Showing posts with label Terrence Malick. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Terrence Malick. Show all posts
492. The Tree of Life
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
491. (11 Dec) /The Tree of Life/ (2011, Terrence Malick)* 94
The Tree of Life (2011)
Monday, December 5, 2011
****
Country: US
Director: Terrence Malick
Our Town, Meet Me in St. Louis, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Michael Powell's A Matter of Life and Death, Andrei Tarkovsky's Mirror. These are a few of the movies that flashed through my mind as I watched Terrence Malick's remarkable new film The Tree of Life, now out on DVD. Like its director, this is a picture which galvanizes those who see it, a love-it-or-hate-it film, one which has divided the jury at Cannes that awarded it the Palme d'Or, critics who have reviewed it, and audiences who saw it in its general release earlier this year. Some find it pretentious and dull, others brilliant and innovative. Nobody seems to have a mild reaction to the film, and nobody seems to respond to it with indifference. My own response is that this is the most ambitious, personal, and original work yet from one of the most important American filmmakers of the last forty years.
Malick is a very private man who doesn't give interviews, doesn't promote his movies, and has little to say about the artistic intentions of his films. We can, however, infer some things about his films from his working methods. He has made only five pictures in nearly forty years, so it is clear that he spends a great deal of time thinking about and preparing each project before filming even begins. On the DVD extras of Days of Heaven, Richard Gere comments that the screenplay he read when he agreed to make the film was a straightforward one, quite different from the film he finally saw, which he called an "impressionistic" version of the shooting script. David Thomson writes that he has read a script "very different" from the completed film of The Thin Red Line. Sean Penn, discussing The Tree of Life in the French newspaper Le Figaro, calls the film's script "the most magnificent one that I've ever read" but notes how different the tone of the film is from that of the screenplay. This kind of comment makes me believe that Malick's movies most likely begin as conventional screenplays and may even be filmed that way. We do know that he can spend several years at the editing stage, transforming the footage he has shot into the final film. We also know that his films have certain things in common—the use of voice-over narration to comment on and explain the action, repeated shots of nature interwoven into the narrative (he seems especially fascinated with rivers and with shots of the sky seen looking up through treetops), multiple points of view, a fragmented narrative line—that seem more likely to emerge in the editing room than to find their origin in the screenplay.
In The Tree of Life, Malick takes all those stylistic mannerisms we have come to associate with his previous films and amplifies them. To these he adds a pair of new elements that take the film in a direction different from anything he has done before. Each of his earlier films seemed to have an even more fragmented plot than the last one, but still each told its story chronologically. In The Tree of Life, he takes this last holdover from conventional film storytelling and smashes it to bits. And he takes the mystical strain that seemed to become more pronounced with each new film and makes it the central element. His aim here is to chronicle one man's search for meaning in life as he tries to place the pattern of his own life's story in no less than the history of the universe.
The man is Jack O'Brien, who is played as an adult by Sean Penn and as a child by Hunter McCracken. The plot of the film is a straightforward one. When Jack learns that his father has died, the news triggers a swirling collage of memories of growing up in Texas in the 1950s, memories that revolve around his family and in particular the often troubled relationship between him and his father. Like the central character in all of Malick's films, Jack, even as a child, is what might be called a meta-observer, someone who seems to live inside life while simultaneously observing it from the outside. From his earliest memories, Jack has been torn between two ways of viewing the world, which he calls the way of Nature and the way of Grace. He identifies each of these with one of his parents—the way of Nature, with its need to understand and control the world, with his father, and the way of Grace, with its unquestioning acceptance of life's events, with his mother. These are dialectically opposed principles analogous to the yin and yang of Asian philosophy. Is it any surprise that Malick was a philosophy major in college and later taught philosophy briefly at MIT?
If the combination in one movie of this simple plot, complicated storytelling technique, and heady philosophical underpinning were not enough to challenge viewers, Malick bookends the main part of the movie with two sequences that will further alienate those not already responsive to his approach. At the beginning, he shows in largely abstract images nothing less than the birth of the universe in the Big Bang, the formation of the Earth, the evolution of life on Earth, and finally Jack's own conception and birth. With little to latch onto emotionally during this long section, which amounts to an overture to the main part of the film, it is perhaps understandable that some viewers will become impatient or even put off.
But if in dramatic terms this sequence is largely of intellectual rather than emotional appeal, it is conceptually necessary to establish the subject of the film. The Tree of Life is not just about the events in Jack's life. It is about his lifelong attempts to understand the forces that drive the universe and where his own life fits into the overall scheme of the cosmos. Like Job, who is referred to at several points in the film, Jack feels compelled to know why things happen, specifically why bad things happen. He is essentially looking for answers to questions that have no answers. Yet right up to the very end that does not stop him from asking and searching, so great is his need to know.
Jack's dreamlike vision at the end, a passage that serves as the film's coda, is as challenging as the opening sequence, a vision of life and death which suggests that the universe and everyone in it exists in a kind of continuum in which the individual is both the creator and a participant. I know this all sounds very paradoxical and metaphysical, and it is. But consider how difficult it must be to convey such abstractions through concrete events and images in a narrative, even one as fragmented and impressionistic as this one, and it becomes clear what a tremendously ambitious task Malick has set for himself. The amazing thing is that he manages to pull it off without becoming lost in narrative chaos, and without losing that spirit of wonder which drives the artist to seek order where none is apparent. Could that conflict between Nature and Grace be another way of stating the artist's dilemma between close but detached observation of life and the need to impose some kind of order to make sense of those observations?
All of this may seem quite conceptual and metaphysical, and if that were all there was to The Tree of Life, then it would be a cold and sterile movie indeed. But it's not. This is a deeply absorbing film on the emotional level, and the reason for that is the richness and the authenticity of both the characters and the visual details in the film.
One of the risks of Malick's approach to his subject is that the people in the movie could easily become schematic and unconvincing. But they don't. Instead they are fully realized individuals sympathetically inhabited by actors wholly attuned to Malick's view of their identities, problems, and relationships to one another. Brad Pitt, who also co-produced the film, plays Jack's father. Pitt plays this complicated man with commendable restraint—no star turn here—managing to find a balance between his likable and unlikable qualities, and between his sometimes loving, sometimes overly stern and authoritarian treatment of Jack. Jessica Chastain plays Jack's mother, a nurturing woman whose love for her children is constant and invariable, a gentle woman who accepts Jack's strengths and weaknesses without judgment or his father's constant attempts to mold his personality. She may not be as sharply delineated a character as Jack's father, but I think that is deliberate, for to Jack she is both a real person and an ideal. Chastain finds just the right note to center her character then maintains it throughout the film.
Sean Penn conveys all the shock, pain, and confusion of the adult Jack. It's an emotionally raw performance, numb on the surface but with a core of almost palpable despair, one of his most intense and focused performances since Dead Man Walking. But the real discovery here is young Hunter McCracken, who plays Jack as a boy. He manages to create an impression of solitude, bewilderment, and a driving need to understand the world that so exactly matches the personality of the adult Jack that it is easy to see how the boy became the man. If Penn gives the film its brains and Chastain its heart, young McCracken gives the film its soul. It's one of the great child characters in the movies and one of the great child performances.
