not delivering a lecture on social justice. He is delivering a homily, and the distinction matters for the ledger. The result is a work of enormous spiritual ambition and almost no contemporary urgency. It wants to know whether grace exists. It does not want to know your pronoun. That is either a limitation or a relief, depending on the viewer, and the classification reflects the former.