Days of Heaven: Birds, Terrence Malick and Suzuki Roshi
By Robert Reese
“When you think Buddha said something wonderful and I must find out what he meant—then your mind is directed towards Buddha’s words so you don’t hear the birds. Always we sacrifice various actual realities because we stick to something and we stick to something that looks like very good,” Shunryu Suzuki Roshi.
“To the Wonder,” Terrence Malick’s 2012 film recently screened on Netflix, is a simple contemporary love story. Dissimilar to “The Tree of Life,” it does not includes scenes in the afterlife, ancient history or distant worlds. At the same time, “To the Wonder” is no less a metaphysical spectacular, which is all the more extraordinary because it is a movie about ordinary contemporary life. "To the Wonder" contains only a few main characters and a portion of crucial moments in their lives. There is dialogue, but it’s faint and half-uttered, making it essentially a silent film—which only adds to the interior quality.
Like the film’s title, Malick’s art is that of filming situations so seeming mundane and unremarkable as to risk triteness and then to imbue them with visual awe and create a process of re-enchantment. His films are also, by turns, sometimes bloated, pretentious, preoccupied and endlessly dreamy. Mr. Malick’s movies are often discussed in religious terms. Hannah Patterson writes, “The central protagonists in Terrence Malick’s films are caught up in, or driven by, a search: for a different kind of life, a sense of self, a reason for being, or a spiritual presence in the world… characters are taken out the everydayness; their subsequent journeys form the films’ narrative impetus and existential inquiry.”
Plot is often not the most significant feature of a Terrence Malick film, but, for what it’s worth, “To the Wonder” begins in France, where Ben Affleck is in a relationship with a young mother, played by the Ukrainian actress Olga Kurylenko. Across bridges and through the Luxembourg Gardens of Paris, they swirl and pirouette and stare at one another. At Mont Saint-Michel, Kurylenko whispers on the soundtrack (in French), “We climbed the stairs to the wonder.” In the church cloister, lost in an erotic trance, they cuddle again. “Two . . . one,” Kurylenko whispers. “I’m in you. You in me.” Essentially, the story is about how people--tragically and beautifully--come together and fall apart.
Malick has thrown his hat into auteur/philosopher school of cinema. As he brings his love story to light, he also presents serious ideas about the trials of our time, the encounter between the Catholics and Protestants, our relationship to nature—and, most astonishingly, he does so with imageries and sound, not with dialogues and performance.
“To the Wonder” looks like no other film—almost every shot features a wandering, floating, probing, slanting camera. The film’s attention to light is unique, and Malick’s way with his story is equally distinctive. The camera flints and touches on things, seemingly distracted by the movement of wind in grasses and flights of birds. The cinematographer moves solemnly into scenes, as if indicating the re-emergence of some new consciousness. Actor John C. Reilly said that the filming of “The Thin Red Line” was put on hold—including battle scenes with dozens of extras—so Mr. Malick could stop and film birds in flight.
Shunryu Suzuki Roshi had a similar fondness for birds, and, in the film “Particle of Dust” reveals a comparable wandering attentiveness. Interviewed against the green foliage of Tassajara, the impish teacher is drawn to the sound of Stellar jays: “If we try to listen to something wonderful it means we ignore the bird which we are listening to now,” he says gesturing towards the lush woods. “When you think Buddha said something wonderful and I must find out what he meant—then your mind is directed towards Buddha’s words so you don’t hear the birds. Always we sacrifice various actual realities because we stick to something and we stick to something that looks like very good,” he says.
Many of the moments in the film are seemingly random and appear to evoke Suzuki Roshi’s careful, but light, relationship to things, where the call of birds is not less significant than the teaching of the Buddha and the narrative is conjured and suggests rather than show. Malick’s very idea of character and action is as drastic as his vision and, for that matter, as his philosophy, and that comes through in even the barest attempt to summarize the plot.
In “Branching Streams Flow in the Darkness,” Suzuki Roshi says, “Let your ears hear without trying to hear. Let the mind think without trying to think and without trying to stop it. That is practice. More and more, you will have this rhythm or strength as the power of practice. If you practice hard you will be like a child. While we were talking about self-respect a bird was singing outside. Peep-peep-peep. That’s self-respect.”