Besides its fully realized characters, the other thing that keeps The Tree of Life from becoming an arid conceptual treatise is the astounding level of realistic visual detail in the film. From the cold, impersonal cityscape where Jack works and the equally bleak ultra-modern apartment where he lives, to the small Texas town and traditional neighborhood where he grew up, each setting is carefully chosen to create an emotional mood. Those childhood settings in particular had my mind reeling. Everything about Jack's childhood, right down to the dishes the family eats from and the food they eat, is absolutely authentic. If you grew up during this time and in a place similar to this, as I did, then time and again you will experience an instant shock of recognition.
This is not the academic authenticity found in well-researched period movies, or even the studied authenticity of Mad Men, where the set decorators consult mail-order catalogues and magazines of the time, but real, remembered authenticity. Such literal visual details should dispel any doubt about the autobiographical origins of this film. (A glance at a biography of Malick confirms that many of the details in the movie duplicate those of his own life.) As well as Malick's own memory of his childhood environment, credit for the extraordinary look of the film should also go to the production designer, Jack Fisk, who has worked with Malick on all of his pictures, beginning with his first, Badlands, in 1973.
Of all the scenes in The Tree of Life, the one that stays with me above all others is not one of the film's visionary, cosmic, or emotionally wrenching scenes, but one of its briefest and simplest. After the family plants a young tree in the back yard of their house, Jack's mother remarks, "You'll be grown up before this tree gets big." For me that simple statement somehow encapsulates all the mysteries of time and change, of life and death, of the vastness of the universe and the finiteness of an individual life, that the rest of the movie explores in such imaginative detail.
You might also be interested in:
Country: US
Director: Terrence Malick
Our Town, Meet Me in St. Louis, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Michael Powell's A Matter of Life and Death, Andrei Tarkovsky's Mirror. These are a few of the movies that flashed through my mind as I watched Terrence Malick's remarkable new film The Tree of Life, now out on DVD. Like its director, this is a picture which galvanizes those who see it, a love-it-or-hate-it film, one which has divided the jury at Cannes that awarded it the Palme d'Or, critics who have reviewed it, and audiences who saw it in its general release earlier this year. Some find it pretentious and dull, others brilliant and innovative. Nobody seems to have a mild reaction to the film, and nobody seems to respond to it with indifference. My own response is that this is the most ambitious, personal, and original work yet from one of the most important American filmmakers of the last forty years.
Malick is a very private man who doesn't give interviews, doesn't promote his movies, and has little to say about the artistic intentions of his films. We can, however, infer some things about his films from his working methods. He has made only five pictures in nearly forty years, so it is clear that he spends a great deal of time thinking about and preparing each project before filming even begins. On the DVD extras of Days of Heaven, Richard Gere comments that the screenplay he read when he agreed to make the film was a straightforward one, quite different from the film he finally saw, which he called an "impressionistic" version of the shooting script. David Thomson writes that he has read a script "very different" from the completed film of The Thin Red Line. Sean Penn, discussing The Tree of Life in the French newspaper Le Figaro, calls the film's script "the most magnificent one that I've ever read" but notes how different the tone of the film is from that of the screenplay. This kind of comment makes me believe that Malick's movies most likely begin as conventional screenplays and may even be filmed that way. We do know that he can spend several years at the editing stage, transforming the footage he has shot into the final film. We also know that his films have certain things in common—the use of voice-over narration to comment on and explain the action, repeated shots of nature interwoven into the narrative (he seems especially fascinated with rivers and with shots of the sky seen looking up through treetops), multiple points of view, a fragmented narrative line—that seem more likely to emerge in the editing room than to find their origin in the screenplay.
In The Tree of Life, Malick takes all those stylistic mannerisms we have come to associate with his previous films and amplifies them. To these he adds a pair of new elements that take the film in a direction different from anything he has done before. Each of his earlier films seemed to have an even more fragmented plot than the last one, but still each told its story chronologically. In The Tree of Life, he takes this last holdover from conventional film storytelling and smashes it to bits. And he takes the mystical strain that seemed to become more pronounced with each new film and makes it the central element. His aim here is to chronicle one man's search for meaning in life as he tries to place the pattern of his own life's story in no less than the history of the universe.
The man is Jack O'Brien, who is played as an adult by Sean Penn and as a child by Hunter McCracken. The plot of the film is a straightforward one. When Jack learns that his father has died, the news triggers a swirling collage of memories of growing up in Texas in the 1950s, memories that revolve around his family and in particular the often troubled relationship between him and his father. Like the central character in all of Malick's films, Jack, even as a child, is what might be called a meta-observer, someone who seems to live inside life while simultaneously observing it from the outside. From his earliest memories, Jack has been torn between two ways of viewing the world, which he calls the way of Nature and the way of Grace. He identifies each of these with one of his parents—the way of Nature, with its need to understand and control the world, with his father, and the way of Grace, with its unquestioning acceptance of life's events, with his mother. These are dialectically opposed principles analogous to the yin and yang of Asian philosophy. Is it any surprise that Malick was a philosophy major in college and later taught philosophy briefly at MIT?
If the combination in one movie of this simple plot, complicated storytelling technique, and heady philosophical underpinning were not enough to challenge viewers, Malick bookends the main part of the movie with two sequences that will further alienate those not already responsive to his approach. At the beginning, he shows in largely abstract images nothing less than the birth of the universe in the Big Bang, the formation of the Earth, the evolution of life on Earth, and finally Jack's own conception and birth. With little to latch onto emotionally during this long section, which amounts to an overture to the main part of the film, it is perhaps understandable that some viewers will become impatient or even put off.
But if in dramatic terms this sequence is largely of intellectual rather than emotional appeal, it is conceptually necessary to establish the subject of the film. The Tree of Life is not just about the events in Jack's life. It is about his lifelong attempts to understand the forces that drive the universe and where his own life fits into the overall scheme of the cosmos. Like Job, who is referred to at several points in the film, Jack feels compelled to know why things happen, specifically why bad things happen. He is essentially looking for answers to questions that have no answers. Yet right up to the very end that does not stop him from asking and searching, so great is his need to know.
Jack's dreamlike vision at the end, a passage that serves as the film's coda, is as challenging as the opening sequence, a vision of life and death which suggests that the universe and everyone in it exists in a kind of continuum in which the individual is both the creator and a participant. I know this all sounds very paradoxical and metaphysical, and it is. But consider how difficult it must be to convey such abstractions through concrete events and images in a narrative, even one as fragmented and impressionistic as this one, and it becomes clear what a tremendously ambitious task Malick has set for himself. The amazing thing is that he manages to pull it off without becoming lost in narrative chaos, and without losing that spirit of wonder which drives the artist to seek order where none is apparent. Could that conflict between Nature and Grace be another way of stating the artist's dilemma between close but detached observation of life and the need to impose some kind of order to make sense of those observations?All of this may seem quite conceptual and metaphysical, and if that were all there was to The Tree of Life, then it would be a cold and sterile movie indeed. But it's not. This is a deeply absorbing film on the emotional level, and the reason for that is the richness and the authenticity of both the characters and the visual details in the film.
