‘Where did I go wrong,” mopes Christian Bale’s character in the latest Terrence Malick film, Knight of Cups. It’s a question he broods over for two beautifully shot hours. But to the viewer, the answer seems simple: you didn’t go wrong! Your life is fantastic. You look like Christian Bale. You don’t have any health issues or addictions. You’re an in-demand screenwriter, and yet, instead of doing any work, you spend your days wandering around decadent Hollywood house parties and strolling along the beach in an Armani suit. True, you’ve broken up with your wife (Cate Blanchett), but your subsequent girlfriends are played by Natalie Portman, Imogen Poots, Freida Pinto, Teresa Palmer and Isabel Lucas – and that’s not including all the nubile models who keep frolicking in your hotel room. A film that could easily be retitled First World Problems: The Movie, Knight of Cups is laden with voice-over assuring us that Rick is racked with regret. But anyone who watched it with the sound turned down might assume that it was an unusually arty episode of Entourage. Are we supposed to take this existential fretting seriously?
There’s certainly a lot of it about. Navel-gazing dramas keep asking us to take pity on wealthy, attractive people who are starting to feel that being wealthy and attractive isn’t quite as fulfilling as they had expected. Never mind the vintage sports cars and the designer wardrobes, they say. Never mind the luscious friends and lovers. And never mind the highly paid, creative jobs that most people would kill for. Having everything you ever dreamed of is actually a curse.
It’s not an inherently boring theme. And any film-maker who has made it to the top of their profession, only to find that they’re still not very cheerful, must feel that they have something to say on the matter. They may also think of themselves as heirs to Federico Fellini. In the maestro’s 8 1/2 (1963), Fellini represents himself as Guido (the peerlessly handsome Marcello Mastroianni), a lauded director who is struggling to get started on a sci-fi epic. Guido’s biggest headache is how to keep his lusty mistress away from his loyal wife, but Fellini brings such mischief, melancholy and imagination to the scenario that the film is regarded as one of cinema’s supreme masterpieces. It’s no wonder that it has so many imitators, from Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories to Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty, via Rob Marshall’s musical version of 8 1/2, Nine. (In which Guido is played by Daniel Day-Lewis, and his main concern is who is going to lure him into a luxury hotel suite next – Marion Cotillard, Penélope Cruz or Kate Hudson? The heart bleeds.) But however often directors return to the theme of being prosperous but miserable, film has to be the worst possible medium in which to explore it.
At any time, it’s difficult for a cinema audience to feel sorry for a character who is phenomenally successful: can anyone cope with Julia Roberts’s Hollywood A-lister bemoaning her lot in Notting Hill’s dinner-party scene? But at a time when we’re reeling from an economic crash, such laments for the rich and famous can be especially insufferable. In Sex and the City 2, Carrie and her pampered pals overcame piffling insecurities by travelling, via private jet and chauffeur-driven limo, to a seven-star hotel in Abu Dhabi. Judd Apatow’s This Is 40 didn’t have a plot as such. Just Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann grumbling about their financial worries, because neither her clothing boutique nor his indie record label was a money-spinner. A pertinent issue, you might think, considering how hard it is to keep a small business going these days. But it might have seemed a bit more drastic if the couple had done some work occasionally, instead of nipping off for weekends in a swanky seaside hotel. There was certainly no sign of them selling their Lexus, their BMW or their pristine suburban mansion.
When asked whether his characters were just too well-off for viewers to be moved by their paltry troubles, Apatow countered that you could pose the same question about The Great Gatsby. Judd, I love you, but you’re no F Scott Fitzgerald. Yet he has a point. It’s undoubtedly easier to sympathise with the affluent but vaguely anxious protagonists of books than of films.
Take Revolutionary Road. Richard Yates’s novel, published in 1961, was acclaimed as an unsparingly bleak portrait of a poisonous marriage, and a devastating attack on 1950s conformity. The failings of its main character, Frank Wheeler, ooze through every page. But Sam Mendes’s 2008 film doesn’t have the same power. How could it? Leonardo DiCaprio’s Frank Wheeler does a morning’s paper-shuffling in a Manhattan office, has a long, Martini-drenched lunch with his colleagues, retires to a hotel room with his secretary, and then slips back into his snazzy suit and trilby. When he returns to his spotless, barn-sized house in the country, his wife, April (Kate Winslet), and his two adoring children are waiting for him with a birthday cake. Kate Winslet. Birthday cake. Talk about the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
Read The Age of Innocence and you can ache for Newland Archer as his hopes are crushed by the conventions of New York’s high society. Watch Martin Scorsese’s gorgeous adaptation, and you’re too busy swooning over Daniel Day-Lewis’s cheekbones (yes, him again) and Gabriella Pescucci’s Oscar-winning frocks. So what if Archer is forced to spend his life with Winona Ryder rather than Michelle Pfeiffer? It could be worse. Prose allows us direct access to the characters’ tortured thoughts, so we’re constantly reminded of their angst. Mainstream films, on the other hand, constantly remind us how glamorous the characters and their surroundings are: that’s what cinematographers, costume designers and makeup artists are there for. Movie stars, too. When we first meet Frank and April in the film of Revolutionary Road, we can’t see the broken souls described by Yates, because we’re also seeing Leo and Kate. And we’re recalling, however unconsciously, their many appearances in magazines and perfume commercials, on red carpets and chatshows.
The advertising and entertainment industries devote vast resources to convincing us that we would be happier if only we were more like Winslet and DiCaprio, not to mention Bale, Roberts and all of the other mentioned above. We are assured, daily, that they are the most desirable and enviable people on the planet. What’s more, we are assured that they are at their most desirable and enviable when they are depicted precisely as they are in these films: flatteringly lit, draped in expensive clothes and jewellery, posing on beaches or emerging from gleaming cars. How can any film undo all those years of brainwashing?
A TV series such as Mad Men can manage it, because it has so much more time to play with, but in two hours at the cinema, not even Malick can make us weep for Bale’s bespoke moaner. We can believe movie stars are spies and superheroes. We can believe that they’re rulers of post-apocalyptic dystopias. But asking us to believe that they’re gloomy about their perfect features and celebrity lifestyles? That’s going too far.
Knight of Cups is released in the UK on 6 May.
