What do Ada Ushpiz’s Vita Activa: The Spirit of Hannah Arendt and
Terence Malick’s Knight of Cups, have
in common. It would seem nothing. The former is a documentary about one of the
greatest and most controversial thinkers of the 20th Century and the
latter is a fiction about an alienated Hollywood screenwriter, Rick, played by Christian Bale. First of
all these two unlikely bed fellows both have trouble coming to a timely end and both deal with thinkers. The
Ushpiz film, a tiresome attempt to unify a plethora of disjointed material
around no theme in particular, repeats the leitmotif of Hannah Arendt thinking
with a cigarette in her hand (Arendt was apparently a giant in smoking as well
as philosophy, a fact that is also underscored in Margarethe von Trotta’s Hannah Arendt in which Barbara Sukowa
playing Arendt is constantly puffing away).
Rick, like Arendt, is frequently looking out
meditatively during the Malick film, but the comparison ends there since what goes on in Rick's head, in contrast to Arendt's well thought out pronunciamentos, can only be
called stinking thinking. Do all screen writers walk around Malibu engaging in
interior monologues which can be neatly translated into voice overs? Are all
seeking to be awakened from an existential sleep and do all of them
intermittently find themselves waking up in the middle of conversations that sound
like lousy adaptations of Oedipus,
Cain and Abel and Macbeth? Do they all look like they have seen Fellini’s 8 ½ and Stanley Kubrick’s Eye’s Wide Shut one too many times and
do all their girl friends and especially the one played by Cate Blanchett
(Nancy) also look out vacantly as Monica Vitti did in L’avventura after her friend disappeared? Do all Hollywood
screenwriters wander around the lots of
film studios when they’re not attending fashion shoots populated by half naked
models? Undoubtedly there are lots of people who have been adversely molded by
the unreality of the film industry, but surely not even the most jaded script
writer thinks thoughts like the ones that Malick puts into his main character’s
head. "I dreamt that we were caught in a huge tall wave that engulfed the city," is an example.Yes it's understood that the movie is about a brooding filmic sensibility who, when he isn’t staring out at the sea, is wandering amongst rock formations in
the desert and who on more than one occasion finds himself staring at a craggy
road. But get out! Even by Hollywood standards, this is errant nonsense of the highest
order.