One of the risks of Malick's approach to his subject is that the people in the movie could easily become schematic and unconvincing. But they don't. Instead they are fully realized individuals sympathetically inhabited by actors wholly attuned to Malick's view of their identities, problems, and relationships to one another. Brad Pitt, who also co-produced the film, plays Jack's father. Pitt plays this complicated man with commendable restraint—no star turn here—managing to find a balance between his likable and unlikable qualities, and between his sometimes loving, sometimes overly stern and authoritarian treatment of Jack. Jessica Chastain plays Jack's mother, a nurturing woman whose love for her children is constant and invariable, a gentle woman who accepts Jack's strengths and weaknesses without judgment or his father's constant attempts to mold his personality. She may not be as sharply delineated a character as Jack's father, but I think that is deliberate, for to Jack she is both a real person and an ideal. Chastain finds just the right note to center her character then maintains it throughout the film.
Sean Penn conveys all the shock, pain, and confusion of the adult Jack. It's an emotionally raw performance, numb on the surface but with a core of almost palpable despair, one of his most intense and focused performances since Dead Man Walking. But the real discovery here is young Hunter McCracken, who plays Jack as a boy. He manages to create an impression of solitude, bewilderment, and a driving need to understand the world that so exactly matches the personality of the adult Jack that it is easy to see how the boy became the man. If Penn gives the film its brains and Chastain its heart, young McCracken gives the film its soul. It's one of the great child characters in the movies and one of the great child performances.
Besides its fully realized characters, the other thing that keeps The Tree of Life from becoming an arid conceptual treatise is the astounding level of realistic visual detail in the film. From the cold, impersonal cityscape where Jack works and the equally bleak ultra-modern apartment where he lives, to the small Texas town and traditional neighborhood where he grew up, each setting is carefully chosen to create an emotional mood. Those childhood settings in particular had my mind reeling. Everything about Jack's childhood, right down to the dishes the family eats from and the food they eat, is absolutely authentic. If you grew up during this time and in a place similar to this, as I did, then time and again you will experience an instant shock of recognition.This is not the academic authenticity found in well-researched period movies, or even the studied authenticity of Mad Men, where the set decorators consult mail-order catalogues and magazines of the time, but real, remembered authenticity. Such literal visual details should dispel any doubt about the autobiographical origins of this film. (A glance at a biography of Malick confirms that many of the details in the movie duplicate those of his own life.) As well as Malick's own memory of his childhood environment, credit for the extraordinary look of the film should also go to the production designer, Jack Fisk, who has worked with Malick on all of his pictures, beginning with his first, Badlands, in 1973.
Of all the scenes in The Tree of Life, the one that stays with me above all others is not one of the film's visionary, cosmic, or emotionally wrenching scenes, but one of its briefest and simplest. After the family plants a young tree in the back yard of their house, Jack's mother remarks, "You'll be grown up before this tree gets big." For me that simple statement somehow encapsulates all the mysteries of time and change, of life and death, of the vastness of the universe and the finiteness of an individual life, that the rest of the movie explores in such imaginative detail.
You might also be interested in:
• The Cinematic New World of Terrence Malick
• Brief Reviews: Days of Heaven (1978)
Top Ranked Films of Terrence Malick
Saturday, November 5, 2011
Terrence Malick
4 titles, 55th in points with 13,683
These are all the films of U.S. director Terrence Malick’s that made the top 1000 in our 2011 update of the Top Ranked 1000 Films on the Net, all polls.
1. Days of Heaven (1978) #110
2. Badlands (1972) #232
3. The Thin Red Line (1998) #373 [photo top]
4. Tree of Life, The (2011) #650
5. New World, The (2005) #1329 [photo bottom]
An
ReReview: THE TREE OF LIFE
Saturday, October 15, 2011
Written and Directed by Terrence Malick
Starring Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain and Sean Penn
Mrs. O'Brien: You'll be grown before that tree is tall.
Terrence Malick’s THE TREE OF LIFE is the most polarizing film I’ve seen in ages. It was widely reported that plenty of patrons walked out and angrily demanded their money back while just as many fans vehemently defended it, proclaiming the film a modern masterpiece. In fact, this pattern began at the Cannes film festival, where the film made its debut, when half the audience took its feet in ovation while the rest booed and hissed loudly. To be fair, Cannes audiences do tend to err on the dramatic side of things but this divide was very real. No word of a lie, I hold THE TREE OF LIFE personally responsible, at least in some small part, for actually ruining a very close friendship of mine. It doesn’t matter which side of the line you fall on though; what matters is that for those who see it, the reaction it inspires is a strong one.
All I knew after seeing THE TREE OF LIFE in theatres was that I would need to see it again to truly form a full opinion of it. I knew that seeing it again would either leave me feeling more detached from it or more involved in it. When I saw the film with an audience, I was surprised and moved by how quiet and attentive everyone was. The film demands your attention and it certainly had it in that room. A few people left, including the couple sitting in front of me. (I knew when they sat down that it was only a matter of when.) At the time, my original review praised the film’s aesthetics, calling them nothing short of genius, but I also felt the film came across as somewhat self-important, as if Malick portended to know something we didn’t.
After seeing the film again, in stunning high definition in my living room, I feel as though I have seen THE TREE OF LIFE in a whole other light. The film is an odyssey of sorts, one that the viewer must choose to embark upon freely in order to enjoy. At two hours and eighteen minutes, the film is not particularly long but it can feel that way at times because it requires such delicate contemplation on the viewer’s part, as well as some very focused observation. It’s almost meditative. If you can find that state of balance and calm that Malick mysteriously manifests on film though, the experience itself can be transcendent. Every frame of this film is magnificent, bursting off the screen with beauty like you’ve never seen, rendering the action taking place superfluous most of the time.
There is no succinct plot in THE TREE OF LIFE. Having one would almost defeat the point, or at least the new point I’ve taken away from the film anyway. I feel more now as though Malick is not telling us what he thinks he knows about life but rather asking us to see life as the splendid miracle it is, to appreciate it fully and to understand that not only could it disappear in an instant but that one day it will. And so instead of story, Malick gives us random moments, some mundane, some meaningful. Moments are what make up our lives and from these moments, spring the stories we create in our minds. We invite shame and suffering into our homes and into our bodies when we don’t need to. Our lives are but blinks of an eye and all that we should see in that instant is love.
THE TREE OF LIFE
Sunday, June 19, 2011
Written and Directed by Terrence Malick
Starring Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain and Sean Penn
Mrs. O'Brien: You'll be grown before that tree is tall.
THE TREE OF LIFE is a true film experience. Writer/Director, Terrence Malick’s latest opus is an assault of the best kind on your eyes, your ears and your mind. It is mesmerizing from the moment it begins with a pattern of dancing waves of colored light flowing in the center of a black screen. Whispers can be heard in the distance, birds too, seagulls maybe. It is a total mystery what lies ahead but you can feel its weight, its magnitude, its inevitable magnificence. THE TREE OF LIFE is a journey, one with remarkable richness in every frame. When the journey ends though, its insight isn’t as revelatory as its grandness suggests it should be.
Malick has famously been tinkering and toiling over THE TREE OF LIFE for more than two years now. And while his hyper-perfectionism might drive the man himself to the brink of potential madness, it has once again served to create a film so fluid and inviting that I felt as though I was floating through space and time along with it. Despite its subject matter, which I will get into shortly, THE TREE OF LIFE has an airy quality to it. Alexandre Desplat’s (THE KING’S SPEECH) piano and string score carries you effortlessly into the sky on the wind, allowing you to look down upon Emmanuel Lubezki’s (CHILDREN OF MEN) breathtaking cinematography and just gaze longingly at its immense beauty. The film is then cut together in non-linear sequence so seamlessly that it never seems to matter at all just how little it all comes together at times.
