Song to Song Review

For roughly twenty minutes, Emmanuel Lubezki's camera is enough on its own. He shoots Austin in wide angle at the last light of the day, drifting through recording studios and half furnished mansions and festival crowds, and the images have a tactile restlessness almost nobody else gets on film. Then the method eats the movie. Rooney Mara and Ryan Gosling murmur their interior lives in voiceover while the scenes refuse to hold a thought long enough for it to become one, and what is left is two hours of beautiful people trailing their fingers along walls.

Michael Fassbender is the only actor handed something to play, a producer whose appetite turns genuinely frightening when he pulls Mara into his arrangement with another woman. Natalie Portman's waitress is given a tragedy the edit cannot be bothered to build toward. Val Kilmer takes a chainsaw to an amplifier and then disappears from the film.

Malick had already worked this vein twice, in To the Wonder and Knight of Cups, and the third pass has the least underneath it. Whole sequences feel salvaged rather than shot, which is what happens when performance gets treated as raw material for a collage instead of as acting.