Your mileage may vary when it comes to Terrence Malick, but for me his style has long since worn out its welcome. For years, Malick’s way of doing things has consisted of inviting scores of A-list celebs to be in his films, then shooting hundreds-to-thousands of hours of footage, before wittling down that footage later. That’s lead to incomplete synopsis’ and the vast majority of his stars being cut out of the final film as Malick searches for whatever semblance of a story he can find. One of the worst examples of this was his 2012 film, To the Wonder, but this time Malick’s process has yielded an unexpected result.
Photojournalist Eugene Richards will debut at SXSW the 43-minute short, Thy Kingdom Come, a spinoff of To the Wonder following Javier Bardem’s conflicted priest. As detailed by The New Yorker, Richards was hired by Malick to find actual Bartlesville, Oklahoma residents to question Bardem as he stayed in character. Bardem’s part was never fully realized in To the Wonder, so Richards sought Malick’s approval to take the extra footage and make something new out of it.
Pretty cool idea, and the brief look we get in this teaser looks like potentially powerful stuff. Bardem speaks with numerous subjects, from couples facing an uncertain future to a former Ku Klux Klan member who has renounced his past. Richards explains, “Most people knew him as the murderer in ‘No Country for Old Men. A couple people knew him as Penelope Cruz’s husband. Some didn’t know who he was at all. And absolutely no one cared, in the end, who he was, except that he was there to listen.”