Malick’s screenplay is a vast contemplation on life, its meanings and lack there of. It may be perhaps a tad bit too vast though. Mr. and Mrs. O’Brien (Brad Pitt and the captivating Jessica Chastain) have just lost one of their three sons at the age of 19. Their grief and regrets run so deep that they transcend time, affecting not only the present but the future of their remaining children as well. As an adult, their son, Jack O’Brien (Sean Penn), has never gotten over the loss of his brother, let alone the drastically different views his parents instilled on him. Malick seems to be musing on the continuity of issues and pain as passed down from generation to generation, how one moment in time can affect all the others to varying degrees. To really drive his point home hard, Malick expands his theory to the dawn of time, taking his film into a lengthy segue showcasing the creation of the universe. Life forms have always affected the others around them and they can appear and disappear without warning or explanation, rendering most of our problems completely pointless.
The obvious but supposed deeper meaning in THE TREE OF LIFE forces the viewer to think there must be more to this, that any experience this spectacular must contain clues to puzzles I’ve never been able to fully understand. Only the idea that our souls continue on throughout time, destined to struggle with the same issues the whole way, despite our ability to decide how we approach and master our troubles, is not exactly new. For as much depth as THE TREE OF LIFE portends to have, it rests fairly comfortable on the surface most of the time. It is however one of the loveliest surfaces I’ve ever stared into.
DAYS OF HEAVEN
Friday, June 17, 2011
Written and Directed by Terrence Malick
Starring Richard Gere, Brooke Adams, Linda Manz and Sam Shepard
Linda: I'm telling you; the rich got it figured out.
The effect is instantaneous. The moment DAYS OF HEAVEN begins, you are fully taken into what can only be described as the cinematic incarnation of heaven itself. Striking yet sumptuous still images of America and the suffering Americans of yore, fill the screen in a montage set to a classic Ennio Morricone score. It isn’t the content that constitutes heaven but rather the bold and commanding manner in which writer/director, Terrence Malick, presents it to his audience, that transcends the filmmaking abilities of any mere mortal. In that sense, Malick is the cinematic equivalent of God, and like God, Malick is omniscient. He is aware of all the tiny moments that make up the lives of his characters and how each of them can go on to change the world around them without even realizing what is happening. Sometimes, watching through Malick’s eyes feels like you might actually be watching from the clouds.
The world we are privy to in DAYS OF HEAVEN is farm country, Texas, 1916 (actually shot in Whiskey Gap, Alberta). Bill and Abby (Richard Gere and Brooke Adams) are a couple, riding the rails with Bill’s little sister, Linda (Linda Manz). They take up work in the wheat fields just in time for harvest season, after Bill got into a fight and accidentally killed his foreman at his previous manual labour job in Chicago. Everyone they encounter knows them as brother and sister, a decision made to avoid talk amongst the other prying workers. Believing her to be unattached, Abby catches the eye of the farm owner, played by Sam Shepard and known only as The Farmer. He is unmarried and ill, with only a short time left to live and no one to share his time with. When the harvest is complete, he asks Abby to stay on with her “brother and sister” and marry him and she decides to do just that. The trouble for The Farmer is he doesn’t know that she and her lover are just waiting until he passes away so that they can inherit his fortune. The trouble for Bill and Abby is that they don’t know how long their love can survive the charade, nor when The Farmer will die.
DAYS OF HEAVEN triumphs for a number of reasons, not the least of which is Malick’s incredibly focused direction. His screenplay is as lean as the times in the film. Dialogue is sparse and the plot is forwarded instead by the activity taking place on screen, allowing literally for the action to speak much louder than the words. All the while the harvest is happening, words are barely spoken, safe for some minor exchanges about being hungry or where someone is from. This leaves the viewer to piece together what is happening through looks and body language and fractions of larger conversations that reveal just enough to connect the dots. And who wants to listen to a lot of false dialogue anyway when you can allow your ears to take in the brilliantly designed soundscape, as mixed by Barry Thomas. Whether the wind is whipping through the wheat in the fields or locusts are descending in biblical proportions upon them, the sound is always impeccable and dynamic. It had better be too to keep up with Nestor Almendros’s Oscar-winning cinematography. Together, the viewer is drawn into the drawl one would expect when staring out into the fields on a hot day in the south and watching the buffalo roam. With every element coming together so brilliantly, it’s hard to believe this is only Malick’s second feature.
Another trait Malick shares with his maker is that he does not judge, at least not from behind the camera in DAYS OF HEAVEN. As the story unfolds in front of us, Malick is not concerned with taking sides or playing sympathy, he only seems interested in how best to present it to his audience. This great respect for the audience’s capacity to appreciate the depth of his artistry grows stronger as his scope goes wider. To pull away from the central story is to see the grander setting surrounding it. In it, Malick gives us the America of the time and the great divide between rich and poor. But even as Bill, Abby and Linda go from having nothing to having so much that they feel the need to throw food around as though it were nothing, Malick does not condemn them. That said, some fairly intense punishment does befall the whole lot of them eventually but even then, Malick is just there to observe, and beautifully so, as their fates are carried out. For better or for worse, this was just the America of the time and DAYS OF HEAVEN proves Malick is just one of the greatest American filmmakers of his time.
There and Back Again: The Thin Red Line
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
It is a style I find disconcerting, if not entirely frustrating altogether. In essence it is a form of narrative that plays against everything I expect in a movie, and unfortunately also the things I desire. I am a man of character. Well, I'm a character. But either way the aspect of a film I find myself most directly drawn to are the characters. Their motives are important to me. The way they carry themselves, the tales they tell, and the manner in which their lives unfold. So, while I appreciate the solemn nature of films like Badlands and Days of Heaven, I don't find them particularly engaging.
Which brings me to the third installment in Malick's short, but well maintained and beloved, directorial resume - The Thin Red Line. Based on the novel by James Jones about the battle of Guadalcanal during WW2, The Thin Red Line follows a platoon of soldiers journey through bloodshed, reflection, inner demons, and the raw intensity of nature, Malick focuses his efforts on the men themselves. We seldom see the action, but we are always experiencing it. Often tight shots on groups of soldiers marching through the woods help create a claustrophobic sense of war. An ever increasing fear of the world around, the beautiful and covert surroundings, and the all encompassing desire to escape - mentally and physically.
My first experience with The Thin Red Line led me in quite a different direction from those of Malick's other films. Having taken part many years before them, I found the movie's initially first part, the taking of the hill, gripping at every turn. I could not get enough of it. But in time it passed, and there was still half the film to unfold! It was at that time that my interest waned, and eventually collapsed under its own pressure. I didn't so much hate the film as I longed to love it. An odd feeling that finds your review of it equally challenging. How do you rate a movie you feel indifference is too unbecoming and yet anything overtly positive would be misleading? Negativity isn't the way to go, but if I recall I threw out a 7 for good measure and was done with it.
