Somewhere Over the Rainbow. Daniel Ross Goodman

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СКАЧАТЬ Quintana character is far more compelling than the wooden, simplistic Neil, and is one of To the Wonder’s redeeming features.

      The Neil-Marina-Jane love-triangle is not only hackneyed but as agonizingly affectless as the Affleck character. And unlike Tree of Life’s masterful allegorization of a microcosmic human story with the grand cosmic drama, To the Wonder cannot quite relate the love-triangle dilemma to the broader mysteries of life and universe. While To the Wonder is somewhat similarly suffused with a bevy of wide-shot long-takes of natural beauty that are certainly wondrous, a few beautifully photographed panoramas a masterpiece does not make. While Malick may have intended To the Wonder to be a religious film (in the sense that viewing it could elicit the kind of questions of meaning that are addressed by religion), I doubt that moviegoers exclaiming “thank God!” upon the film’s conclusion (as I heard one viewer utter at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater) were the sort of religious sentiments he imagined that To the Wonder would evoke. In Tree of Life, Malick successfully deployed the abstract and the sublime as a means of stimulating a sense of the mysterium tremendum in audiences which were not tone-deaf to such a frequency. Yet, whereas the gnomic qualities of Tree of Life contributed to its aura of wonder and majesty, the gnomic qualities of To the Wonder detract from its sublimity. Other diversions similarly undermine To the Wonder’s aura of spiritual majesty. Olga Kurylenko’s ethereal quality is mostly lost in her incessant, distracting twirling. And while the film’s dream-like visuals and long stretches of silence can engender a state of reverie, as Roger Ebert noted in his review of the film, Neil’s prevarications—into which we’re given scant insight—likewise detract from the film’s transcendent, contemplative aspects. The Tree of Life cast expressed the kind of psychomachic characteristics that the actors in To the Wonder do not. Because of this severe want of discernible interiority (save for Bardem’s character), To the Wonder is severely lacking in the emotive elements that make for compelling cinema.

      Joyce did not write another novel after the glorious disaster of Finnegan’s Wake, dying shortly after its completion. Malick aficionados can take solace in the knowledge that To the Wonder will not be his last effort—he has another film currently in production, The Voyage of Time—but can only hope that Voyage of Time hues closer to Tree of Life than To the Wonder.

      Notes

      1.

      This quote is commonly attributed to Socrates but its exact genesis is unknown.

      2.

      David Foster Wallace, Both Flesh and Not: Essays (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2012), 215.

      Chapter 2

       Renoir

      The French Impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir was not only a prolific creator of gorgeous art, but was a passionate, zealous advocate of creativity itself. The serene, sensitive film Renoir (2012) by Gilles Bourdos attempts to match Renoir’s lyrical use of color with the lushness of a luxuriously paced film. Much of the out-of-focus, hazy cinematography is designed to mimic the lush, impressionistic look of much of Renoir’s paintings. Many shots bathe the screen in the iridescent golden glows of the midday sun. Speckles of light and vibrant colors seep onto the screen in a manner similar to the way they decorate Renoir’s paintings.

      The film is worth watching not only for its beautiful visual effects, but also for its powerful expression of Renoir’s implicit theology of creativity—a theology that has surprising parallels with the thought of influential Jewish thinkers.

      At the film’s opening, Pierre-Auguste worries that his sons Claude and Jean are not involved in valuable work. “They don’t create anything lasting,” laments Renoir, “a pair of shoes, a book, a table . . . something people can hold in their hands.”

      Even before he became a painter, Renoir strove to create objects that could last. As a child, Pierre-Auguste made pottery in a porcelain factory. Creativity was always foremost in his consciousness; it was his raison d’être. If his sons were to embark upon paths in which they would not be creative—Pierre was pursuing an acting career and Jean went on to become the famed director of cinematic masterpieces such as The Rules of the Game and The Grand Illusion—if they did not lead lives in which they created lasting objects that others could “hold in their hands,” Renoir feared that they would be wasting their lives.

      The loosely structured, nearly inconsequential plot of the film centers on the budding relationship between Jean, who is on medical leave from the French army during the First World War, and Renoir’s new model, Andrée. Every artist needs a muse—whether the muses are other works of art (as they were for Yeats), dreams (as they were for Edgar Allan Poe), or God (as He was for the ancient Israelite poets who attributed their wondrous literary creations to divine inspiration). For Renoir, who loved to paint the female nude, his muse was a woman. Or, more precisely, his muses consisted of an alternating cast of younger and younger models; when his models became too old, they were demoted to the Renoir housekeeping staff.

      While Renoir was an artist and not a theologian, the theology that is implicit in Renoir’s approach to life and to art reflects the centrality of creativity to his thinking. Renoir’s theology, it seems, was art: just as his lines lent his paintings their form, art endowed his life with structure. And much as his art enriched the lives of others with beauty, art lent his own life a transcendent significance. By creating beautiful objects of lasting value, art allowed him to feel that he was using his artistic gifts in the most beneficial, dignified way possible. To live a meaningful life, for Renoir, was to create.

      Renoir possessed a deep-seated belief that existence was rendered meaningful through creativity. Renoir had to paint; for Renoir, the stakes of art were almost yehareg v’al ya’avor—do or die. If he could not paint, he did not want to live. In the middle of the film, we see him struggling mightily just to walk a few steps. “I give up,” he says. He was suffering from cripplingly painful rheumatoid arthritis, and needed to exercise in order to manage his pain. “Walking takes all my strength,” he bitterly states, intimating that he wishes to give up the trying regimen. “I won’t have anything left for painting.”

      “And if you can’t use your hands?” his assistant asks.

      “I’ll paint with my dick.”

      This line may be said for laughs, but it encapsulates an entire realm of thought in which creativity is sexualized, and in which the creative process is viewed as a generative act. If human beings are commanded (or blessed, according to what is perhaps the literal meaning of the verse) to “be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:28), one such manner in which this verse can be fulfilled, according to theopoetic theologians, is to be artistically fruitful and create lasting works of art that fill the world with beauty. “The Renoirs refused to paint the world black,” the film tells us. For the Renoirs, the imperative of painting was to make the world beautiful: “There are enough unpleasant things in life. I don’t need to create any more.”

      Creativity as a theology is not confined to artists alone; it is also the theology that animates some of the most influential Jewish thinkers of the past half-century. According to Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, God created human beings in His image so that they would partner with Him in perfecting His unfinished world. To be in the image of God, according to Rabbi Soloveitchik, means to possess some of the capacities of God. Invoking the Talmudic concept of sh’lucho shel adam k’moto (the idea that one’s agent must be like oneself), Rabbi Soloveitchik explains that God was “legally” able to select human beings as His agents СКАЧАТЬ