TIFF 2012: Terrence Malick’s ‘To the Wonder’ Wonders About Love

Oh Terrence Malick, what are you up to? Your films are always beautiful, but they just wander. Following up The Tree of Life last year, legendarily reclusive director Terrence Malick has delivered his next film, To the Wonder, starring Ben Affleck and Olga Kurylenko, and for about 15 minutes, the lovely Rachel McAdams. Whereas Tree of Life was a visual portrait about family and childhood, To the Wonder is about love, and the pains of it, and the ebb and flow of it. But it just shows it, it doesn’t really say anything about it in the end. Instead, it asks endless questions, to which there’s no definitive answers given or even hinted. The main piece of the story, if there even is one, in To the Wonder is the relationship between Affleck’s Neil and Kurylenko’s Marina. The two meet in Paris and fall in love, but it’s not a straightforward …