And there it lay for many years. It was until some time later that the theory of second viewings being the tell all for many films crossed my mind, and inevitably became something of a fixation with me. I revisited hundreds of movies that traversed the gamut of love and hate, and found to my surprise a few real gems among the evanescent. Perhaps the most momentous being Malick's The Thin Red Line. Keep in mind this was still some time before I cared to see A New World, Badlands, or Days of Heaven. Yet, I could not deny the existence of a new feeling that didn't exist the first time around.
Perhaps since then my run through the world of Kurosawa, William Wyler, and David Lean had dampened my aversion to long, winding films with multiple interwoven parts. But that was not the only reason. The Thin Red Line marked a rather epiphanic turn for my understanding of the way movie reviewing worked: The knowledge that no matter what we declare, our opinions are roaming ideals, floating throughout our minds, and capable of being pushed in any direction - it is just a matter of finding a force strong enough to do the job.
The Thin Red Line still ranks among my favorite war movies to this day, some four years later. It's a constant outside shot for my top 100, and one of those movies I am constantly looking back on and wondering "what if." It serves, alongside the rather ubiquitous 2001: A Space Odyssey, as reminders that even the most unfulfilling of films are not always bad - just not right at the particular time in life they came along. So while we may be quick to lash out in hyperbolic claims of mediocrity or dissidence, acknowledgment that this is not final is perhaps one of the most crucial components of any review.
It does not mean you must watch every movie you ever see twice. Instead, that you should never close yourself to the idea that one can come along and surprise you, even when your sure your mind is made up. In the words of Chuck Noland you should do so "because tomorrow the sun will rise. Who knows what the tide could bring?"
Brief Reviews
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
THE MIRACLE WOMAN (1931) ***½
This is a most impressive early sound picture, more compelling and well-crafted than most of the movies of its time I've seen. Barbara Stanwyck plays Florence Fallon, a young woman who with the help of a sleazy showman, Bob Hornsby (Sam Hardy), becomes a celebrity evangelist/miracle healer in the style of Aimee Semple McPherson. The daughter of a minister who dies after the congregation he had served for many years replaces him with a younger man, she is motivated by bitterness and revenge, and by disillusionment with what she sees as the hypocrisy of those who profess to be true believers. When Hornsby sees her deliver a fiery denunciation of her father's parishioners from the pulpit, he realizes what a potential goldmine she is with her histrionic evangelism and her ability to make religious platitudes seem sincere. "George M. Cohan said, 'Leave 'em laughing,'" he tells her. "I want [you] to leave 'em crying."
Her revival meetings are theatrical, stage-managed affairs—almost religious spectacles—complete with shills planted in the audience to fake miracle healings and help Florence fleece the gullible for contributions. Problems begin when Florence meets and falls in love with a blind war hero, John Carson (David Manners), whom she saves from suicide, and begins to question her ruthless exploitation of her followers' trust. The possessive Hornsby, a sort of malevolent Pygmalion, senses he is losing control of Florence and coerces her into continuing their scam by threatening to implicate her in crimes he himself has committed, including bribery, fraud, embezzlement, and even murder.
Stanwyck is sensational in the title role, relentlessly intense as she maneuvers through a whole gamut of emotions. She is by turns a hardened cynic out to manipulate the credulous with her showmanship and phony piety, a frustrated victim being controlled by the menacing Hornsby, and a disillusioned and vulnerable woman susceptible to redemption by the goodness of her blind lover. But whatever emotions she expresses, she always remains believable and basically sympathetic.
Capra's direction is assured, and he keeps things moving briskly. The emotional intensity of the plot surges and relaxes, but Capra's sure-handed staging never for a moment lets the movie's interest level flag. Highlights include the lavishly detailed, circus-like revival meeting scenes, including one in which Stanwyck delivers a rousing sermon on the strength of faith while inside a cage of lions; a tender and humorous birthday party scene with Florence and John; a dramatic night scene on the beach between Florence, John, and Hornsby in which she defiantly confesses her charlatanism to John; and a spectacular fire that destroys Florence's Temple of Happiness in the movie's climax.
Florence and John in the lions' cage
Capra's expert staging of these sequences is aided tremendously by the inventive photographic effects of cinematographer Joseph Walker, including impressively mobile tracking shots, startling whip-pans, and imaginative camera placement—for example, looking into John's room from inside its fireplace, with roaring flames in the foreground between the viewer and John and Florence. Many shots of the revival scenes are composed showing Stanwyck from the rear with upraised arms, the silhouette of her body visible through the backlit diaphanous white gown she wears. This is one of the most watchable movies of its era I've seen—one of Capra's best early directorial efforts and one of Stanwyck's best and most sizzling early performances.
THE ENIGMA OF KASPAR HAUSER (1974) ****
Directed by Werner Herzog, this movie is a part-factual, part-speculative work based on a true story. In 1828 a young man is found early one morning standing in a deserted street in Nuremberg, Germany, holding in one hand a note saying his name is Kaspar Hauser and in the other hand a prayer book. Able to speak only one nonsensical sentence, he seems disoriented and confused. He appears to be neither violent nor mentally defective, only unacquainted with normal human life.
Kaspar appears on a street in Nuremberg
Exhibited as a freak in a circus, he is observed by a professor who adopts him and undertakes to teach him the ways of civilized humans and the German language. Kaspar quickly learns to communicate, and the story he tells is a bizarre one. He claims to have been kept chained in a dark cellar for nearly his entire life and never to have encountered another human being (food was left for him while he was sleeping) or to have seen anything outside the cellar where he was imprisoned. Under the professor's tutelage, Kaspar becomes something of a celebrity. There is much speculation—most of it absurdly fanciful, for example, that he is the castoff heir of the royal House of Baden—about his true origins before he is mysteriously murdered a few years later.
Filming largely in the Bavarian village of Dinkelsbühl, which looks essentially unchanged since the early 19th century, Herzog authentically recreates the life of the time. In the midst of this historical realism, he interpolates brief dreamlike scenes filmed in an anomalously distorted style. The overall effect of this historical authenticity punctuated with unexpected departures into surrealism is to suggest how utterly strange life in his new environment is for Kaspar. No matter how much he learns about the ways of human beings, his conception of life always keeps its edge of strangeness, threatening to slide at any moment into weirdness, if only briefly. Like a mystic, he is subject to occasional visions and imaginary events that seem to the viewer baffling and mysterious, but to Kaspar as genuine as his real experiences.
Kaspar is played by a 41-year old street singer named Bruno S., who didn't want his full name used in order to preserve his privacy. It's hard to imagine that anyone else, especially a professional actor, could have given such a naked, real performance, so spontaneous, instinctive, and entirely lacking in artifice does he seem. And it's hard to imagine that the movie would be half so effective with anyone else in the title role. One of the oddest supporting characters in the film is a scribe who is present almost from the beginning of the movie until its very end, obsessively documenting every experience Kaspar has, from his discovery in the town right up to the results of his autopsy. Yet these factual details provide no real insight into the man. The insight is provided by Herzog and Bruno S., whom it's clear played off each other and inspired each other like two complementary halves of a whole, Herzog providing the intellect and vision and Bruno the heart and emotions.
