Cool Tricking

Terrence Malick​ is the quietest of American movie directors. He gives no interviews; he avoids talkshows and festival appearances; he doesn’t feed us stories of what he was doing and why. For decades, he has done his best to avoid being photographed. He isn’t a ‘known American’ or a spokesman for himself in the way of Scorsese, Coppola, Tarantino, Spike Lee or just about any other director. For fifty years he has been involving us in questions about cinema – what it is, what it might be, whether it matters. He has perplexed his admirers; several of his films are regarded by some as masterpieces and by others as misguided asides. Above all, he has insisted on beauty, and his films have us wondering whether beauty is truth or a trick. He is a real person. I met him once and talked with him. He was amiable and decent, or distant.

John Bleasdale’s The Magic Hours is both a monument to unstoppable research and, in the end, an admission that even such a thorough inquiry can remain inconclusive. Bleasdale hasn’t been able to talk to Malick, or to his family. But he has interviewed some of his essential companions – notably the art director Jack Fisk and the editor Billy Weber. Bleasdale is especially good on Malick’s early life and the details of it that have appeared in his movies. But he is an observant enough member of Malick’s church to know that wonder can be compromised or limited by the facts.

Terrence Malick was born in 1943 in rural Illinois, but the family home was in Waco, Texas. It was nurturing but troubled: Malick often fought with his father (a geologist of Assyrian descent) and was mindful of many ideas beyond Texas. Aged twelve, he was sent to a private boarding school in Austin, where he excelled in all his classes and became a talented football player. Against his father’s advice, he went to Harvard and fell under the sway of Stanley Cavell (who wrote a fine book, Pursuits of Happiness, about comedies of remarriage – films like The Awful Truth, His Girl Friday and The Philadelphia Story). He spent some of his senior year at the Sorbonne, met Hannah Arendt and travelled to the Black Forest with her letter of introduction to meet Martin Heidegger (Malick’s translation of The Essence of Reasons was published a few years later). After graduating in 1965 he went to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, but didn’t like the cold and damp, and ‘talking to the Brits was like talking underwater.’

He was 23 years old and ‘the world was calling,’ as Bleasdale puts it. He tried journalism, but foundered trying to write about Che Guevara for the New Yorker. Briefly, he dated Carly Simon; she listened attentively, she said, ‘as he talked with the kind of fervid enthusiasm for Che that I secretly hoped he might have an iota of for me’. He was very serious, but could be very funny too. He taught at MIT for a year but decided he was a poor teacher, inclined to drift. So he applied to a programme at the school newly opened in Los Angeles by the American Film Institute to improve the minds of Hollywood hotshots. He was in a class with David Lynch and Paul Schrader.

Something in him was set on making movies, though years later he would also adapt the Kenji Mizoguchi film Sansho the Bailiff (1954) for the stage. In addition, and almost to demonstrate his caring and not caring, he wrote an early draft of what would become Dirty Harry and got the writing credit on Pocket Money (1972), in which Lee Marvin and Paul Newman are involved with a small herd of cattle. One critic said it felt like a home movie in which the two actors were killing time. One way or another, Malick was finding a way to get round Hollywood’s rules.

He had hoped to make a film of Walker Percy’s novel The Moviegoer, as if inspired by the transcendent moment when the main character, Binx, observes someone who might be William Holden on the streets of New Orleans. Is he the real thing, or a ghost, a technological anticipation of holography, or just the manifestation of an awareness that such gods as Holden had become axiomatic, as much a model for American manhood as Johnny Carson or Bugs Bunny? Instead, in 1973, Malick made an unexpected debut that was arty and high-minded, even though it was called Badlands, which made it sound like an exploitation movie. It was made cheaply, in the tradition of B-movie film noirs, with money from the producer Ed Pressman, the computer millionaire Max Palevsky and Malick himself. It was based on the story of a Nebraska hoodlum called Charles Starkweather (Martin Sheen), who in 1957 killed the father of 14-year-old Caril Ann Fugate (Sissy Spacek, 23 at the time), and then took off with her on the lam across the desolate spaces of legend.

