Song to Song may not be the best movie playing in town this week, but it’s surely the most important. The film is the latest by Terrence Malick, one of the handful of working narrative directors who has created what critic and director Paul Schrader once termed a transcendental film style. Like Yasujro Ozu, Robert Bresson, and Carl Dreyer (the directors Schrader considered in his 1972 study of transcendental cinema), Malick operates in a unique cinematic language that evokes a spiritual presence in the material world. Song to Song is not explicitly concerned with spirituality, as other Malick films are, yet the spiritual force that animates virtually all his work is impossible to overlook. Whether the film succeeds as a whole is less important than the seriousness of its intent—it’s worth experiencing and grappling with.
In Song to Song the characters come closest to experiencing that force when they experience romantic love. The film centers on a young guitarist named Faye (Rooney Mara) who’s trying to get ahead in the Austin music scene. When the story begins she’s living with a superrich producer played by Michael Fassbender. The producer takes a shine to another musician played by Ryan Gosling, who falls in love with Faye during a trip that all three characters take to Mexico. Gosling and Mara become an item and Fassbender seduces and marries a waitress (Natalie Portman). Gosling and Mara split up, see other people, get back together, then repeat the cycle again, while Fassbender descends into drug abuse and sexual excess, which puts emotional strain on his spiritually inclined wife. Malick shifts between each major character’s point of view, but he only presents the characters when they’re in heightened states of amorousness, sadness, anger, or euphoria. As such, the film can feel almost monotonously concerned with the life-changing powers of love and art or the devastation one feels in their absence.