The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser is unlike any other movie I've seen: It incorporates dreamlike elements that in a strictly logical and narrative sense don't seem to belong in an otherwise realistic movie, yet that on some extra-logical level do enhance the narrative without compromising its coherence, suggesting through the story of Kaspar Hauser that the nature and meaning of human existence can be explained only so far before hitting the impenetrable wall of the inexplicable.
DAYS OF HEAVEN (1978) ****
Terrence Malick is one of the great contemporary American directors, a filmmaker with a style as distinctive as that of David Lynch, yet he has directed only four movies. When you see how meticulously conceived, written, photographed, and edited his movies are, this deliberately unhasty approach to filmmaking becomes entirely understandable. His first movie, Badlands (1973), seemed to follow a clear plan determined in advance, with little improvisation. But beginning with Malick's second movie, Days of Heaven, his work seems to be the result of a combination of advance planning and spontaneous inspiration taking place at the editing stage.
I have heard that Malick is an exceptionally well-read man, and in Days of Heaven I detect two clear literary influences. The plot of the movie resembles Henry James's novel The Wings of the Dove. In the early 1900s two lovers, Bill (Richard Gere) and Abby (Brooke Adams), pretend to be brother and sister. When Bill is fired from his job in a steel mill in Chicago after a dispute with the foreman, he and Abby, along with his young sister Linda (Linda Manz), travel south seeking work as itinerant farm workers. They end up in the Texas panhandle, where the wheat harvest is just beginning. The wealthy owner of the farm where they find work (Sam Shepard) quickly becomes obsessed with Abby, and when Bill overhears the farmer's doctor telling him he has only a few months to live, he persuades Abby to allow herself to be romanced by the farmer and to marry him, with the expectation that he will soon die and she will inherit the farm. Two forces thwart this scheme, though. The farm foreman (Robert Wilke) is immediately suspicious of Bill and Abby. And the farmer's love for Abby cures him of whatever disease the doctor thought he had.
The other literary influence I detect is apparent in the visual element of the movie and makes an even stronger impression than the narrative. This element resembles the vividly atmospheric rural locales of certain novels of Thomas Hardy and the themes in those novels of the conflict between man and nature as humans attempt to tame and dominate nature in an early Industrial Age agrarian setting. The people in the movie are dwarfed and made insignificant by the vast, flat landscapes of the plains and the golden fields of wheat, the imperatives of following the rhythms of the crops, and the challenges to human endeavor posed by the physical world. Some of the strongest images in the movie are of the wheat being grown, being harvested, being processed. Scenes of frenzied harvesting, a sudden invasion of locusts, and the nighttime burning of the fields are especially dramatic and hypnotic. Such images contrast strongly with those of artifacts of early 20th-century industrialism—steel mills, steam-driven trains, the first automobiles, primitive farm machinery, even the World War I-era airplanes of a flying circus.
The invasion of the locusts
Visual and thematic preoccupations present in all of Malick's movies appear here: scenes of the limitless sky overhead shot through overhanging trees, of ever-flowing rivers, of animal and insect life coexisting with human beings shown in almost documentary fashion, of people attempting to survive in immense landscapes that barely accommodate their presence. All this is imbued with a deterministic sense—not unlike that of Hardy—of the lack of control of individuals over their destinies, which seem governed instead by hostile human enemies, their own self-destructive impulses, and a benignly indifferent natural world.
The movie is filled with arrestingly beautiful images, and a great deal of credit for this must go to Nestor Almendros, the Spanish-born cinematographer best known for his work with François Truffaut and Eric Rohmer, who won an Oscar for his work here. (Additional photography was done by another Oscar winner, Haskell Wexler, who has said he tried to duplicate the work of Almendros rather than impose his own style on the parts he shot.) Almendros largely eschewed artificial lighting, particularly in the many outdoor scenes, in favor of natural sources of light. Those outdoor scenes were shot mostly late in the long summer days on location in Saskatchewan, and the result is nothing short of stunning, with one riveting image following another. The voice-over narration typical of Malick, the performances, and the plot are lean, while the visual element is of a contrasting richness seldom found on the screen. Days of Heaven is in all ways the expression of a fully developed and uniquely personal cinematic style associated only with the greatest film directors.
This is a most impressive early sound picture, more compelling and well-crafted than most of the movies of its time I've seen. Barbara Stanwyck plays Florence Fallon, a young woman who with the help of a sleazy showman, Bob Hornsby (Sam Hardy), becomes a celebrity evangelist/miracle healer in the style of Aimee Semple McPherson. The daughter of a minister who dies after the congregation he had served for many years replaces him with a younger man, she is motivated by bitterness and revenge, and by disillusionment with what she sees as the hypocrisy of those who profess to be true believers. When Hornsby sees her deliver a fiery denunciation of her father's parishioners from the pulpit, he realizes what a potential goldmine she is with her histrionic evangelism and her ability to make religious platitudes seem sincere. "George M. Cohan said, 'Leave 'em laughing,'" he tells her. "I want [you] to leave 'em crying."
Her revival meetings are theatrical, stage-managed affairs—almost religious spectacles—complete with shills planted in the audience to fake miracle healings and help Florence fleece the gullible for contributions. Problems begin when Florence meets and falls in love with a blind war hero, John Carson (David Manners), whom she saves from suicide, and begins to question her ruthless exploitation of her followers' trust. The possessive Hornsby, a sort of malevolent Pygmalion, senses he is losing control of Florence and coerces her into continuing their scam by threatening to implicate her in crimes he himself has committed, including bribery, fraud, embezzlement, and even murder.
Stanwyck is sensational in the title role, relentlessly intense as she maneuvers through a whole gamut of emotions. She is by turns a hardened cynic out to manipulate the credulous with her showmanship and phony piety, a frustrated victim being controlled by the menacing Hornsby, and a disillusioned and vulnerable woman susceptible to redemption by the goodness of her blind lover. But whatever emotions she expresses, she always remains believable and basically sympathetic.
Capra's direction is assured, and he keeps things moving briskly. The emotional intensity of the plot surges and relaxes, but Capra's sure-handed staging never for a moment lets the movie's interest level flag. Highlights include the lavishly detailed, circus-like revival meeting scenes, including one in which Stanwyck delivers a rousing sermon on the strength of faith while inside a cage of lions; a tender and humorous birthday party scene with Florence and John; a dramatic night scene on the beach between Florence, John, and Hornsby in which she defiantly confesses her charlatanism to John; and a spectacular fire that destroys Florence's Temple of Happiness in the movie's climax.
Florence and John in the lions' cageCapra's expert staging of these sequences is aided tremendously by the inventive photographic effects of cinematographer Joseph Walker, including impressively mobile tracking shots, startling whip-pans, and imaginative camera placement—for example, looking into John's room from inside its fireplace, with roaring flames in the foreground between the viewer and John and Florence. Many shots of the revival scenes are composed showing Stanwyck from the rear with upraised arms, the silhouette of her body visible through the backlit diaphanous white gown she wears. This is one of the most watchable movies of its era I've seen—one of Capra's best early directorial efforts and one of Stanwyck's best and most sizzling early performances.
THE ENIGMA OF KASPAR HAUSER (1974) ****
Directed by Werner Herzog, this movie is a part-factual, part-speculative work based on a true story. In 1828 a young man is found early one morning standing in a deserted street in Nuremberg, Germany, holding in one hand a note saying his name is Kaspar Hauser and in the other hand a prayer book. Able to speak only one nonsensical sentence, he seems disoriented and confused. He appears to be neither violent nor mentally defective, only unacquainted with normal human life.