Badlands drew on movies like Gun Crazy and Bonnie and Clyde and made reference to the resemblance between Sheen and James Dean. It also had music by Carl Orff and Erik Satie and an appreciation that the badlands were both beautiful and an obliging metaphor for destructive liberty. Malick knew that country from working summers in the fields, drilling for oil or as a farmer. His movies often look actual or reliable. But few filmmakers have been so alert to the medium’s cool tricking of the real and the abstract. Badlands may be the most serene film he ever made. A philosopher might have stopped then and there. But he was tickled by the idea of life as a moviemaker.

His next film, Days of Heaven (1978), was more flagrantly beautiful and even more widely admired. It’s the story of an outlaw trio fleeing from a murder committed in a factory in Chicago in 1916, and coming to rest at the prairie ranch of a wealthy farmer. The lonesome pioneer was played by Sam Shepard, as iconic and taciturn as Gary Cooper. The outlaws were Richard Gere, Brooke Adams and the haunting 15-year-old Linda Manz, whose croaky voice narrated the story. (This was a bold rescue after the picture hadn’t worked. And Manz improvised the narrative.) The mix of artfulness and melodrama was a little uneasy. The setting and characters were working class but Malick leaned in to the exquisite night fires set to destroy them. As photographed by Nestor Almendros in the magic hour this set piece was so ravishing you could feel edged away from the dirt and calamity towards the still life or dead end that lurks in ‘beautiful’ photography. Here was a crossroads in the tendency of auteur cinema to trade smart fun tonight for respect in eternity. Seen again, over the years, the painted imagery seems saved by the deadpan boredom in Manz’s voiceover.

When things in America appear beautiful it is an omen that the human – the political – begins to be ignored. Days of Heaven may be poised between heaven and hell, but it shows no interest in moralising the distinction between the two. In adapting to the grandeur of its own promise, the film seems to say, America was increasingly removing itself from a reality that might be improved. After the Creation, how could its history go anywhere other than downhill?

Days of Heaven was not a popular success. It won an Oscar for cinematography; Malick won the prize for best director at Cannes, but the Academy did not nominate him. Most reviewers were awed by the film, and over the decades it has been widely accepted as a movie milestone. Despite the modest box office, Paramount offered Malick a million dollars for whatever he might want to make next. But what he did was melt away. He went to live in Paris, and then travelled in earnest. He was said to be nursing a project – it was called Q – that some would later reckon had been the genesis of The Tree of Life. But as if he had gone to the end of the line with beauty, Malick seemed ready to forsake his past and his talent. Travelling became a way of life. He was preoccupied with the natural wonder of remote places. He went to wildernesses, jungles and high mountains, and fell in love with the birds, insects, plants and helpless wildlife. I say ‘helpless’ because I am trying to suggest an indifference to what humans might do, and a despair over the assumption that they are higher than other species. In the wild, where everything is ‘beautiful’, the concept of beauty dissolves – it is so much the sentimentality of an urban culture that fears what it has lost.

In the fashion-needy world of American film, Malick was in danger of being forgotten. And Bleasdale sees no reason to claim he was hurt by that or felt compelled to return to work. Still, after twenty years he did return, with The Thin Red Line (1998). This was easily promotable as a great American war movie. It came from a novel by James Jones, who had written From Here to Eternity; it focused on the taking of a hill in the Guadalcanal campaign; and it was crowded with regular soldiers depicted by big Hollywood names – Malick’s legend had grown such that the stars were eager to work for him. But The Thin Red Line is not conventional. It doesn’t personalise the soldiers, beyond one roaring dispute between a junior officer (Elias Koteas) and his commander (a manic Nick Nolte). There is a sketch of a soldier’s wife who is unfaithful in his absence. And there is one soldier (played by Jim Caviezel) who is a drifter unconvinced by the duties of service. For the rest it is a film about a band of men encumbered by weapons and uniforms in an Eden they do not comprehend or even notice. The big attack is desperate and bloody enough for military enthusiasts. But this is also a film about insects and grasses being trampled before coming back to life, because nature is unimpressed by human business.

