There are images of homeless men, beggars, men with gangrenous legs and deformed fingers (another echo of "To the Wonder"), and the film looks at them with empathy; but nothing any of the characters do for them (not Rick; not one of his girlfriends, who absentmindedly drops flowers next to a man sleeping on a stone bench; not Barry, who rants against the indifference of the privileged; not Nancy, a doctor who ministers to their wounds) seems able to personally improve their daily lives, or even to bond with them on anything but an abstract level. Everything, everyone, every place, seems disconnected here; as superficially lovely as "Knight of Cups" is, it's Malick's bleakest film in some ways. Treat the world as it deserves to be treated, Rick's father says. There are no principles, only circumstances. Nobody's home. The lushness of the imagery contradicts him, but without shutting him down. The world is beautiful. There is beauty everywhere, in the land, in the light, but what difference does it make to people who are suffering from physical or emotional wounds? Near the end of the film, a minister played by Armin Mueller-Stahl says, "To suffer binds you to something higher than yourself," but the movie seems aware that it's easy to nod at this statement but harder to accept it, much less make something tangible of it.

Nobody else is making films like this. Not at this level. And certainly not with such sustained disregard for what films are supposed to do, what they are supposed to say and how they are supposed to say it. The sheer freedom of it is intoxicating if you meet the film on its own level, and accept that it's unfinished, open-ended, by design, because it's at least partly concerned with the impossibility of imposing meaningful order on experience, whether through religion, occult symbolism, mass-produced images and stories, or family lore. Time and again, we see Rick and other characters revisiting agreed-upon narratives (of blood family, of friendship, of romantic or sexual relationships) and ultimately realizing that they don't make rational, objective sense any more, and perhaps never did. The tearful climax of the meeting between Rick and Elizabeth (Portman's character) is one of the most piercing, because it concerns a shared tragedy that originated in secrets and lies.



The film seems to be fighting a losing battle to make sense of itself, to coalesce into a statement, to not fade away. This feels right. "Knight of Cups" is not a young man's movie. It's an old man's movie. A philosophically engaged, beatific, starchild-as-old-man's movie. The end is coming. What did it all mean? What else is there but sunlight, water, sex, laughter, sunlight? Why do people sneer when they hear questions like that? Why is it unacceptable to make films like "Knight of Cups," which speak in the language of poetry, fables, dreams, calendar art, Tarot cards? Why is it banal, vacuous, naive, to hear Rick's father assign redemptive meaning to "the light in the eyes of others"?



The train pulls into the station. The critic walks up the steps. The snow is falling harder.



Cut to an image of Brian Dennehy shambling down a sunny residential street in Los Angeles, the camera floating just behind his broad shoulders. His limp seems a heroic statement. He's old. He's in pain. He keeps moving forward.



Cut to the desert, the camera moving slowly towards a mound of smooth stones, and then to a hand making handprints in wet beach sand, then to a wave rolling in and erasing it.