Kaspar appears on a street in NurembergExhibited as a freak in a circus, he is observed by a professor who adopts him and undertakes to teach him the ways of civilized humans and the German language. Kaspar quickly learns to communicate, and the story he tells is a bizarre one. He claims to have been kept chained in a dark cellar for nearly his entire life and never to have encountered another human being (food was left for him while he was sleeping) or to have seen anything outside the cellar where he was imprisoned. Under the professor's tutelage, Kaspar becomes something of a celebrity. There is much speculation—most of it absurdly fanciful, for example, that he is the castoff heir of the royal House of Baden—about his true origins before he is mysteriously murdered a few years later.
Filming largely in the Bavarian village of Dinkelsbühl, which looks essentially unchanged since the early 19th century, Herzog authentically recreates the life of the time. In the midst of this historical realism, he interpolates brief dreamlike scenes filmed in an anomalously distorted style. The overall effect of this historical authenticity punctuated with unexpected departures into surrealism is to suggest how utterly strange life in his new environment is for Kaspar. No matter how much he learns about the ways of human beings, his conception of life always keeps its edge of strangeness, threatening to slide at any moment into weirdness, if only briefly. Like a mystic, he is subject to occasional visions and imaginary events that seem to the viewer baffling and mysterious, but to Kaspar as genuine as his real experiences.
Kaspar is played by a 41-year old street singer named Bruno S., who didn't want his full name used in order to preserve his privacy. It's hard to imagine that anyone else, especially a professional actor, could have given such a naked, real performance, so spontaneous, instinctive, and entirely lacking in artifice does he seem. And it's hard to imagine that the movie would be half so effective with anyone else in the title role. One of the oddest supporting characters in the film is a scribe who is present almost from the beginning of the movie until its very end, obsessively documenting every experience Kaspar has, from his discovery in the town right up to the results of his autopsy. Yet these factual details provide no real insight into the man. The insight is provided by Herzog and Bruno S., whom it's clear played off each other and inspired each other like two complementary halves of a whole, Herzog providing the intellect and vision and Bruno the heart and emotions.
The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser is unlike any other movie I've seen: It incorporates dreamlike elements that in a strictly logical and narrative sense don't seem to belong in an otherwise realistic movie, yet that on some extra-logical level do enhance the narrative without compromising its coherence, suggesting through the story of Kaspar Hauser that the nature and meaning of human existence can be explained only so far before hitting the impenetrable wall of the inexplicable.
DAYS OF HEAVEN (1978) ****
Terrence Malick is one of the great contemporary American directors, a filmmaker with a style as distinctive as that of David Lynch, yet he has directed only four movies. When you see how meticulously conceived, written, photographed, and edited his movies are, this deliberately unhasty approach to filmmaking becomes entirely understandable. His first movie, Badlands (1973), seemed to follow a clear plan determined in advance, with little improvisation. But beginning with Malick's second movie, Days of Heaven, his work seems to be the result of a combination of advance planning and spontaneous inspiration taking place at the editing stage.
I have heard that Malick is an exceptionally well-read man, and in Days of Heaven I detect two clear literary influences. The plot of the movie resembles Henry James's novel The Wings of the Dove. In the early 1900s two lovers, Bill (Richard Gere) and Abby (Brooke Adams), pretend to be brother and sister. When Bill is fired from his job in a steel mill in Chicago after a dispute with the foreman, he and Abby, along with his young sister Linda (Linda Manz), travel south seeking work as itinerant farm workers. They end up in the Texas panhandle, where the wheat harvest is just beginning. The wealthy owner of the farm where they find work (Sam Shepard) quickly becomes obsessed with Abby, and when Bill overhears the farmer's doctor telling him he has only a few months to live, he persuades Abby to allow herself to be romanced by the farmer and to marry him, with the expectation that he will soon die and she will inherit the farm. Two forces thwart this scheme, though. The farm foreman (Robert Wilke) is immediately suspicious of Bill and Abby. And the farmer's love for Abby cures him of whatever disease the doctor thought he had.
The other literary influence I detect is apparent in the visual element of the movie and makes an even stronger impression than the narrative. This element resembles the vividly atmospheric rural locales of certain novels of Thomas Hardy and the themes in those novels of the conflict between man and nature as humans attempt to tame and dominate nature in an early Industrial Age agrarian setting. The people in the movie are dwarfed and made insignificant by the vast, flat landscapes of the plains and the golden fields of wheat, the imperatives of following the rhythms of the crops, and the challenges to human endeavor posed by the physical world. Some of the strongest images in the movie are of the wheat being grown, being harvested, being processed. Scenes of frenzied harvesting, a sudden invasion of locusts, and the nighttime burning of the fields are especially dramatic and hypnotic. Such images contrast strongly with those of artifacts of early 20th-century industrialism—steel mills, steam-driven trains, the first automobiles, primitive farm machinery, even the World War I-era airplanes of a flying circus.
The invasion of the locustsVisual and thematic preoccupations present in all of Malick's movies appear here: scenes of the limitless sky overhead shot through overhanging trees, of ever-flowing rivers, of animal and insect life coexisting with human beings shown in almost documentary fashion, of people attempting to survive in immense landscapes that barely accommodate their presence. All this is imbued with a deterministic sense—not unlike that of Hardy—of the lack of control of individuals over their destinies, which seem governed instead by hostile human enemies, their own self-destructive impulses, and a benignly indifferent natural world.
The movie is filled with arrestingly beautiful images, and a great deal of credit for this must go to Nestor Almendros, the Spanish-born cinematographer best known for his work with François Truffaut and Eric Rohmer, who won an Oscar for his work here. (Additional photography was done by another Oscar winner, Haskell Wexler, who has said he tried to duplicate the work of Almendros rather than impose his own style on the parts he shot.) Almendros largely eschewed artificial lighting, particularly in the many outdoor scenes, in favor of natural sources of light. Those outdoor scenes were shot mostly late in the long summer days on location in Saskatchewan, and the result is nothing short of stunning, with one riveting image following another. The voice-over narration typical of Malick, the performances, and the plot are lean, while the visual element is of a contrasting richness seldom found on the screen. Days of Heaven is in all ways the expression of a fully developed and uniquely personal cinematic style associated only with the greatest film directors.
The Cinematic New World of Terrence Malick
Monday, January 5, 2009
The career of the screenwriter and director Terrence Malick is a curious one. Since directing his first movie, Badlands, in 1973, he has directed only three other movies—Days of Heaven (1978), The Thin Red Line (1998), and The New World (2005). Malick is a reclusive man who doesn't give interviews, allow photos of himself to be taken, or promote his work. Yet he is a consistent favorite of movie critics, film scholars, and organizers of film festivals. Each of his movies is in a completely different genre. Badlands is a crime-spree movie based on the case of Charles Starkweather and his 14 year-old girl friend Caril Ann Fugate, who went on a similar crime spree in 1958. Days of Heaven is a love-and-betrayal story set in early-20th century rural Texas that bears clear resemblances to Henry James's The Wings of the Dove. The Thin Red Line is a World War II combat movie set during the battle of Guadalcanal in the Pacific.The script of Malick's fourth movie, The New World, which is about the well-known story of Pocahontas and Capt. John Smith, was completed in the late 1970s. Yet it was nearly twenty years before the movie was filmed and released, in 2005. At the time I had seen only Days of Heaven, and I was most impressed by its look (it was photographed by the great Nestor Almendros) and its distinctive style. Reviews of The New World piqued my curiosity, especially the one by Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle—one of the best-written movie reviews I've ever read—who chose it as the best movie of 2005. But not being a particular fan of movies about American history, I was not enthusiastic about the movie's subject. I recently got a chance to watch The New World, and I'm only sorry that I waited so long.
