David Sterritt: Film, Philosophy, and Terrence Malick

Film, Philosophy, and Terrence Malick
By David Sterritt
Undercurrent



Terrence Malick clearly isn't in it for the fame. He avoids press interviews, keeps public appearances to a minimum, and doesn't like to have his picture taken. But it's harder for a filmmaker to dodge publicity than it is for, say, a novelist like Thomas Pynchon, also known for an aversion to cameras. About five clicks on the Internet brought me to a gallery of online Malick photos showing the shy celebrity as a teenager, then a fledgling movie director, and now an éminence grise of independent cinema. One picture is labeled "the ubiquitous Malick photo." So much for the cloistered auteur as master of his own public image.

While it's interesting to look at these, I can't help sympathizing with Malick's wish for privacy. That ubiquitous photo — snapped in 1998, when his World War II masterpiece The Thin Red Line was in production — is a standard-issue shot (big smile, casual clothes, earphones draped around neck) conveying no hint of what makes this director different from countless others who've obediently said "cheese" for studio photographers. While there may be a whiff of aloofness in Malick's disdain for the publicity fray, it's possible he just doesn't want to distract attention from what really matters, which is the work he does. He also has an egalitarian streak, refusing interviews on the principle that "he's not different from anyone else," as a New Line Cinema executive claimed recently.

New Line released The New World to theaters late last year, and the company would surely have been happier if Malick had glad-handed journalists the way less reclusive directors do. Such marketing work is especially important when a film might have trouble "finding its audience" without some extra pushes. The New World was such a film theatrically, and while its DVD edition (from New Line's home-video division) will surely do well over the long haul, it's hard to imagine copies of this artfully diffuse drama flying pell-mell off the shelves.

The story itself is commercial enough, revolving around colonial-era characters — the seventeenth-century English explorer John Smith and the Native American adolescent Pocahontas, his friend and perhaps his lover — who have enthralled Americans for ages. The movie chronicles their deepening intimacy in the context of Jamestown's gradual evolution from a frontier outpost to a burgeoning North American town. It also shows Smith's flight from Pocahontas when adventures beckon in other climes, her subsequent marriage to tobacco pioneer John Rolfe, and her eventual visit with Rolfe to England, where they and their young son are greeted as exotic celebrities from afar.

This frequently heroic, often bittersweet material has paid Hollywood dividends more than once over the years; but true to his reputation, Malick didn't handle the story with big-time ticket sales in mind. While he serves up the love scenes and battle sequences most moviegoers demand from historical sagas, he's couched the story in a loosely strung-together structure with a dearth of dramatic climaxes. Nor is the cast exactly lustrous: Colin Farrell as Smith, teenager Q'orianka Kilcher as Pocahontas, and Christian Bale as Rolfe, who doesn't enter the picture until it's two-thirds over. The film has so little dialogue that it's been likened to a silent movie. And sometimes the screen goes blank simply because Malick's sense of visual rhythm calls for it.

All of this must have given New Line the jitters, especially since Malick's previous epic (The Thin Red Line) failed to recoup its $52 million budget theatrically despite seven Academy Award nominations and many good reviews. (Plus the fact that it opened at a propitious moment for World War II films, vying with Steven Spielberg's vastly less interesting Saving Private Ryan in the Oscar race.) The New World is a less expensive movie, at $40 million, but it's certainly been a considerably harder sell — due to both Malick's uncompromising style and the fact that (aside from the animated Pocahontas released by Disney in 1995) there's never been an automatic audience for films set in Jamestown some 400 years ago. Malick is obviously not alone in his deep commitment to film as a fine art, but comparatively few of his indie peers share his increasingly keen taste for epic formats, correspondingly high budgets, and the meticulous attention to detail that distinguishes even his smaller-scale works. Given the paucity of risk-taking production companies, it's little wonder that his filmography comprises only four features: Badlands, his 1973 melodrama about serial killers on the road; Days of Heaven, his melancholy 1978 romance; The Thin Red Line, based on James Jones's eponymous 1962 novel; and The New World, a project dear to him since the late 1970s, when he started to write the screenplay. Each contains Malick's distinctive trademarks: sumptuous images of the natural world, a great deal of voiceover monologue, and an unabashed interest in such grand issues as the purpose of life and the meaning (if any) of death. Pay attention to the resonant layers of image, word, sound, and music that weave through these movies and you'd think you were communing with a philosopher.

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