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Brushes With Grace: Terrence Malick’s New Worlds
The Jamestown Expedition arrives in Virginia in Terrence Malick’s The New World (2005).
New Worlds: The Films of Terrence Malick
TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)
Saturday June 4 to Wednesday June 15
The main thing, I think, that differentiates Terrence Malick from other American filmmakers who may be reasonably considered among the greatest (Altman, Lynch, Ray, and, sure, Scorsese) is that Terrence Malick apologists don’t really exist. Nobody who admires his films has to have that admiration troubled or undermined by a Quintet or a Lost Highway or a Gangs of New York. That he’s helmed a measly five features in 38 years, and that his canon doesn’t suffer the bloat of his contemporaries, doesn’t impact his track record either—not in any meaningful way. Maybe the law of averages will kick in and Malick will get around to making a bad movie, but for now he’s as unimpeachable as unimpeachable gets. Five films, each differently rich and suggestive, and constituting a career marked by a rare degree of thematic cohesion. And no blind spots. It’s ideal retrospective programming.
Luckily, the (TIFF Bell) Lightbox is mounting just that retrospective.
New Worlds: The Films of Terrence Malick, begins Saturday and, as its name suggests, organizes itself around the image of Malick as transcendentalist: one who has come to look at the world, to paraphrase Emerson, through new eyes. Who builds his own worlds. But—and don’t let his use of vapoury voiceover narration (once ironic, now by all appearances totally sincere) sway you otherwise—he’s not some airy-fairy naïf. Though critics will call out his tendency for indulgence, as if it’s egregious for anyone doing what can conceivably called art to indulge their passions or curiosities, it’s not like he’s oblivious to the cultural and aesthetic crosscurrents eddying all around him. He’s a serious thinker and artist who, implausibly, operates within what’s commonly understood as the most cramping and discouraging of artistic systems, i.e., the American studio picture system. His films have been called lyrical, poetic and, even, Heideggerean. But more important than all of this, Terrence Malick makes real movies.
Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek in Badlands (1973).
When Malick’s first feature, Badlands ( 
), was released in 1973, American cinema was in a state of flux. The collapsed studio system of Hollywood’s “Golden Era” has been supplanted by a new crop of young, edgy filmmakers (Scorsese, Coppola, Friedkin, Rafelson) invested in a kind of cinema more indebted to the rhythms and textures of the European art house than the pomp and circumstance of Old Hollywood. Loosely based on the 1958 killing spree of Charles Starkweather and his girlfriend, Caril Anne Fugate, Badlands cast Martin Sheen as Kit, a cucumber-cool smalltown ne’er-do-well on the run from the law with his teenage sweetheart, Holly (Sissy Spacek).
Badlands would make a nice double-feature with Arthur Penn’s oft-cited New Hollywood kick-starter, Bonnie and Clyde. But Malick trades in that film’s sexiness for sociopathy. Unlike Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, Kit and Holly aren’t American anti-heroes. Their vacancy (even Kit’s self-styled James Dean posturing positions him as an empty vessel, further reflected in the doe-eyed hollowness of Holly’s adoring gaze) suggests not the rewriting of the narrative of America success so much as detachment from it. Ditto his follow-up, 1978’s epic Days of Heaven ( 
), which develops in Sam Shepard’s nameless ranch-owner (credited simply, The Farmer) an image of alienation from the tilling of the earth that stands in sharp relief to the American image of the noble homesteader (think Van Heflin in George Stevens’ Shane). It also chucked conventional plotting, privileged the narration of an overtly romantic youngster (Linda Manz) over dialogue, boldly sullied the incest taboo, and crystalized a kind of eerie, profound, and deeply beautiful cinema that would come to typify Malick’s sensibility. A sensibility that can be suitably called “transcendentalist.”
Days of Heaven, set on a Texas ranch in 1916 and starring Richard Gere and Brooke Adams as lovers who pose as brother and sister in order to exploit the wealth of Shepherd’s farmer, captures a moment at which the process of industrialization radically changed our relationship with the world around us. Hired hands work the harvest and hop on a train to the next job, while the Farmer espies them through a telescope, an almost burlesque image of the alienated landowner. Malick’s lensing of this historical moment is not didactic, but evasive. The camera will cut away to gorgeous panoramas of blowing, almost weeping, fields of wheat, signifying the disjoint of subject and object. And like Emerson, the reconciliation (or at very least, the radical rejigging) of this relationship forms the emotional and intellectual core of Malick’s cinematic project.