Malick got Oscar nominations for best director and best adapted screenplay, but The Thin Red Line was not a hit. It was nearly three hours long, and didn’t honour the war genre’s protocols of heroic combat. The actors served (Adrien Brody, Ben Chaplin, John Cusack, Woody Harrelson, Sean Penn, John C. Reilly, John Savage, John Travolta), though some were filmed and then dropped (Bill Pullman, Mickey Rourke). George Clooney was cast, scripted, shot and widely promoted, but he was on screen for just 83 seconds. In an army of a million stories we are not expected to take any particular individual seriously. Nothing justifies or explains the war; it is the spasm of a maddened species. You do not feel good to be American. Or victorious. It is the closest Malick has come to a flawless picture.

In 2005 Malick released The New World, an attempt to recreate the Virginia colony of the early 17th century through the story of John Smith and Pocahontas. This entailed careful research on appearance, language and Powhatan tribal customs. But the little we know of that time has been Hollywood-ised in the movie. Colin Farrell makes a brooding but vague Smith, so that the energy of the film is taken over by a newcomer, Q’orianka Kilcher, as a cheerfully radiant Pocahontas. Later on, Christian Bale appears as a man who has a better understanding of her; she marries him and sails to England, where she is received by the king. The colony is as much the film’s subject as the love story: nature is turned over to agriculture, and the Indigenous Americans are degraded.

The New World was another commercial let-down. It seems now as if Malick was on the brink of issuing a profound cultural warning but felt too constrained by the imperatives of the big American show to confront fully the dismay of the new world. Was the ruin so great that a proper accounting felt as remote a possibility as a cure?

Any doubts about his feelings on that score were clarified by The Tree of Life, which opened in 2011. It is really two movies. The core concerns a family growing up in Waco, Texas, in the 1950s. Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain play the parents of three sons. They make one of the truest families in American film. It was also in the 1950s, on television, that the institution of the American family was turned into a bland advertising scheme for generations to come. This family, the O’Briens (the name of Malick’s Irish grandmother), don’t watch TV, but their scrutiny of themselves, their environment and their difficulties with each other is utterly absorbing. Chastain’s mother is subdued but eloquent, pale from the dust and her voluntary silence; the father is emphatic to mask his lack of confidence, and proof of the thoughtful actor Pitt had become. And the boys are so believable, lyrical yet inarticulate, you want to be one of them.

That is far from the whole thing. The Tree of Life spreads backwards and forwards. It shows a future in which the eldest of the three sons, and the most rueful, has turned into Sean Penn as an architect disenchanted with what he has built and with the state of the world. There are glimpses of him, at odds with a wife or a lover, walking in a desert to meet the ghosts of the past. When the film opened, Penn spoke about his regret that the explanation of his character’s distress, as scripted and filmed, had been cut from the movie (Malick has never addressed the matter in public). And the film also reaches back in time, way back – not just to a primeval era in which we meet some lugubrious dinosaurs, but to the fiery explosion that must have formed the Earth. These lofty visions feel heavy-handed and pretentious after the common exactness of Waco.

It was understandable by 2011 that Malick, or any of us, might be experiencing an existential crisis in which our feelings about family life could mesh with a fear that creation itself was in such jeopardy that any attempt at self-expression – whether in art, politics or religion – was irrelevant and even fatuous. You could imagine this dilemma inspiring a perverse comedy (think of Billy Wilder or Paul Thomas Anderson running it, let alone Preston Sturges) in which a respected movie director sits in a room full of Hollywood execs. He pitches a film about a vexed family from the 1950s and his own growing anxiety that nothing quite matters. The suits suggest that he warm it up with a little sex and computer-generated violence: they see Will Smith in an abandoned Manhattan, pursued by mad dogs. They perk up and crack open more San Pellegrino. Nevertheless, the room gradually sinks into depression over what their purpose can be, beyond making money from sentimental fantasies and superhero movies. A sort of pornography beckons – not just sex and violence, but dumb riffs on happiness or feeling good, and the dogma in which shots and storylines fit together like Ikea furniture. So what are movies for?

