To the Wonder (Terrence Malick, 2013)

To the Wonder marks the fullest distillation of Terrence Malick’s style even as it violently shakes up the formula like nothing else in his oeuvre from the start. Its opening shots roll out under a blanket of digital snow, lending an immediacy to its central couple’s passionately begun relationship even as it buries some of the romance under heavy image artifacts. Later, back on pristine 35mm stock, Malick and Emmanuel Lubezki bring the same loving aesthetic care to shots of a Sonic Drive-In and a nondescript supermarket that they do to shots of nature. The mundane began to creep into Malick’s frame with The Tree of Life, but even the routines of suburban life were elevated through its overwhelmed child’s perspective, to say nothing of the link of the concrete and uninspiring to the cosmic and ineffable. To the Wonder, however, situates itself firmly within the banality of life, even if the film itself gives over completely to Malick’s cinema of gesture, collage and hushed narration.

The wonder of the title refers to the Merveille of Mont Saint-Michel, the abbey off the coast of Normandy where American Neil (Ben Affleck) and Frenchwoman Marina (Olga Kurylenko) travel after meeting on the former’s European trip. They reach this location not five minutes into the movie, fulfilling the epic ambition of the title through a punny loophole. Where Tree of Life culminated on a beach that elevated reality into the sublime, To the Wonder begins on one, forcing the characters to spend the rest of the film returning to the world. The results make for perhaps Malick’s most harrowing picture, despite laying claim to a corpus in which four of six films contain murder, if not outright war. Violence, pestilence, devastation have always had a place in Malick’s world; Tree of Life even indirectly traced the explosions of The Thin Red Line to a natural history of chaotic destruction and renovation via its intense creation sequence. But To the Wonder rips apart the personal bonds that gives the director’s work its intimacy, pushing farther than the familial strife that tore open holes in his last film and removing (almost) entirely the notes of loving reconciliation and restabilization.

The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011)

[Edited 12/28/11]

"God is closer to me than others of my art."

-Ludwig van Beethoven

In 1733, Johann Sebastian Bach, born and raised a Lutheran, premiered two pieces of what would become his Mass in B minor, which he spent the remaining years of his life expanding and honing until the liturgy used for both major Christian denominations became a full-blown Roman Catholic Mass. Composed in chunks up to his final years, his Missa is disjunctive, consisting of clashing textures reflecting both the different kinds of inspiration that drove him in each writing block as well as the altered emotional state of the composer as he drifted into blindness and illness. Yet the result is one of the undisputed masterpieces of Western classical music, the apotheosis of nearly every musical style of its time in one grand, summarizing statement.

Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life may be the closest the cinema has to its own Mass in B minor: it's gargantuan, encompassing, messy and bold. It's also exquisitely beautiful and personal on a level seemingly impossible for something that feels so vast. Bach spent about two decades tweaking and expanding his mass; Malick has been collecting ideas and images for this for 30 years, and the inspirations behind it likely stretch back even further. The Missa comprises movements under four distinct sections, and The Tree of Life incorporates the themes and styles of the director's four previous features into a film that feels infinite and minute, unwieldy yet perversely whole.

The New World (Terrence Malick, 2005)

Thus far in his slim corpus, each Terrence Malick film has solidified and purified Malick’s transcendentalist belief in the connection of man and nature, even when he shows horrible, destructive acts. The murder spree in Badlands fits with uncomfortable harmony with the flat plains and scattered, gnarled grass lining the sides of Midwestern country roads. Days of Heaven moved deeper into that territory to bask in the glow of our amber waves of grain, yet the mangled love triangle and plot to steal the farmer’s wealth contrasts to the invasion of locusts naturally laying waste to the area. The Thin Red Line builds further on this contrast, presenting even the monstrous environmental and human cost of war as an exaggerated of the destruction inherent in an ecosystem even as it pushed gently and spiritually for an end to such horrors.

