To you, the sight of Javier Bardem dressed as a priest might elicit a spontaneous barrel roll out the confessional door, assuming, as you would, that you’d been targeted as part of some No Country for Old Men 2: Still No Country From Old Men assassin scenario. For the actual Oklahomans who took part the filming of Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder, however, he served as confessor and confident. In a new 43-minute film assembled from unused footage (only snippets of the interviews appeared in Wonder) and directed by Eugene Richards, the citizens of Bartlesville, Oklahoma, including a grieving mother, an inmate, and a former Ku Klux Klan leader, bend Bardem’s ear about their complicated, often difficult lives. As The New Yorker reports, all the participants knew Bardem was merely playing a priest as a part of the 2012 drama. “Most people knew him as the murderer in No Country for Old Men,” Richards told The New Yorker. “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.” Thy Kingdom Come will debut at South by Southwest in March.
