Terrence Malick has baffled many of the film critics who once championed him. His detractors call his latest film, Knight of Cups, an “indecipherable mess” or “hard to parse.” A.O. Scott of the New York Times admired Malick’s Tree of Life, but now sounds as if he feels betrayed: “The deployment of beauty strikes me as more evasive than evocative.” Even Malick’s admirers find him opaque. Matt Zoller Seitz, the generally perceptive editor of RogerEbert.com, writes that “the film seems to be fighting a losing battle to make sense of itself, to coalesce into a statement, to not fade away.” Moira MacDonald of the Seattle Times found the images “exquisite,” but couldn’t discern “a point to it all.”
There’s no arguing with taste, and Malick’s last few movies have been unusual, to say the least. He films a great deal of plot, then cuts it away in the editing room until all that’s left is a dense web of beautiful, highly symbolic moments. Sometimes we’ll see a famous face in the corner of a shot and wonder about which pieces of the story we’re missing. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s literal and what’s a memory or a dream. But to say Knight of Cups is formless is to miss its moral vision, which, like his last film, is in the service of what Pope John Paul II called “the culture of life”: a culture that includes, cares for, and protects the full span of human life, from conception to death. The family open to receiving new life stands at its center.
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