Malick’s films, like Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poetry, make me want to walk in a field, palms outstretched, letting leaves and blades of foliage brush against my fingertips. When I experience their work, I feel that I can go outside and be jolted by the current running through nature, running through us as well if we’d stop breaking the circuit. Their conceptions of the universe are heady, allegorical and concerned less with what’s before their transparent eyeball than its spiritual essence (even the romance between Smith and Pocahontas feels like an encapsulation of the pure love of nature for those who can tap into its grace). Yet they also are some of the most tactile artists to ever live, offering intoxicating panoramas of nature and the past, present and future it contains. Unlike Emerson, however, Malick lacks the self-absorbed narrow-mindedness that undercuts his own idealism. Malick seeks to capture it all, even when he leaves out one side entirely (as he did in The Thin Red Line). His view of destruction as but one facet within nature is but one example of his more universal belief in the force that connects us.

That Malick would make a film about Native Americans seems so obvious it’s a wonder he didn’t find the inspiration to do it about 30 years before he released The New World in 2005. Perhaps it was for the best, though: by building off the moral, philosophical and natural themes he’d refined to that point, Malick crafted unquestionably the most singular film to chart the English settlement of America and the interaction with the tribes already there. It is not about environmentally indifferent white settler vs. the attuned native, though certainly conflict and discrepancies exist, as do moments of horrific violence that destroy so much that nature csually covers over in a season. Nor is it a Disneyfied version of John Smith’s romance with Pocahontas, a symbolic union of an open-minded Englishman bonding with a purer spirit, though elements of that exist as well.

Badlands

"I saw her standin' on her front lawn just twirlin' her baton Me and her went for a ride sir and ten innocent people died"
-Bruce Springsteen, "Nebraska"

Terrence Malick began work on his debut Badlands in his second year at the American Film Institute, crafting not only a script but a sales pitch complete with videos and slides for potential investors. It didn't matter, though; he got his money on the spot and ended up crafting possibly the best "road" movie ever made.

Loosely based on the infamous 1957 murder spree of Carl Starkweather and his girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate, Badlands opens with garbage man Kit (Martin Sheen) walking up to Holly (Sissy Spacek), surely enough, on her front porch twirling a baton. In her voice-over, Holly describes Kit as "the handsomest man I ever saw--he looked just like James Dean." Kit gets fired from his job, and comes to sweep Holly off her feet and take her out of this dead-end town. Soon, Kit leaves bodies wherever they go.

Malick uses the voice-over to create a dialectic between the actual events on-screen and how the character interpreted them. This style would become Malick's trademark, bringing Linda's detached perspective to the love triangle in Days of Heaven and prying into the minds of the soldiers in The Thin Red Line. Holly speaks like the child she is: she views their road trip as the ultimate romantic getaway. Even as Kit blows another hole in some poor sap for no reason, she narrates her journey as if reading out of a teen magazine. Though the real Caril Ann was supposedly just as violent as Starkweather, Malick turns Holly into an innocent child who follows her boyfriend simply because he likes her. "I wasn't popular at school on account of having no personality and not being pretty," and this flattery wins her over as if Kit were Romeo incarnate.

What makes the film so interesting is how little Malick cares about these characters' psyches; Kit never gives a reason for killing, nor does he seem to enjoy it, but he murders anyway. Martin Sheen, in his major debut and possibly his finest performance, plays Kit as a man driven by loneliness and isolation. We don't know--and we never will--why he kills, but we know something went wrong in his life to make him this way. Spacek keeps Holly from being one-dimensional by giving her just enough smarts to figure out that Kit is...a little off. At the end she muses what may have drove him to his ways, but as is often the case with Malick, the point is to ask the questions, not get the answers.

Holly's voice-over and Malick's structuring deliberately rob the film of emotional impact, as he would do with his subsequent films. When Holly starts to spend time with Kit, her father disapproves and, as punishment, shoots her dog. "I was greatly distressed," recalls Holly. Because Kit gets no pleasure from his killings, the murders seem so matter-of-fact that they're emotionally draining. Malick's films would play out like anti-climaxes if they didn't spend the whole time detaching you from the proceedings, and it makes his films so singular in an industry of tropes and cliché.

