This is the low point of the Terrence Malick canon: despite moments of visual panache, the Malickian style descends here into mannerism, cliche and self-parody. His epiphanic moments of wonder, generally deployed to evoke the American heartland or ordinary people generally, are now applied to the silly and self-important world of an LA screenwriter (Christian Bale) undergoing the least interesting spiritual crisis in history. The golden-hour sunsets, whispery voiceovers and woozy flashback-montages feel flaccid.
With its images of the natural world and occasional dinosaur fantasy sequences, Malick’s docu-meditation on the eternal mystery of existence is in effect a footnote or bonus feature to his film The Tree of Life (as is, arguably, his To the Wonder). Malick studied the philosopher Martin Heidegger when he was younger and there is something rather Heideggerian at his simple stupefaction at the very fact of existence: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” intones Brad Pitt’s sonorous voiceover. The cosmic effusions make it a spectacular Imax event, although dramatically weightless.
Like Knight of Cups, this film applies Malick’s dreamy-sublime authorial style to a subject matter that is perhaps unworthy of it, and exposes it to ridicule. But it works better. This is not the world of movies, but the music scene in Austin, Texas: Ryan Gosling is the up-and-coming singer in love with Rooney Mara, who is also in love with Michael Fassbender’s charismatic, charming but sleazy producer. The dramatic shape is dissolved in the woozy, spacy Malickian rhapsody, but this has distinctive urgency and force.
The second of Malick’s second world war films (the first being The Thin Red Line) is set in Austria, where the conscientious objector Franz Jägerstatter (August Diehl) was executed in 1943 for refusing to take the Hitler oath as a Wehrmacht conscript. The film’s idealism and sincerity is rendered self-conscious by the subject and setting, which work against Malick’s flair for finding the trandscendent in the ordinary, though Jägerstatter’s decision not to publicise his dissent gives his crisis a personal, interior quality that is amenable to the Malick approach. Audiences might ponder the director’s early interest in Heidegger, who notoriously supported the Nazi regime.
Malick followed up his Cannes Palme d’Or winner, The Tree of Life, just two years later with this, another tragi-romantic rhapsody in blue. It was received rather coldly by pundits, yet to recover from the previous one. In Paris, Ben Affleck’s stolid engineer falls for Olga Kurylenko’s sensual free spirit. All the Malick tropes are present and correct: golden-hour shooting, whispered narrative, wordless outdoor memory sequences. Perhaps they are overfamiliar, but the passionate seriousness of this film deserves attention.
Before this film was released, Malick had been absent for around 20 years, long enough to have accumulated a Salingeresque reclusive mystery and glamour. This comeback astonished the film world: a three-hour second world war movie about the Battle of Guadalcanal in the Pacific in 1942, conducted in unrepentantly Malickian terms of static, ruminative rapture. It was the moment in which his style evolved into the Malickian trance mode, leaving behind conventional editing and pacing. The all-star cast included Sean Penn, Nick Nolte and George Clooney, with a deserter played by Jim Caviezel, whose presence provides the dreamy voiceover-flashbacks.
Malick’s early, slow-moving masterpiece is a superbly achieved piece of Americana with something of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath or Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World — and a romantic and moral dilemma which could have interested Henry James. Richard Gere and Brooke Adams play Bill and Abby, lovers in 1916 pretending to be brother and sister because he is on the run from the Chicago police having killed his factory foreman. They get farm-labouring jobs in Texas: a world of glorious sunsets and wheatfields where the rich owner, Sam Shepard, falls in love with Abby. Because the farmer is terminally ill, Bill ruthlessly encourages Abby to seduce him into marriage so that she can soon become a widow and make them both rich. But the relationship between Abby and her wealthy groom is more complicated.
The only Malick film set (partly) in England – and one of his best: a dream vision of savagery and grace. In 1608, in the Virginia colony, Colin Farrell’s arrogant Captain John Smith falls in love with the tribal chief’s daughter, the fabled Pocahontas, a wonderful performance from Q’orianka Kilcher. The utopian peace of their love affair in the wild elicits from Malick his gift for wordless poetry: a tidal drifting of images and sounds. The final act is a brilliant narrative coup, taking us to the court of James I in England, where Pocahontas has become the bride of Christian Bale’s aristocrat.
Malick’s sensational debut was a true-crime adventure, based upon the notorious 50s spree-killer Charles Starkweather and his girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate. Like Days of Heaven, it owed something to Bonnie and Clyde or even Butch and Sundance. The young Martin Sheen, who notably resembles James Dean, is a hoodlum who falls in love with the trusting 15-year-old Sissy Spacek. He kills her father and they take off together on a deeply mysterious odyssey across the Texan Badlands, heading naturally for a confrontation with their own destruction, but also their dark mythic destiny.
Malick’s toweringly spectacular and strange epic was a Cannes Palme d’Or winner and is the most cataclysmic midlife crisis in movie history. Sean Penn plays an ageing executive who, at a moment of anxiety and self-questioning, is carried back to an ecstatically remembered 50s boyhood in west Texas. There, his stern father Brad Pitt and his gentle, religious wife, Jessica Chastain rule over the family. The mother plants a tree that she tells her sons will reach its maturity long after them, but they are deeply traumatised by the death of one of the boys on military service. In parallel with this inexpressibly painful memory, which only seems to get more agonising as the years go by, Penn’s existential hero considers his own negligible place in the universe, and the film gestures at the vast reaches of geological and stellar time, depicting the origins of man and the cosmos in a huge symphony of images. It returns to the old question of existence and belief: why is anything there at all? The mass and scale of Malick’s vision, its extravagance and even its folly, have something magnificent.
