Christopher Rhoten
Terrence Malick will likely always be remembered for his first five films. After the unforgettable one-two punch of instant classics Badlands and Days of Heaven, released five years apart in the seventies, Malick returned twenty years later with the Best Picture-nominated 1998 war epic The Thin Red Line. The Texas native continued to shake off any rust with the period piece The New World before arguably reaching his peak with the Palme d’Or-winning The Tree of Life in 2011, often considered one of the best films of the 21st century. It is a filmography as accomplished as any in cinema, cementing Malick as a singular creator of beautiful, thought-provoking, thinking man’s cinema.
And then, inexplicably, Malick rattled off three films in five years. To the Wonder, Knight of Cups, and Song to Song are extremely experimental movies that have a lot in common, which is not necessarily a good thing. All three confounded critics and audiences alike, contributing to the growing consensus that the famously introspective filmmaker had fallen into self-parody. Each film in this modern-day trilogy was shot without a script, its story assembled in the editing room during post-production, and featured seemingly endless scenes of characters staring into the distance, watching the sunset, or crawling on the floor.
Combine these indulgences with Malick’s ever-present detached narration and an eye that searches for moments unimportant to the larger narrative, and you are bound to push most viewers away. In fact, these films might be the poster child for the kind of self-important, navel-gazing borefests your friend imagines fill the Criterion Collection.
Maybe you hate all three. Maybe you love them. Or maybe, like me, you think there are things to appreciate in each attempt to find spontaneous magic. While Malick’s experiments appear to be over for now—2019’s A Hidden Life was far more straightforward and far more successful—one of his more esoteric entries deserves a closer look as it quietly celebrates its ten-year anniversary. 2015’s Knight of Cups (released theatrically in March 2016) is a film that came and went with little fanfare, often lumped in with the poorly received experiments that precede and follow it. While indeed guilty of some of the same critiques leveled at the other two, the poetry of Knight of Cups makes it ripe for reappraisal ten years later.
The symbolism of the title offers a useful entry point. While I’m far from an expert—and Tarot cards often represent many things at once—the Knight of Cups is typically associated with romance, creativity, and the pursuit of spiritual meaning. When the card appears upright, it typically represents a dreamer or messenger who brings new invitations or opportunities, especially those connected to love or artistic endeavors. The figure is usually characterized as charming but also somewhat restless, someone who can become easily bored without new adventures. Because of this, the Knight of Cups is often seen as an idealist, drawn to beauty and romance, yet prone to chasing unsustainable dreams. When reversed, these qualities can become unstable or deceptive, suggesting unreliability, false promises, or a tendency to blur the line between genuine truth and illusion.
Malick’s Knight of Cups follows screenwriter Rick (Christian Bale) as he embarks on an unusual odyssey through Los Angeles and Las Vegas, likely inspired by Malick’s own time as a commercial screenwriter in the seventies. (He reportedly even wrote a draft of Dirty Harry.) Rick attends parties, drives fast cars, argues with his father, Joseph, and spends time with both his ex-wife and various lovers, wandering to and fro without much direction. It is all shot gorgeously by Malick’s career-long partner, Emmanuel Lubezki, who often employs wide-angle lenses that do tremendous justice to the sheer scale of the cities.
There is also, however, an obvious lack of a coherent narrative or cause-and-effect between sequences; linearity is suggested largely by the changing length of Bale’s facial hair. If you look up the film on Wikipedia, you may notice that there is no traditional plot summary, but rather a listing of its “chapters,” each inspired by a Tarot card. The first card/chapter is, of course, the Knight of Cups itself. Compare Rick to the card’s description, and the similarities are obvious.
While an accomplished writer, Rick is a man constantly searching for stimulation and meaning within a hedonistic lifestyle that offers neither. It is no accident that he appears upside down on the film’s poster; he chases women who eventually disdain him and lives in a cycle of disillusionment. Rick is looking for something to give his life purpose, which the narration alludes to metaphorically as “The Pearl.” Inspired by “Hymn of the Pearl” from the apocryphal Acts of Thomas, the pearl represents meaning for the modern man in contemporary Western civilization. Rick has long forgotten this search on a conscious level. Early on, we hear these all-important lines from his father in voiceover, which play over a montage of Rick playing games as both child and adult:
Remember the story I used to tell you when you were a boy…about a young prince. A knight, sent by his father, the King of the East, west into Egypt… to find a pearl. A pearl from the depths of the sea. But when the prince arrived, the people poured him a cup that took away his memory. He forgot he was the son of the king. Forgot about the pearl… and fell into a deep sleep. The king didn’t forget his son. He continued to send word… messengers… guides. But the prince… slept on.
