Religious Ideas in Malick's Films

Editing in Malick’s To the Wonder

One of the interesting approaches Terrence Malick takes to making cinema is that he often wants the viewer to experience the film rather than simply observe it or watch it. He wants the film to have an impact on the viewer’s emotions, mind, and memory. To accomplish this effect in his 2012 film To the Wonder, he relies on editing to create an experience for the viewer that is unlike anything else one might have experienced previously in a cinema. Since the film is a story about a European Catholic woman trying to find happiness in her life while at the same time trying to set herself right with God, Malick wants the viewer to experience what this struggle is like for the main character Marina. He wants the viewer to see the world through her eyes, hear her voice, and understand where she is coming from—and especially why the conflict is such an enormous one for her. On the one hand she wants earthly love, and on the other she wants to live the faith she has been taught, which tells her to look for happiness in the eternal world of the next life. The two impulses within her pull her in two different directions, and Malick wants the viewer to experience and to feel that pull. Malick is not interested in simply telling a story about the struggle: he wants it to be real to the viewer, and to make it real he uses various editing tricks, which jar the viewer and keep the viewer off balance and on the edge of the seat. Malick makes special use of the montage technique to convey psychological and emotional feeling rather than to give spatial or temporal sense. With the montage technique, editing is used in To the Wonder to create an impressionistic film that gives the viewer the sense of being “in” or part of the experience of the main characters. This paper will look at the opening and ending montage sequences in particular as they help to show how Malick uses the montage to convey the important sense of longing at the heart of the film.

The first scene in which editing is most notable is in the opening of the film when the viewer is introduced to the main characters, Marina of France, and Neil, an American with whom she is in love throughout a montage of romantic images that pour across the screen. The film opens with them on a train—but the viewer is seeing Marina through Neil’s cell phone as he captures her image on his phone. It is not a normal cinematic lens that puts us into their world; rather, it is a cell phone lens, suggesting a more personal and yet distant feeling: we are pulled in—but we do not know who these people are and feel like strangers in their world. That is purposeful on Malick’s part: his own characters are strangers to themselves as the film will show. The opening scene tells as much as Marina explains through voice over that her new love, Neil, has awakened her. Marina describes her life up to now: “Newborn, I open my eyes. I melt into the eternal night. A spark. You got me out of the darkness. You gathered me up from earth. You’ve brought me back to life,” as Neil records her image and she dances for him on the train. Malick is showing that she feels alive for the first time in a long time, but that she is hurtling somewhere, ignorant of direction and destination, merely happy to feel joy. She attaches religious significance to this feeling and her words echo the words of David in the Psalms, as Goodman points out: “I will exalt you, Lord, for You have drawn me up…You have raised up my soul from the lower world; Lord, you have restored me to life from she’ol” (1). The words are hers but they connect to the Scriptures, and these words are followed by a montage of the two lovers touring Paris, as Marina points out highlights to Neil along the way. As they do this, Malick uses music by Wagner to underscore a deep longing that is evident as the lovers come to the Wonder—an old church on the shores of France. Here Neil and Marina are shown embracing as she sighs with contentment but simultaneously stares out a window as though trying to make out her own future.

Marina leaves France for America with Neil and her young daughter. It is revealed that Marina’s husband has left her, and that she desires to be a wife once more but cannot remarry since in the eyes of the Church she is still married. This poses a problem for her, since she wants to do the right thing in the eyes of the Church and God but she also wants to be a wife, which she cannot do and achieve the first goal at the same time. To express this conflict, Malick uses a montage of clips in which Marina, Neil, and the daughter are shown having happy times in America and troubled times, fighting, laughing, being cold toward one another, and looking around at the beauty in nature. Blasi states that Malick is successful with this editing technique because he is concerned with juxtaposing positions: he wants to use images and cut them together in a montage sequence so as to make the viewer compare and contrast modern philosophical ideals with traditional theological and spiritual concepts. Malick does this in the montage sequences, especially in the opening and ending of the film. In the opening montage, for instance, Marina asks a question through voice over narration—a question about finding peace—while admiring a medieval work of art representing one of the seven virtues of Christian theology. This sequence is part of a larger montage in which Marina is seen cavorting around Paris with Neil as they take part in the all the typical modern tourist traps—like placing a lock representing their love on a bridge over the river in Paris. The contrast is sharp—one idea of peace and spirituality is deep and rooted in virtue; the other is rooted in superficial artifice and sentimentality. The contrast is shown over the course of the montage, which makes the viewer experience the inner struggle that Marina is having.

This struggle erupts once Marina makes it to church in America and meets the priest there. He is a Spanish priest and he hears her confession. He himself is struggling to live his faith, as he finds the people in the community are not interested in deep spirituality but rather in superficial love. Marina’s confession helps him to realize that people need deep spirituality but may not know how to hold onto it, pursue it, recognize it, or understand it. He resolves to help them find that deep spiritual peace and love by living like Christ, and this is shown in a montage sequence towards the end, as the film’s climax plays out between Marina and Neil: she is realizing that she cannot be happy with Neil in America because it means violating her relationship with God; he comes to understand and goes to the priest for some teaching. The montage shows Marina coming to life once more—in a new spiritual way as she finds an answer to the question that she asked earlier in the film: “What is this love that loves us?” (Hamilton). She is shown dancing across a rooftop to see birds in flight, and also included in the montage is a clip of her clipping medieval artwork pictures from a book and placing them on a windowsill as Neil kneels before. The montage communicates a resolution to the conflict, for Marina is now in a place of peace—a peace that eluded her for much of the film, and it has come thanks to prayerful searching and realizing that she will not happy until she is doing what she believes to be right according to her faith. Neil does not share that faith or understand what the conflict is all about, but he is willing to submit to her sense of what is right. Meanwhile, the montage is carried forward by the words of the priest as he provides voice over for the montage: his words are those of the prayer of St. Patrick’s breastplate. The priest is going to bring the deep spirituality that people need by seeing Christ in them and bringing Christ to them through his own humble submission to the divine.

The film ends with Marina now on her own in the final montage sequence: she lifts herself from the ground—now in a foreign land, far from Neil in America. She is on her own spiritual pilgrimage. She is nourished by the dew drops on thistle, and she is accompanied by a tiny dog—like Dorothy’s Toto in The Wizard of Oz. The dog carries a little light, to help her see the way, but on the horizon is a foreboding pack of wild dogs. They represent the wild spirit that Marina is prone to abandon herself to. She tries to wave them away and becomes overwhelmed in the process. Then a blinding light flashes across her eyes, and she is forced to look in the direction of the light. Malick uses a smash cut to bring the image of the Wonder—the old church—to the viewer. Then the film fades to black and credits roll, as Wagner’s music reaches a crescendo and fades. The montage sequence described here is the final one that Malick uses to make the viewer experience what it is like to be on that spiritual pilgrimage, alone, trying to move in the right direction, but being distracted by cares and concerns and needing to be reminded over and over again that the ultimate destination is not any passing happiness or allurement in this world but the eternal reward that awaits the faithful in heaven. That is the experience that Malick wants the viewer to have, and it is evident through his use of montage—from the beginning, opening montage in which the conflict is revealed: two ideals pulling Marina in two directions; to the middle montage in which Marina’s crisis comes to a head; to the concluding montage when a resolution is reached and peace achieved.