From its opening images, The New World is a visual marvel. It begins with the arrival of the English colonists in Virginia as seen by the Native Americans on the shore. Malick captures the arrival in images that emphasize its strangeness to the natives. The boats appearing suddenly in the clear, unbroken blue of the sea might as well be alien spaceships in a science fiction movie arriving unannounced from a clear blue sky, so bizarre does the event, as shown from the point of view of the natives, seem. When the colonists disembark, their unvarying dress, with its black fabric and tall hats, might be the military uniforms of alien beings from a distant galaxy. And the metal armor and Cavalier hats of the soldiers resemble the carapaces of insect- or robot-like creatures from outer space. The natives, who moments before had been frolicking in the tall grass, creep up gingerly to these people and touch them and knock on their armor before accepting that they are indeed human beings.The Native Americans in The New World are depicted with what appears to be painstaking authenticity. Their dress, their dwellings, their customs, their social system—all the accouterments of their culture are presented with almost documentary precision. The uncorrupted nature of their "noble savage" existence may be somewhat exaggerated, but the detail with which the Native Americans are drawn always makes them seem living people and not just idealized constructs.
Relations between the two groups are at first friendly. With the help of the natives, the British establish a rudimentary community before their leader (Christopher Plummer) sails back to England for more supplies, leaving Capt. John Smith (Colin Farrell) in charge. When the expedition fails to return before autumn and their supplies are nearly exhausted, Smith sails upriver to the winter home of the natives to seek help from them. What follows is an extended idyll with the love affair between Smith and the chief's favorite daughter, Pocahontas (Q'orianka Kilcher), at its center.
When Smith does return to the fort, he finds that order has broken down, that in his absence he has been deposed as leader of the colonists and replaced with a kind of oppressive totalitarianism. Relations between the Native Americans and the settlers have also deteriorated. The natives have at last comprehended the expansionist aims of the English, and the English, who once referred to the Native Americans as "the naturals," now disparagingly call them "the savages." Each side now considers the other the enemy, and the colonists' dwellings have become a stockade fortified against attack.
Pocahontas, exiled by her father for what he sees as her betrayal of her people, takes refuge at the fort, where she is sheltered but treated coldly by the colonists. When the ships from England finally return, Smith has been recalled by the king to lead another sea expedition, this time in search of the fabled Northwest Passage. Before he departs, he leaves instructions that Pocahontas be told that he has been lost at sea and is dead. The devastated girl is befriended by another colonist, John Rolfe (Christian Bale), whom she eventually marries although she still pines for Smith. Adopting the dress and manners of an Englishwoman, she returns with Rolfe and their child to England, where she is regarded as an exotic celebrity, living on his family estate. She does finally encounter John Smith and learn the truth, and she at last is able to let go of her passionate emotional attachment to him.
What is most exceptional about The New World is less the story it tells, although it is a remarkable one, than the way Malick tells that story. Eschewing conventional methods of film narrative, Malick tells his story largely through a succession of almost silent images combined with voice-over narration by the three principal characters—Smith, Rolfe, and especially Pocahontas. There is very little real dialogue, particularly in the first part of the movie, and few scenes are fully dramatized in the conventional manner. Most shots are quite brief, lasting only 3-10 seconds, and most camera set-ups are static. When longer takes do occur, or when the camera does move, the effect is all the more striking. A good example is the long unbroken take that happens when Smith returns to the fort and walks inside. The shot lasts for a couple of minutes as the camera roams all around the interior of the fort, following Smith's gaze, to show how desperate conditions are and how suspicious and hostile the inhabitants have become.
Each individual shot is almost like a beautifully composed and rendered painting. As one shot follows another, there is often little obvious spatial connection, yet there is always a subtle continuity and progression in the sequence of images as they propel the narrative onward, continuously moving it in a forward direction. The brevity of each shot and the fact that the same camera set-up is rarely, if ever, repeated indicate that each shot, and its precise placement in the orderly series of images that make up the movie, must have been either meticulously planned in advance or meticulously devised at the editing stage. Either way, the complexity of this method of constructing a movie that runs 2 hours 15 minutes in its shortest version is mind-boggling.
Frequent images and sounds of the natural world act as a unifying element. We constantly see images of water—rivers, swamps and marshes, the sea—of the sky, of plants and trees. The first sound we hear, over the credits, is the song of a wild thrush. (Later, a Native American is shown with two Carolina parakeets, now extinct, perched on his arm.) When Smith begins to teach Pocahontas English, the first words she learns are the names of the things in the natural world—water, tree, earth, sky. These scenes of the natural world contrast markedly with the scenes that take place in England during the last section of the movie. Malick makes 17th-century England, with its oppressive gray skies, seem austerely monochromatic—a cold, damp, and forbidding place. The drab brick buildings and cobbled streets seem hard and colorless compared to the landscapes of Virginia. And the gardens of Rolfe's estate—with their rigidly formal, highly manicured, geometric design typical of the French-style gardens of the time—seem equally unnatural, uninviting, inhuman, and drained of color.
The mesmeric effect of Malick's highly visual way of telling the story is nearly impossible to articulate. I've experienced something like it before with certain films of Eisenstein, Antonioni, and Orson Welles, an effect so subliminal that it is akin almost to cinematic hypnosis. This description might make the movie sound like a sterile formal experiment in the methodology of film narrative and what Andrew Sarris calls "academic montage." But that would be far from the truth, for this is a movie with a strong human element and an emotionally compelling story at its heart.
The main character of th
e movie and its most fully defined one is Pocahontas, and the heart of the movie is her story. It is first of all a love story, between Pocahontas and John Smith, and that part of the film is both tenderly moving and intensely emotional. It is the story of Pocahontas finding and losing love, of her losing innocence as she gains experience, of her cultural displacement as she moves through three distinct cultures (Native American, early Colonial American, and 17th-century English), of her journey from girlhood to womanhood and finally death when she was only in her early twenties. Kilcher's Pocahontas is a gentle, sensitive, and intelligent woman who moves through the incredible phases of her life with quiet strength and dignity. It's hard to believe that Q'orianka Kilcher was only fifteen years old when she made this movie, so insightful is her performance, and so utterly authentic her portrayal of the evolution and transformation of Pocahontas.The New World is an amazing movie because it works on so many levels. It is simultaneously a visual and a narrative work of art, taking the viewer on a journey through history, culture, and the life of one individual woman. It uses cinematic means that are almost beyond analysis or even description to bring to life a story that seems at once particular and universal. It expresses the uniquely personal vision of a film artist who is himself an explorer, a creative adventurer guiding viewers through his own cinematic new world.
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