If this all sounds abstract, well, there is no denying that Knight of Cups is not a traditionally narrative-driven picture. Trying to find a conventional plot in what often amounts to Sean Penn’s scenes from The Tree of Life stretched to feature film length would be no more successful now than it was a decade ago. Most of the events Rick encounters have less literal importance than symbolic significance; the earthquake that shakes his apartment is the call to action personified, while Vegas represents crossing the threshold into a new world.
There is a mystical element as well, as each chapter reflects the Tarot card that inspires it. In “The Hanged Man,” for example, Rick reflects on his brother’s suicide, while in the apropos “Judgment,” he visits his bitter ex-wife. Briefly, too, does the film lapse into outright surreality, as the screenwriter appears to dream of his father washing his hands in blood and, later, of his miscarried daughter.
But unlike Song to Song or To the Wonder, Malick’s meandering, unfocused storytelling proves perfectly suited to the story he tells here. Rick’s lack of a clear goal or arc is not a flaw but the natural consequence of Malick transporting The Pilgrim’s Progress into the twenty-first century, where a quest for enlightenment risks seeming trivial. It might be a mistake to take the director’s autobiographical tale too seriously; it seems unlikely the absurdity of Natalie Portman putting her feet in Bale’s mouth would be lost on the filmmaker. At a distance, Rick is indistinguishable from the wealthy elites who drink their sorrows away at a party held by Antonio Banderas’s character, or the vacuous agents who talk shop about his scripts. Few of his outward actions indicate regret, and in another film, Rick’s rich, good-looking blank slate would hardly be worthy of carrying a movie.
The intent, of course, is to place us in the shoes of someone more detached than he lets on. Rick’s entire life revolves around seeking purpose in others, specifically within romantic love. This includes rebellious Della, ex-wife Nancy, model Helen, free-spirited stripper Karen, Elizabeth, a married woman with whom he has an affair, and finally Isabel, a symbolic figure seen only briefly. Malick’s focus on relationships ties the film even more closely to Los Angeles and to the way partners are treated like candy. Banderas’s character, Tonio, says women resemble flavors: “Sometimes you want raspberry, then after a while you want some strawberry.” Beauty itself is a commodity, as seen in the incessant stream of billboards and advertisements that populate the film’s cityscapes.
And yet there is more to it. Knight of Cups is, in many ways, about experience itself. One of Rick’s lovers tells him that he does not want love; he wants a “love experience.” Rick wants his life to mean something in the moment—to both thrill and fulfill. As another quote from his father explains:
You think when you reach a certain age things will start making sense, and you find out that you are just as lost as you were before. I suppose that’s what damnation is. The pieces of your life never to come together, just splashed out there.
Most scenes have little to do, plotwise, with the previous one because the film is not a “story,” in the strictest sense. In addition to shooting without a script, Malick would occasionally attach a GoPro to Bale and have him simply walk around with the other actors. This attempted to capture experience authentically, reflecting the act of living from moment to moment, as we do in the real world, or woman-to-woman, in Rick’s case. But through the power of editing, Malick turns Rick’s random encounters into a sequence; he meets people who present various worldviews and beliefs, from Karen’s embrace of hedonism to the priest who tells him he is seeking a connection to God.
The interesting part, seemingly lost on many viewers, is that this post-production assembly also parallels Rick’s journey. The film’s desert scenes function as a framing device, suggesting that what we are watching is not happening in real time, but surfacing as fragments of memory while Rick wanders in reflection. The very moment he remembers his father’s story of the pearl is the moment he breaks the “spell,” and one can infer that the choppy interactions and disembodied narration are supposed to be memories swirling in our protagonist’s mind as he makes his way through Death Valley, which itself might double as some sort of dream state.
Nearly all of Rick’s lines are delivered through voiceover because we are watching him relive his past. Conversations are heard only in fleeting snippets, since the protagonist was not really paying attention, instead searching for the elusive experience that will transcend the ordinary. Malick suggests life only makes sense in retrospect, just as a story only makes sense once it has been told—an idea analogous to Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror. As Rick revisits his life, he sees how infatuations with distractions and superficial relationships have lured him into sleepwalking through it. “All those years, living the life of someone I didn’t even know,” Rick says in his very first line.
It is easy to make fun of Malick’s reverence for trees, grass, and the sky (and women with pink hair), or how archetypal this is at the expense of everything else, but it is this framing that holds it all together. You rarely read how this is a movie about memory (though the association was clocked by at least one contemporary review). From this perspective, hyper-focusing exclusively on moments that would be cut in a traditional story makes sense, as Rick sorts through his past for something meaningful.