Then something happened​ . In the space of two years Malick lost both his parents. He also married for a third time, to a former childhood sweetheart who had several children already. And his working rhythm altered. Between 2011 and 2017, the director who had always taken years to prepare a project and then years more to film and edit it delivered three pictures in quick succession. Bleasdale wants to think highly of them. But I feel these movies – To the Wonder; Knight of Cups; Song to Song – are a falling away. A general audience hardly existed for them, no matter that the films are large and handsome, and still populated by big-name actors. Somehow or other (Bleasdale is not helpful enough on this), Malick raised the funding for these pictures, even as his own commercial energy seemed to be ebbing away. That is palpable on screen. The characters are not cherished by his camera, as everyone is in The Tree of Life or Badlands. And where those films had delighted in real settings, the later ones take place in the aspic of abandoned luxury hotels, or in the mise-en-scène of advertising clichés.

In To the Wonder, Ben Affleck is an American in France who falls in love with a woman from Ukraine (Olga Kurylenko). They are both beautiful in the way a fashion magazine takes for granted, though Affleck is so de-energised you suspect he is sulking at not having been given a script. Their romance rises and falls, and at some point Affleck picks up with Rachel McAdams. Does he settle with her? I’m never sure, or any more sure than Affleck is. For two hours these lovely ghosts drift in and out; the women have a habit of going off in slow whirls instead of walking. They murmur voiceovers on the soundtrack and there is a vein of music that might be thought religious. It’s not so much that it’s thin, pale and enervated as that it seems weary of film itself. The ‘wonder’ is too often a daze.

To the Wonder wasn’t a detour, but a map for the future. It was followed by Knight of Cups, in which Christian Bale is a Hollywood screenwriter at a creative impasse who entertains the dithery attention of several women, including Cate Blanchett, Freida Pinto, Isabel Lucas and Natalie Portman. The film is cloudy, set in a Los Angeles that is romantic yet listless, weirdly detached from the real energy in that archaic magic kingdom. It isn’t just that Malick appeared to have lost faith in writing and directing extended treatments of love or its loss. Beyond dispensing with a script, he had moved to a way of filming and editing that abandoned the habitual grammar. Just as there are no ‘scenes’ or crucial situations, so the image keeps breaking away from sequence or the way dialogue is conventionally shot. The couplings fragment and overlap; they stream, even if that notion wasn’t yet current. We are not meant to know their limits. So ‘incidents’ accumulate, lost to any thought of order or emotional coherence. And in the hushed yearning voices and the wash of music, we begin to wonder if the organising is being left to some other agency, external to the movie – an audience, longing to be moved, or a god?

There was a third film, Song to Song, set in Austin, in which Ryan Gosling, Rooney Mara and Natalie Portman are would-be musicians and Michael Fassbender an impresario. I think it’s dreadful. And I doubt I can live long enough now to find its wonder.

Malick admitted that perhaps he had been mistaken in forsaking script and drama, or in not developing characters in his movies. I was relieved when in 2019 he seemed to recall his old self with A Hidden Life, the story of a humble German farmer, Franz Jägerstätter, who advanced towards his execution in 1943 by refusing to take an oath of fealty to Hitler and his regime. The beauty of the Alpine setting and its harmony with the moral challenge seemed as masterful as anything Malick had ever done. It felt like a religious picture or something Robert Bresson might have attempted, and in addressing the question of whether to be complicit with evil it led one towards a larger anxiety, that stories might lose their worth in a world close to ending. I do feel that there is in Malick’s work an ultimate unease with the idea of expression altogether. Yet he has not stopped. There is a new film in the works, The Way of the Wind, about the life of Christ. Géza Röhrig plays Jesus, Mark Rylance is Satan. It was shot in 2019. The word is that it will open at Cannes in May. But I’m not sure they said which year.