To The Wonder

To The Wonder, the current offering of Terence Malick, like his previous Tree of Life,is not a movie in the normal sense, it is a visual meditation, it is really a prayer, or rather three prayers: that of the exquisite and exuberant female protagonist, that of the saintly but desolate priest, and that of the admiring camera, or director, or viewer. As with the mother in Tree of Life, the director's eye is unabashedly masculine in his adoration of the feminine lead (Olga Kurylenko)...an adoration that never objectives the Beloved, but maintains a sense of awe and wonder, and the excruciating distance of reverence. With a minimum of plot and dialogue, the camera wants mostly to contemplate and marvel at the feminine loveliness and preciousness of the feminine lead in the dance movements of her form and the expressions of her face: wonder, grief, puzzlement, sadness. The second prayer is that of the priest, played poignantly by Javier Bardem, who is gently showing God's love to the most unlovely even as he is in anguish at the absence of God. He is a fresh expression of the dark night of St. John of the Cross, of the (Diary of a) Country Priest, of Mother Teresa and the young Karol Woytija. A summary of the movie explains it as the "story of a man divided by the loves of two women." This is not accurate. The male lead, Ben Afflek, is actually marginal to the agony and ecstasy of the real protagonists: he is a foil for Kurylenko, and is himself unbearably monotonous in his wordless, emotionally repressed, unexplained melancholy. He seems to be an expression of the grief of the director/viewer at the reality that the Desired One, in all her loveliness, tenderness, and preciousness, is finally elusive and out of reach. Despite an occasional smile, he is the morose male, trapped in the Oedipal passage, deeply longing for the maternal, the Eternal Feminine. As others have done with Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn, Ingrid Bergman, and Penelope Cruz, this male director mostly wants to gaze at, marvel at, and long for Feminine Beauty. The melancholy of Affleck and the dreaminess of Kurylenko is balanced by the deeper spiritual emptiness and goodness of the Bardem priest. His is surely one of the finest portrayals of the Catholic priesthood available in movies. A key scene has her confessing to him and then receiving communion. In an erroneous detail that is highly significant for the Catholic, she receives Holy Communion, outside of the liturgy, under both species. This, of course, could never happen as the precious blood is not reserved. But far more disturbing is that, shortly after this reconciliation, she inexplicably commits an act of infidelity. This scene is possibly the most realistic, terrifying portrayal of adultery ever: deeply sad and alienating, bereft even of glamour, there is nevertheless the allure of evil, as she freely and consciously desecrates her own preciousness and her spousal love. Perhaps never on the screen has the allure, the sadness, and the power of sin been unveiled. This is Elvira Madigan meets Diary of a Country Priest, it is Nietzche meets John of the Cross (by way of Heideggar whom Malick studied). It is not a movie to entertain or divert; it is a piece of art that can only lead the viewer into prayer: prayer of desperation for our present-but-absent God, prayer of frustration and yet gratitude for the excruciating splendor of sexual love, prayer of praise for that "love that loves us."

In Movement to the Father

The manhood of Jesus is bracked and defined by two events: his emergence into maturity in the temple and his ascencion to the Father. Both involve a disconnect from the feminine and maternal and a movement to the masculine and paternal. The former event is known as the loss or finding of Jesus in the temple but this wording reflects the anxiety of Mary and Joseph. From his own point of view, Jesus was neither lost nor found. He was exactly where he was supposed to be: moving into his manhood as Son of the Father, gathered with the elders, the patriarchs, the wise men and scholars. His words to his mother are harsh, sharp, corrective: "Did you not know that I must be about my Fathers's house (work)!" A similar renunciation occurs with Mary Magdalen after his Resurrection: "Do not grasp me...I must go to my Father and your Father..." Jesus understands that he has come from the Father and is going to the Father and on the way is doing the work of the Father. This entails a sober, chaste, generous, liberating love for women but also rejetion of romance, sentimentality, codependency, domestication, and masculine weakness. Like his cousin John, Jesus is drawn to the desert where he becomes fierce, hard, tough, free and entirely available to the work of the Father and combat with Satan. He is no mama's boy! First, last and always...He is Son of his Father!

Enemies: A Love Story

Enemies: A Love Story, a marvelous, mesmerizing novel by Isaac Singer, later a movie, has Herman, a Jewish Holocaust survivor in Coney Island circa 1949, hopelessly enmeshed in relationships with three women and eventually married to all of them. Raised as a devout Orthodox Jew, his faith is shattered by the events of his life; he is intellectual and sensitive. He has married the simple Polish peasant servant who risked her own life to save his. He is indebted and devoted to her as she adores him and is helpless without him in a new culture. He is in love with a beautiful, sexy, neurotic woman who also loves and needs him. Then his wife (played marvelously by Angelica Huston), who supposedly had died in the war, surfaces. She is attractive in a seasoned way, intellectual and wise. Their relationship had been volitile but also filled with respect, loyalty and memory, largely of their two children who perished in Poland. Herman is attached to each of the three: each is charming in her distinct manner; he cares about each; each needs him. He does not give himself completely to one woman because he is incapable of extricating himself from any of them. He bounces from one to another, engulfed in evasion, hopelessness and deceit. His situation is very poignant. I marveled at the paralysis of decision and sympathized. In the novel, however, the underlying cause and its connection with the Holocaust is made evident in a way it was not in the movie: he very clearly did not want to father children. He had renounced his paternity. In his earlier life, according to the novel, he did not want to have children but it happened in spite of his intentions. But their murder hardened him in his state of psychological hopelessness and infertility. He was swallowed up by the needs of the three women and his inability to say "no" because he was anti-paternal. At one point, Herman tells his wife that his then-mistress did not want to have children. She wisely responds: "If a woman loves a man, she wants to have his children." Shortly after that he is told that she is pregnant, agrees to marry her and hears her voice these words: "I wanted to have your child from the day I laid eyes on you." Clearly: the erotic, romantic and spousal are insepable, in this most carnal woman, from the maternal. Herman is a tragic exemplar of how the paternal/maternal infuses the spousal. The repression of fertility aborts the spousal relationship itself. This calls to mind a conversation in which a man, happily married with two children, told of seeing an old girlf friend who invited him back to her place. He refused. On arriving home, he told me, he looked at his wife and realized that going for the fling would not have been a "big thing." But he looked at his children and thought that he could never do such a thing. It was his fatherhood that sealed his fidelity. Lacking such paternal orientation, Herman could not give himself and became victim of his own needs and compulsions and those of his three lovers. What does this say about gay unions? About homosexuality and the paternal priesthood? About the plague of co-habitation? About the inability of our young men to commit? About our countraceptive culture? About the REAL needs of our young women? The crisis in paternity...flight from it, contempt for it, maginalization of it... is certainly the defining tragedy of our age. The story weaves a pattern of nihilism and seems incapable of anything but a tragic conclusion. But the ending is surprizing and largely satisfying as it delivers what is suggested in the title by means of the very thing that Herman most dreaded.