This revelation will hardly unlock the film for anyone bored by the story, or lack thereof. But it offers a new angle for understanding the rambling, dreamlike, often silent journey Rick undertakes. His mostly wordless presence amounts to a ghost in his own life; in fact, I consider it a mistake to have Rick speak at all outside of narration, as his handful of lines seem random.
Towards the end, Joseph describes the pearl as the light in the eyes of others, a stark contrast to Rick’s self-centeredness. And this is certainly a movie with plenty of contrast—pavement and sky, pleasure and pain, love and lust. Statues of religious figures and other religious iconography recur throughout Rick’s travels, and this newfound self-awareness seems to lead him towards reconnecting with his father, but also the divine. A priest Rick speaks to in a nearly empty church offers a final reflection:
Seems you’re alone. You’re not. Even now, He’s taking your hand and guiding you by a way you cannot see. If you’re unhappy, you shouldn’t take it as a mark of God’s disfavor. Just the contrary. Might be the very sign He loves you. He shows His love not by helping you avoid suffering, by sending you suffering. By keeping you there. To suffer binds you to something higher than yourself, higher than your own will. Takes you from the world, to find what lies beyond it. We are not only to endure patiently the troubles He sends, we are to regard them as gifts. As gifts more precious than the happiness we wish for ourselves.
Rick has awakened to the cycles of self-destruction in which he has been an unconscious participant. Though the horizon is only briefly glimpsed, the film ends with a (literal) new road to go down, no doubt full of new trials and tribulations. This return to ordinary life, however, is now accompanied by faith, symbolized by Isabel. Knight of Cups might reflect the idea that the quest, and therefore “meaning,” is not about a single destination but about trying to live mindfully, guided by the past, even if the destination remains uncertain. A life of suffering will never make sense in the moment, so we must do our best to seek out experiences that will prove fulfilling for both ourselves and others. Perhaps like watching a film or reading a book.
Yet even this interpretation only explains part of what Malick is doing. Knight of Cups ultimately resists a purely psychological reading, because its concerns are unmistakably spiritual. Speaking of books, one of Malick’s main inspirations for Knight of Cups was Walker Percy’s novel The Moviegoer, a book he worked on adapting in the eighties but never officially brought to the screen. Malick also gave Bale a copy of The Moviegoer to read in preparation for his role in Knight of Cups. Percy begins his novel with a quote from Søren Kierkegaard: “The specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair.” No piece on Knight of Cups is complete without mentioning the Danish philosopher; such a statement perfectly encapsulates Malick’s sinuous tale on reclaiming lucidity.
As such, no reappraisal can turn what is essentially a spiritual experience into something fully explainable without exploring Christian existentialism. Kierkegaard’s philosophy is felt behind every frame of Malick’s vision. The relationship between light and darkness, heaven and hell, and the finite and the infinite are all concepts explored by the philosopher, whom Malick studied extensively at Harvard. A “Knight of Faith” is a central concept in Fear and Trembling. It is especially fitting that water is the film’s most recurring motif, as swimming was a metaphor Kierkegaard used to explore how faith is not an intellectual act but a practical one, just as swimming must be learned while one is actually submerged. Malick constantly circles beaches, pools, fountains, rivers, and even an aquarium throughout the film, and one of its final shots shows Rick treading water.
It goes without saying that some people will not find this experimentation engaging, regardless of the interesting ideas behind it. Even I like thinking about it all more than watching it, or better yet, listening to Hanan Townshend’s calming woodwinds as I do some wandering myself on a hiking trail. If you watch Bale gazing up at the stars and feel nothing, well, this movie is not for you. But if you can picture—or even remember—feeling this same yearning, then the poetry of Malick’s search for purpose in the monotony of the material world may resonate. Works of art like Knight of Cups and The Tree of Life are inseparable from their formal experimentation. Intellectualizing their stories only points further toward an emotionality that cannot be boiled down to any one choice, beat, or plot point. You will only leave dissatisfied if you are expecting something traditional from an experiment.
So while Knight of Cups will not (and certainly has not) been for everyone—and does indeed include several scenes of Bale and Natalie Portman tickling each other while improvised nothing-lines are whispered in voiceover—perhaps such flaws are becoming of a story about being lost in trivialities. As Helen says, “Dreams are nice, but you can’t live in them.” For admirers of the film, such as myself, even the wispiest scenes are forgivable in the larger context.
Like the elusive pearl, Knight of Cups has been floating in the back of my mind ever since I first saw it several years ago, reminding me that there is always a larger story being written, and that time is fleeting, so we must make the most of it lest we look back and see nothing of importance. When considering Terrence Malick’s career, perhaps we can reminisce and find a film that is more meaningful than we might remember.
