
Neil (Ben Affleck) is an American traveling in Europe who meets and falls in love with Marina (Olga Kurylenko), a Ukrainian divorcée who is raising her 10-year-old daughter Tatiana in Paris. The lovers travel to Mont St. Michel, the island abbey off the coast of Normandy, basking in the wonder of their newfound romance. Neil makes a commitment to Marina, inviting her to relocate to his native Oklahoma with Tatiana. He takes a job as an environmental inspector and Marina sett... (Full plot summary below)
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Neil (Ben Affleck) is an American traveling in Europe who meets and falls in love with Marina (Olga Kurylenko), a Ukrainian divorcée who is raising her 10-year-old daughter Tatiana in Paris. The lovers travel to Mont St. Michel, the island abbey off the coast of Normandy, basking in the wonder of their newfound romance. Neil makes a commitment to Marina, inviting her to relocate to his native Oklahoma with Tatiana. He takes a job as an environmental inspector and Marina settles into her new life in America with passion and vigor. After a holding pattern, their relationship cools. Marina finds solace in the company of another exile, the Catholic priest Father Quintana (Javier Bardem), who is undergoing a crisis of faith. Work pressures and increasing doubt pull Neil further apart from Marina, who returns to France with Tatiana when her visa expires. Neil reconnects with Jane (Rachel McAdams), an old flame. They fall in love until Neil learns that Marina has fallen on hard times. Gripped by a sense of responsibility - and his own crisis of faith - he rekindles with Marina after another trip to France. She returns with him to Oklahoma, resuming her American life. But the old sorrows eventually return.
Leave your thoughts about To the Wonder.
| TV GuidePerry SeibertThis approach to the material is so quintessentially late-period Malick that naysayers will accuse the man of parodying himself. In truth, he's come up with his purest vision -- and his most streamlined work since Badlands. |
| Spirituality and PracticeFrederic and Mary Ann BrussatA bold and ground-breaking film by Terrence Malick that is a mystical meditation on the many manifestations of the spiritual practices of yearning and love. |
| San Francisco ExaminerJeffrey M. AndersonIt's a movie to be purely explored, felt and intuited. "To the Wonder" is an example of filmmaking of the highest degree, placing Malick alongside Bresson, Kubrick and Antonioni. |
| Commercial Appeal (Memphis, TN)John BeifussTerrence Malick is to light as Orson Welles was to shadow: the master. |
| Capital Times (Madison, WI)Rob Thomas"To the Wonder" is an imperfect film that perhaps reaches too high and too far, but I admire the effort, and am grateful for those moments when Malick does connect, and the film suddenly becomes glorious. |
| TheMovieReport.comMichael DequinaIn its conventionally alienating extremes, this is probably Malick's most pure expression of his uniquely impressionistic, almost extra-sensory cinematic gifts, transporting one to a meditative wavelength of emotional experience. |
| Arts FuseGerald PearyTo The Wonder - the best American feature by far of 2013: beautiful, compassionate, tragic, transcendent. |
| Film School RejectsJack GirouxTo the Wonder shouldn't be passed off as "self-parody," but as Malick's self-destructed misfire. |
| Laramie Movie ScopeRobert RotenTerrence Malick's films have not been very accessible in the past. If this one is any indication, they are becoming less so. The narrative is thin, slow moving and ambiguous in places. It is moody, sombre and melancholy. |
| Chicago Sun-TimesRoger EbertThere will be many who find To the Wonder elusive and too effervescent. They'll be dissatisfied by a film that would rather evoke than supply. I understand that, and I think Terrence Malick does, too. But here he has attempted to reach more deeply than that: to reach beneath the surface, and find the soul in need. |