Richard Gere and Brooke Adams in Days of Heaven (1978).
Considering how unlike Malick’s 1970s features were from those of the rest of his ostensible New Hollywood contemporaries, it makes sense that he would recede for 20 years before releasing his next film. When his sprawling Second World War picture, The Thin Red Line ( ), finally hit theatres in 1998, the dust of the ‘80s blockbuster era had settled and American filmmaking had perfected its baldly commercial operations. (The rise of “Second New Wave” American directors like Tarantino, Rodriguez, and Soderbergh in the ‘90s seems in hindsight like a kind of portent heralding Malick’s return.) The Thin Red Line did to the war film what Days of Heaven did to the western and the prairie melodrama: offer a vision of genre so disinterested in the pre-existing moulds that it broke them altogether. Holding it up against Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (released the same year) proves a remarkably instructive example of the competing possibilities of American filmmaking.
With a massive cast containing darn-near every male actor in Hollywood at the time (John Travolta, George Clooney, John C. Reilly, Woody Harrelson, Jim Caviezel, Sean Penn, John Cusack, Elias Koteas, etc., etc., etc.), united by the (not at all mistaken) belief that working with Malick amounts to instant artistic cred, the film used intense imagery of Pacific Theatre combat to foreground what Caviezel’s intermittently-AWOL Pvt. Witt describes as “the war in the heart of nature.” Without sentimentalizing combat or all that stuff we often here about the brotherly bonds of war, Red Line is extremely powerful in its suggestion that in the uphill battle of war, and in all its brutality, there is the inherent possibility of a kind of grace that equipoises all the evil. It’s pretty easy to roll your eyes at, at times. But resisting the temptation yields rewards greater than holding yourself above a haughty bit of voiceover. Its images of soldiers stolen by the natural beauty of the world around them, a beauty which was overwritten by the civilizing influence of Europeanism in America, also provides the tie to his next film, 2005’s The New World.
The New World ( 
) may not be Malick’s most definitive film (that mantle’s generally reserved for Days of Heaven) but it’s his most exquisitely realized. And, for what it’s worth, my favourite. It’s also probably his easiest to scrutinize. This is probably because it’s a love story, and a love story about Pocahontas (Q’orianka Kilcher) and John Smith (Colin Farrell) at that.
The New World also provides plenty of ammo for anyone who would volley criticisms of “tree fetishism” against Malick’s canon. What such criticisms miss is that Mallick isn’t dopey enough—well, probably isn’t dopey enough (he’s notoriously cagey and shies away from media interviews, so it’s hard to know what his intentions are, exactly)—to think that man can return to relationship with the natural environment enjoyed by the “naturals” (as Native Americans are referred to in the film) before the arrival of the Jamestown Expedition in the film’s opening scenes. New World isn’t so much a lament for nature as a document indexing history, myth, and philosophy. Like Farrell’s Smith, who arrives in Virginia literally in chains and returns to England only figuratively bound, the viewer experiences only the brush with grace, yanked away as soon as we realize that we can no longer see the trees or the clouds or the water babbling over the rocks as expressions of some grander, all-embracing beauty, but as objects in our experiential sphere. It’s like Emerson’s transparent eyeball—the mystical idea of understanding oneself as one with nature and, thus, with god—but seen through a peephole.
This, then, is what Malick’s “New Worlds” offer up. They’re not “worlds” like the richly-imagined fabulations of comic books, the many-peopled moving dioramas of Robert Altman, or the just-askew small towns of David Lynch that seem to exist just below the radar of normality. They’re (quote) “real” worlds. Worlds existing in the realm of myth, history, and tabloid news reinvigorated, like they’re being seen for the first time—a fleeting, flickering gaze of the transcendental. And if these abundant pleasures aren’t enough to allure even the most hardened cynic to check out the retrospective then, yes, there’s also gun violence and a plague of locusts and a frothing, barking-mad Nick Nolte. And Malick’s new one, the Palme d’Or-winning Tree of Life, even has dinosaurs.
How many Heideggereos can say that?
Badlands
Days of Heaven
The Thin Red Line
The New World
The Tree of Life
Stills courtesy of TIFF.