Movie Review : Knight of Cups (2015)
Legendary film director Terrence Malick released six movies over the first 36 years of his career. Each were poetic, meticulously crafted ciphers that critics and cinema snobs like me anticipated, admired and debated. A new Malick was an event. Then, he exploded like a supernova and directed eight films over the following eight years and nobody seems to have even seen them? What happened there? Was his muse constipated or did he just lose his goddamn mind? I used to love Terrence Malick. So, I decided to watch his first contemporary-set movie Knight of Cups to find answers.
Knight of Cups is not exactly a straightforward movie. It tells the story of Rick (Christian Bale), a successful Hollywood screenwriter undergoing an existential crisis. He lives a life of drugs, alcohol and womanizing, trying to find answers to questions I believe aren’t even clear to himself. Knight of Cups is split in eight chapters named after tarot cards (like Rick himself, hence the film title). They each represent a character, mostly women Rick sleeps with, but also his dead brother Barry (Wes Bentley) and another womanizer who mirrors his actions (Antonio Banderas).
It would be easy to reduce Knight of Cups to a two hours-long tarot metaphor. Although each character represent a certain card, Rick also represent one and there’s no allusion to the ritual of tarot like shuffling the deck and picking cards in certain order, which is as important as the cards themselves. The tarot cards represent who the characters are to one another. Rick is the knight of cups (a wild vector of creativity), his ex-wife is the judgement (she reveals Rick’s behavior to him), Natalie Portman’s character is death (heartbreak and the end of his womanizing), etc.
It’s a fun artifice, but it’s not exactly profound. Most important, it doesn’t reveal any deeper meaning to Knight of Cups.
I believe the opening sequence where Rick’s father (Brian Dennehy) read from gnostic text Hymn of the Pearl in voice over reveals much more about the film’s deeper meaning. Because there is one. I believe Knight of Cups is an experimentation with an ancient storytelling device called dream vision, where dreams and visions reveal important knowledge to a character. The early voice-over claims that Rick is asleep and needs to wake up and “remember the pearl”, which he will achieve throughout the movie through altered states of consciousness.
In good Terrence Malick fashion, it’s difficult draw the line and tell when exactly Rick is experiencing dreams or visions. He is at the beginning during the voice-over sequence and when walks around with his dead brothers, but otherwise it’s tough to know. But these sequences inform Rick’s evolution through Knight of Cups and eventual exit from his life of excess, into a more stable future. It’s a little overambitious and muddled at times, but it’s pretty fucking brave to try and turn a medieval storytelling device into a compelling contemporary movie. It’s just not always successful.
My apologies for the nerdy, Academic review. Terrence Malick’s directing style lends itself to it in a very democratic way. He uses obscure references, but he’s not being deliberately cagey about his process. Knight of Cups ambitiously marries medieval and existential to create something quite unique. It’s a little too loose and freewheeling for my own tastes compared to a film like The Thin Red Line, but I liked it because I like Terrence Malick’s weirdo directing style. It’s a terrible film to get into his work, but it’s a must-watch for completists.
6.6/10