What brings these two characters together? Kit is 10 years older, and Holly clearly has enough intelligence to see Kit's madness, even if it takes her awhile. What drives them to such acts of horror? The stark feel of the film seems to suggest that they see each other as kindred spirits in alienation; both feel alone even together, and crime seems to be the only thing that adds meaning to their lives. In the final moments, Holly tells us that Kit got the death penalty and she got off with parole and eventually married her lawyer's son, telling us that she's speaking to us from well into the future. It tells us that she's just as empty in the future as she is in the present. Maybe Kit got off lucky.

The Thin Red Line

In the mid-70s a director named Terrence Malick graduated from the American Film Institutes's conservatory with a master's degree, and set about making two of the finest films in the richest decade of American cinema. Badlands (which I have not yet seen) and Days of Heaven (which is one of the best films I've ever watched) established Malick as a master filmmaker, one who could capture images of endless natural beauty and mix them with meditative scripts that were uniquely his. Days of Heaven in particular defied just about any convention you'd care to name, with its passionate love triangle filtered through the eyes of a teenage girl forced to grow long before she should have. With that film, Malick was on top of the world.

Then, he disappeared. For twenty years the world wondered where this visionary filmmaker had gone and, of course, rumors circulated. "I heard he died." "No, man, he's just living on an island somewhere." Finally, in 1995, Malick began casting for a war movie. Three years later, The Thin Red Line hit theaters, and it looked as though he'd made it right after Days.

Starring an ensemble cast including Nick Nolte, Sean Penn, John Cusack and future torture porn star Jim Caviezel, The Thing Red Line documents the Battle of Guadalcanal through the eyes of a fictionalized group of soldiers, some fresh-faced, others old. Yet the age gaps don't mean as much in this film as they normally do in a war film; many of the educated officers are just as green in the field as their cannon fodder.

The film opens with Caviezel's character, Pvt. Witt, living AWOL with a Melanesian tribe. For him, the tiny village on the edge of the sea is Eden, a location Malick alludes to throughout the film. His paradise is short-lived; a patrol boat tracks him down and Sgt. Welsh (Penn) sends him to join the front line. As the company prepares to invade Guadalcanal, we meet yet more characters on the boat and learn more about the characters.

Even before the first battle, Malick crams two films into one. One film is a war story that subverts some war clichés without calling attention to itself, and the other is an existentialist search for spiritual truth. We start with a peek of Witt's heaven, and on the boat we learn of Colonel Tall's (Nick Nolte), a career-soldier who's never seen a battle. He speaks proudly of how he read Homer in the actual Greek, and cannot wait to see what a battle will actually look like after reading of them for so long. In his voice-over he mentions that this battle could be his last shot for a promotion before retirement. War is not necessarily his Eden, but he clearly looks forward to it.

The two aspects of the film create a dichotomy that most directors could never reconcile, but--and I humbly beg you forgive the cliché--Terrence Malick is not most directors. He captures the reedy hills of Guadalcanal with pristine detail, yet he breaks up the long, pastoral takes with quick cuts that leave the audience as confused as the soldiers. They land to find a deserted beach, but when they attempt to move in the center of the island a hidden machine gun nest mows down every advance. Even so, Tall orders his men on.

This all could have very easily devolved into the usual war archetypes, but Malick doesn't take the easy way out. Yes, Tall callously orders his men on a suicide run without considering the consequences, but when a field captain refuses he wonders if he might be wrong and heads to the front lines to see for himself. He realizes his error and the men change plans and take the bunker.

