However accomplished Malick's technique might be in some ways, this mostly comes off, especially in the laborious second hour, as visual doodling without focused thematic goals.

Affleck has joked that "The Tree Of Life" looks like "The Transformers" compared to "To The Wonder". The former certainly delineates a grander, more robust and ambitious narrative than the slim, simple storyline of the latter, which doesn't dip into the origins of the cosmos but does append faith and God to its primary concern, which is the elusive, confusing, mysterious nature of love as surveyed within the lush, spacey delirium of a typical Malick dreamscape.

At times it's a many-splendored thing: the two women who worship Affleck in "To The Wonder" (the other being a hometown girl played by Rachel McAdams, who he briefly falls for after Marina flees back to Europe) feel it passionately and express it a thousand times over in breathy voiceover and transparent facial cues; Affleck, who probably has four lines in the movie but does engage in plenty of melancholy embraces and wistful walks through tall grassy fields, doesn't seem to feel much at all; and Bardem, in a subplot that crops up now and again when you've all but forgotten it, grapples with his love for God as he mingles with his flock in the small Oklahoma town that's also home to Neil and Marina.

Malick is a revered cinematic poet, deservedly so, and striving for lyrical transcendence on screen is his worthwhile ambition. But it's not a get-out-of-jail-free card either. "To The Wonder", to me, played like a slighter (and more repetitive) version of "The Tree Of Life" in most respects, its flowing, exquisite imagery and elegant soundscape certainly pleasing to the eye and ear but the moves and motives of its sketchy characters failing to offer enough substance to nourish the spirit.

express it a thousand times over in breathy voiceover

The director’s methods serve the film’s theme, which is the tension, the imperfect alignment, between human love and its divine correlative. Marina speaks more than once of “the love that loves us,” echoing the priest’s longing to feel the connection to God identified, in the Christian tradition, as grace.
Mr. Malick takes theology seriously and tries to give its impulses a visual form. His camera, swinging upward from earth to sky, traces a path from the sensual to the spiritual, and his men and women are blessed and cursed to inhabit both realms at once. In “The Tree of Life” he managed — to the bafflement of some and the rapt amazement of others (myself included) — to endow the details of individual lives with genuine awe and to afford even skeptics a view of existence from the perspective of eternity.

“To the Wonder” gestures toward the same kind of transcendence but falls short. This is partly because the human situation in the center of the film does not quite support its philosophical scaffolding and partly because the images, gorgeous as they are, do not in themselves possess the evocative power Mr. Malick intends them to have. He works in a shorthand that can sometimes feel facile rather than profound. Images of Neil’s work sampling soil and water at industrial sites and of poor and disabled Oklahomans appear as tokens rather than expressions of social and environmental concern. And the torsos, the sun-dappled fields and the twirling ladies look more commercial than cosmic, as if plucked from advertisements for perfume, high-thread-count sheets or other luxury goods.

This is not entirely Mr. Malick’s fault, and his insistence on finding a cinematic idiom that connects beauty to ultimate truth is noble and sincere. But the fine intentions of “To the Wonder” pave a road to puzzlement, not awe.