Ben Affleck: 5 Awesome Performances And 5 That Sucked

3. Neil - To The Wonder

I should probably preface this entry with the disclaimer that I am not a fan of this newly reemergent Terrence Malick. His movies have become fluid pieces so vague that you can read them as a meditation on just about anything if you try hard enough, but at the same time they are really about nothing. Alongside all this pondering, he's managed to get severely mixed performances out of A-List actors; I will concede that Brad Pitt was excellent in The Tree Of Life, but he shared that movie with Sean Penn who stood in an elevator for most of the movie then strolled on a muddy beach looking drunk. And that's in a movie that has hints of competent filmmaking. You don't want to even get to To The Wonder, an alleged romance starring Affleck and Olga Kurylenko. As Affleck has excelled in the past from having a detailed character to work with, that goes some distance to explaining why what's here is so ambling and detached; he falls four of Malick's distant direction. It's a frustrating performance, because there is a real humanity to it, but between the director Affleck's given and how it's presented that's all crushed.