The week of July 3rd doesn't have much to offer, but there are a few titles of note. Chief among these is Terrence Malick's latest transcendental melodrama Song to Song, which Broad Green Films is releasing on Tuesday. Song to Song isn't a good movie, but it is fascinating for what it reveals about Malick, namely, what a great filmmaker he was when he was deliberating for anywhere from five to twenty years between pictures (people thought he had retired after 1978's Days of Heaven, and then he stealthily dropped The Thin Red Line in 1998) , and how frustrating he's been since speeding up his output. Since 2011, Malick has made five movies (compare that to only four between 1973 and 2005), and without fail, each has been more disappointing than its predecessor. Song to Song, then, represents some kind of creative nadir - it's easily the worst film of Malick's career. The plot, as it were, is inconsequential. Malick sketches (and I'm being generous using that word - I've seen cocktail-napkin drawings with more detail) some good-vs.-evil nonsense wherein an unscrupulous record producer (Michael Fassbender) tries to corrupt two struggling musicians (Ryan Gosling and Rooney Mara), but that interpersonal drama is really just a framework for Malick to hang some gorgeous cinematography and wall-to-wall narrations about the nature of humanity and the universe. Basically, if you've already seen The Tree of Life, you'll already know exactly what to expect. But for all its issues, The Tree of Life found Malick at his most ambitious (who else would think to contrast the upbringing of a small Texas family with the literal beginning and end of the universe?) while Song to Song is so thin it barely leaves an impression. I blame Malick's current shooting style. Say what you will about those early years, but Malick never made a movie unless he had a clear story to tell. All he does now is make the same movie over and over again, and I mean that quite literally. He pieced together his Voyage of Time documentary from unused Tree of Life footage and concepts, while Song to Song was shot during the same production period where Malick also got footage for To the Wonder and Knight of Cups. Major actors appear and disappear across these movies with little rhyme or reason, and as such, all these features feel like they came together in their respective edits, like there was no greater agency guiding the cast and crew on the day. In theory, I get it. Malick is a poet, and he wants to create this free-form space that respects any and all creative ideas. I'm just at a loss for why they're so boring, or why Malick keeps repeating one theme - How Difficult Is This, Oh Modern Life - to ever diminishing results. In particular, Song to Song and Knight of Cups are so similar (spiritual ennui in Hollywood versus in the music industry) that I suspect a stronger, more interesting film would have edited them both together into a tighter two-hour feature. But until Malick isn't content with remix movies in the editing room, we may be as stuck in this cycle as he is. The least essential film of his career.
Thank god, then, for Universal Home Entertainment: if you slog through Song to Song, you can reward yourself with a viewing of the animated feature An American Tail: Fievel Goes West. In terms of how it fits into the whole An American Tail universe, Fievel Goes West is a bit of a headscratcher. I've seen the film at least a dozen times since its release in 1991, and I'm still not quite sure how we went from a thinly veiled version of the Jewish immigrant story to this movie, which finds the title character (voiced by Phillip Glasser) somehow separated from his family and thrust into a laid-back Western comedy. Tonally, Fievel Goes West couldn't be more dissimilar from An American Tail, and you wonder if screenwriter Flint Dille just retrofitted an old script to fit Fievel and the gang when executive producer Steven Spielberg came a 'calling. And yet Fievel Goes West is so delightful that it's hard to care. The film doesn't close to approximating the resonance of the best Westerns, but it looks great and moves fast, thanks to good direction from Phil Nibbelink and Simon Wells, a rousing James Horner score, and some great character work. Dom DeLuise and John Cleese are very funny as Fievel's only friend and the film's Big Bad, respectively, but the real coup here is getting Jimmy Stewart to play the legendary Western sheriff Wylie Burp. Fievel Goes West would be Stewart's big-screen swan song, and he's wonderful in it, his now-gravely warble and years of playing Western heroes not at all dissimilar from Burp doing so much to humanize this otherwise stock character. It's a lovely little performance, and it would be enough to recommend Fievel Goes West even if the movie were underwhelming. Luckily, it works more often than it doesn't, and a whole lot more than that whenever Stewart is onscreen.
Finally, we get another modest little success in the form of Shout Factory's A Shock to the System. This is probably the most high-profile film from director Jan Egleson, and it would have vanished were it not for Shout's new "Select" edition. In theory, I understand why this picture slipped through the cracks. As so many filmmakers did during the 1980s, Egleson is trying to excoriate corporate culture, except he's nowhere near as ruthless or memorable as he needs to be. That's a problem, considering he's making a movie about an ad man who resorts to murder as a means of climbing the executive ladder; sure, it's more barbed than The Secret of My Success, but Egleson doesn't have the filmmaking brio that Oliver Stone showed in Wall Street, nor does he push the envelope like Bret Easton Ellis did with American Psycho. What Egleson has, and it's just enough to merit a viewing, is Michael Caine, who is splendid as the film's psychotic protagonist. Caine walks this fine line between savagery and sublime understatement: no matter how horrible he gets (and he does some awful things), he's able to justify his actions to both himself and us by casting them as matters of simple, utmost necessity. If the film around Caine were playing at the same level, we'd have a black comedy classic (I dream about what might have happened if Martin Scorsese had gotten ahold of this project). As it stands, it stands illustrative of Caine's ability to elevate even the direst of projects. And hey: A Shock to the System is better than The Hand or Jaws: The Revenge. I can certainly say that.