Young God

You could be forgiven for forgetting that Rick, the half-ghost protagonist of Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups, has a job at all, for the film takes place largely in the long stretches of dissipation and lassitude that pad out his well-appointed, rudderless life. For the record, Christian Bale is portraying a Hollywood screenwriter who, from what we can gather, specialises in comedy – a funny detail, as he’s never once seen to crack a joke. Tumbling in and out of love and bed with a succession of women, he’s still very far from living the dream à la Entourage, trailed to Southern California by a family nightmare: haunted by the memory of one brother who committed suicide; nagged at by another (Wes Bentley), alive but in dire circumstances; and forced to confront his increasing resemblance to his incurably disgruntled father (Brian Dennehy).

Those who like to sift through Malick’s movies for their film à clef tells – and he has given us plenty to work with in the years following 2011’s The Tree – have a lot to unpack here. There’s the blowhard, somewhat pretentious patriarch, embodied in younger days by Brad Pitt in , and again the figure of the brilliant, tragic brother, referent to Malick’s youngest, Larry, a guitar prodigy who traveled to Spain to study with Andrés Segovia and then, frustrated with his limitations, first broke his own hands, then took his own life.