But just as Malick took much of the passion out of Bill's scheming in Days of Heaven, so too does he break up the visceral battles. Now, his battle scenes are chaotic, grand, and every bit as exciting as Spielberg's in Saving Private Ryan, but he spaces them out between meditations. If I had to hazard I guess, I'd say The Thin Red Line is Malick's way of saying that all creatures kill, and that Earth itself is our Eden, but we can never regain it. After the first grand battle, Witt disappears to another village but no longer finds comfort in it, for he sees the violence and evil even there. Malick inserts shots of crocodiles and a bird, injured by crossfire, dragging itself along the grass. In voice-overs, the characters search for meaning and they always lead to death.

I wouldn't call the film realistic, or at least not aspects of it. It gives us fleshed-out soldiers, but I doubt these kids were thinking about the nature of evil and death as mortars exploded around them. Personally, I'd be thinking "Don't die, don't die, duck! Don't die." But, of course, I can only speak for myself. However, Malick is a surprisingly adept action filmmaker; armed with a team of editors, he splices together rapid cuts to keep the viewer disoriented without ever going hog wild like more recent action purveyors. Combined with his more epic long takes, it makes for just about the most beautiful looking war film I've ever seen.

This is not my favorite war film. Hell, it's not even my favorite war film of 1998. However, it's maybe the most original and singular entry in the genre. The original running time clocked in at about 3 1/2 hours, but Malick recut the film down to just under 3, and it shows. He clearly aims for a more holistic approach rather than touching on each character individually, but even then some characters come off as barely cameos for special celebrity guests (Travolta and Clooney come to mind). I also would have liked to see some perspective from the side of the starving Japanese soldiers, but I cannot complain since we eventually got that film in the form of Clint Eastwood's masterpiece Letters From Iwo Jima (which plays not entirely unlike a companion piece to this film). Nevertheless, this is easily one of the finest war movies ever made, one that adds an approach entirely its own and, though that perspective creates some disconnect, makes for thought-provoking moments to compliment the carnage.

Days of Heaven

Having watched David Gordon Green's George Washington before this, I need not speculate over the long-reaching influence of Terrence Malick's pastoral 1978 drama about a love triangle in the pre-World War I Heartland. George Washington borrows heavily from this lauded masterpiece, from its narrative twists to its beautiful and evocative direction. Though some might call this emotionally muted, I found Days of Heaven to be a haunting portrait of people who have learned to live with pain, no matter how great.

In 1916, Bill (Richard Gere) gets into a fight at a steel mill with a co-worker and accidentally kills him. On the lam, he collects his young sister Linda (Linda Manz) and his girlfriend Abby (Brooke Adams) and the three travel to Texas. In order to dispel any gossiping, Bill and Abby pose as siblings and the three of them hire on as workers for a rich farmer (Sam Shepard). One day Bill overhears that his boss is dying, and hatches a plan: Abby, whom the farmer loves, will marry him and collect the money from his will after he passes.

All of this sets up one meaty love triangle, but Malick presents it in a bizarre way. Instead of delving right into the middle of the intrigue, he pulls back and places the events of the story in the memoirs of Linda. Her rambling narration reads less like exposition and more like a commentary track, more reflection than clarification.

Filling the gaps between Linda's teasing and mysterious voice-over is the gorgeous cinematography from Néstor Almendros. Pause the film at just about any point and you'd have a painting worth hanging on your wall. Almendros, who was actually losing his sight during the shoot, managed to capture every scene perfectly using mostly natural lighting.

The lives of the three come undone in the final moments. Bill gets found out, and it all goes to hell in a hand basket. It gets so bad that we hear a glimmer, though nothing more, of pain in Linda's narration. She's a child who grew up knowing only hardship, and she knows how to bury it. You get the feeling that, among the two adults, she was the only one who knew how it could all end. But that doesn't prevent that tiny speck of torture escaping, and it's little details like this that make Days of Heaven more than merely a pretty picture.

When you get down to it, what is the point of the film? It purposefully breaks up its love triangle to pull focus from an interesting but contrived direction. Really it's a portrait of people learning how to deal with misfortunes. Though we cannot say for certain because we meet her in adolescence, we sense that Linda never had a childhood. This is her story, not Bill's, and it's more heartbreaking than Bill's machinations could ever be.