Song to Song was supposed to be Terrence Malick’s paean to indie rock. The New Hollywood legend spent years documenting SXSW and other Austin music festivals for the movie, making headlines as early as 2011 for a scene in which Christian Bale supposedly pounded bongos with Fleet Foxes. Its three main characters work in the music industry, recording artists join A-list actors in its cast, plenty of its action takes place at live performances, its soundtrack features Julianna Barwick and Sharon Van Etten, and a seven-inch record adorns its poster.
But despite all that, Song to Song is not really about indie rock—and not just because neither the bongo scene nor Malick’s footage of Arcade Fire and Iron & Winemade the cut. Although there are plenty of musicians on hand to lend credibility, this story has so little to do with the arts of songwriting and performing, its subjects might as well be investment bankers.Beyond the rock‘n’roll window dressing, Song to Song turns out to be just another minor variation on Malick’s favorite theme—the power of love and spirituality to transcend the life-poisoning curses of ambition and greed—and not a very effective one, at that.
The film begins with a confession: “I was desperate to feel something real. Nothing felt real,” Rooney Mara’s Faye recalls, in one of Malick’s trademark whispery voiceovers. Over a montage that includes shots of men slamming their bodies together in a festival’s muddy circle pit, she confides that she’d been seeking out violent sex. “I wanted to live,” she insists. “Sing my song.”
Faye is, in fact, a young singer and songwriter, although the shape of her aspirations isn’t entirely clear until midway through the film. She hopes that an entry-level job with a fabulously wealthy music-industry macher named Cook (Michael Fassbender) will be her ticket to success. We watch them go to bed together. “I thought he could help me, if I paid my dues...” she intones.
Then love intervenes. Faye falls for another musician, BV (Ryan Gosling), and Cook sets about making him a star—a process that takes place almost exclusively offscreen. But she and Cook secretly continue their affair, even as the bonds of ambition and desire bring all three closer together. The triumvirate travels to Mexico, where Faye has an epiphany that her romance with BV is the real thing. No one captures the magic of a world viewed through the lens of infatuation with more golden-lit poignance than Malick’s longtime cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki. But the glow fades once Faye and BV settle down together.
Built on a festering lie (and questionable business deals), none of these relationships can last. As all three characters move on to new lovers and continue chasing fame, money, or debauched oblivion, Malick’s favorite question pops up: can an existence defined by striving and struggle, rather than true love and harmony with the universe, ever bring fulfillment? His cinematic manifesto, 2011’s The Tree of Life, presented the tense, combative “way of nature” and the open, peaceful “way of grace” as two diametrically opposite approaches to life. If you’ve seen that film, Song to Song’s groan-out-loud idyllic ending couldn’t possibly surprise you.
Considering that Malick went to such extremes to fully situate his latest parable within the Austin music scene, it’s strange that he couldn’t be bothered to write Faye and BV’s development as musicians—rather than as pretty, young vehicles for an allegory about the dangers of ambition—into the script. We barely see them perform. If you timed it, you might find that the camera lingers longer on appreciative shots of Mara’s exposed midriff than on scenes of any character entertaining an audience.
The large cast of real musicians is frustratingly underutilized, too. Lykke Li and a local Austin singer, Dana Falconberry, both have small roles that could just as easily have been filled by non-musicians. Malick’s festival footage is dominated by mosh-pit and backstage shots. Every once in awhile, a recognizable face (Red Hot Chili Peppers, John Lydon, Iggy Pop, Big Freedia) appears to dispense a morsel of ostensibly unscripted wisdom, in a tented outdoor green room or at a party. Of these cameos, only Patti Smith gets substantial screen time. Amid a sea of dire Malickian clichés (“I love the pain. It feels like life”), her reflections on her husband Fred “Sonic” Smith’s death comprise some of the film’s only dialogue that feels genuine and specific. At one point, she says simply, “I thought I would be with him for the rest of my life, but he died,” and it’s enough to make you long for a whole documentary of artists’ reflections on loss.
Malick fans who also cherish live music will surely go into Song to Song longing to see him channel the almost religious quality of those performances—to watch Lubezki’s ecstatic camera elevate the imperfect music-festival experience so that those sweltering afternoons look as holy on the screen as they do in decade-old memories. Terrence Malick’s great obsession is earthly transcendence. That he would make a movie about music but neglect to capture the way it helps us detach from our everyday preoccupations, and make contact with some force greater than ourselves, just seems like a missed opportunity.
Natalie Portman, Michael Fassbender, and Anthony Kiedis in the film. (Courtesy of Van Redin/Broad Green Pictures)
It’s not entirely fair to take a director to task for failing to make the film you wish he’d made. Malick’s limited knowledge of the recording industry is also hard to overlook. Cook is either a major-label honcho who does all of his own production or an indie boss with access to a private jet. Parties for what is, presumably, the SXSW crowd too closely resemble the poolside celebrity bacchanals of Malick’s previous movie, Knight of Cups. One features a naked woman covered in sushi, a spectacle Lubezki is happy to zoom in on, but not one you’re likely to witness at any Jansport-sponsored industry mixer. It couldn’t be clearer—or more ridiculous—that the director sees Austin and Hollywood as functionally interchangeable.
What is most insufferable about Song to Song’s depiction of music and the people who make it, though, is that it’s philosophically shoddy to the point of hypocrisy.Malick frames Smith, Iggy, and the other successful artists he spotlights as sages. He soundtracks his obligatory shots of nature’s majesty with gorgeous songs that run the gamut from classical to classic rock. At the same time, he implies that Faye and BV can only lead fulfilling lives once they shift their focus from their careers to each other.
But what makes them so different from the artists Malick worships, besides their youth and lack of experience? In their own, sui generis ways, Patti Smith and Iggy Pop were both hungry, young strivers once. To imply otherwise is to twist reality into a simplistic, self-serving fairy tale—which is to say, the only kind of story Malick still seems capable of telling. The result is an irreconcilable film that celebrates a life spent making (and, yes, promoting) music and dismisses it as a distraction in the same breath.
Song to Song offered Malick the chance to complicate the nature-vs.-grace binary he set up in The Tree of Life and has since rehashed in To the Wonder and Knight of Cups, a collection of vignettes about a grieving screenwriter that has just as little to say about the value of creative work. What if there is some element of grace in following inspiration? What if making music—or any kind of art—can be both an act of love and act of ambition? Or, hey, what if there is more than just one way to live a good life?
Instead of expanding upon Malick’s philosophy, Song to Song simply restates it for a fourth time. Frankly, it’s painful to watch a once-brilliant filmmaker spin his wheels like this, planting facile morality plays within casually lurid soap operas as though convinced that his audience still hasn’t absorbed the not-particularly-complex take on metaphysics he’s spent years peddling. Maybe it is Malick’s own creative gridlock that has made him so disinclined to publicly ponder what it means to make art.