About the only thing more mysterious than a Terrence Malick production usually ends up being the release date of those films. Sometimes they roll out in limited release with an eye toward potential awards recognition, as with The Tree of Life. And sometimes the Malick film plays a festival circuit – for as long as a year – before gliding into theaters in a random month like April.
Such appears to be the case for Malick’s To the Wonder, which The Film Stage claims is opening in April following a February 22nd release in the UK. “While other territories have yet to be confirmed, it’s exciting to know we’ll be able to check this one out in the early part of 2013 and hopefully a trailer is on its way soon,” the site claims.
Which is strange … because it feels like we have been talking about To the Wonder for years. Malick usually tinkers with his films and is hesitant to formally commit to a finished cut and let it go into theaters. His new film co-stars Rachel McAdams, Javier Bardem and Ben Affleck, who made a joke about the slow-paced drama by saying it “makes The Tree of Life look like Transformers.” Rumor has it the dialogue in Wonder is basically non-existent, with Affleck saying it “feels to me like more a memory of a life than a literal story in real time of someone’s life, the way movies more commonly are. This pastiche of impressionistic moments, skipping across the character’s life and moving in a nonlinear way, mirror, in my mind, the way one remembers one’s life. It’s a little hypnotic and you’re a little bit in a daze -- it’s more fluid than real life is.”
Which, if you love Malick’s deliberate style, is music to your ears. But if you prefer movies like Affleck’s Argo, which the actor-director was actually promoting alongside To the Wonder at this year's Toronto, Venice and Telluride festivals this fall, you’re probably going to want to bail on the new Malick long before it even reaches theaters early next year.
