November 6, 2005

The Terrence Malick Enigma
By CARYN JAMES

TERRENCE MALICK'S films - all three of them over 32 years - are known for
their exquisite, tantalizing images: a killer in a black Cadillac racing
along a dusty road framed by endless plains in "Badlands"; an isolated
farmhouse, lights glowing against a midnight blue sky in "Days of Heaven."
But the most mysterious image of all is that of a man in a suit and fedora,
who appears briefly in "Badlands" at a house where the killer is hiding.
That's Terrence Malick himself, and behind the ordinary, slightly pudgy face
is a director with one of the most brilliant and strangest careers in film.

His legendary status as some bizarro genius (and it's hard to argue with
that) accounts for the great curiosity about his fourth film, "The New
World," a version of the Pocahontas story with Colin Farrell as the least
anonymous of John Smiths. New Line Cinema hopes to release the film on Dec.
25, and hope is the operative word; the original November release was
postponed so that Mr. Malick could go on editing. That can't be reassuring
coming from a man who spent nearly a year editing "Badlands" (1973) and two
whole years editing "Days of Heaven" (1978). Yet even now those works seem
as nearly perfect as films can be.

After making them, though, Mr. Malick, only in his mid-30's, vanished from
filmmaking for 20 years. He returned with "The Thin Red Line," a big,
ambitious World War II movie that has extraordinary scenes but nothing like
the perfectly realized art of his earlier, polished gems. And while "The
Thin Red Line" may have brought expectations for any Malick work back to
earth, the guessing game continues. Why the vanishing act and why the
return?

Mr. Malick doesn't give interviews, but this much is evident: It's odd that
he's a filmmaker at all. He has the singular vision of a poet yet works in a
form that relies on collaboration and other people's money. What's a
perfectionist to do?

His unique style in those early films is unmistakable. Both "Badlands,"
loosely based on a 1950's case of a serial killer and his teenage
girlfriend, and "Days of Heaven," about a lethal love triangle in Texas in
1916, share a powerful feel for the natural landscape and the way place
shapes character. Both rely on striking voice-overs and deal with the same
essential paradoxes: the cold calculations behind romance and the visual
poetry of violence.

The young Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek did some of their best work in
"Badlands." He is the coolest of killers (as in James Dean cool), blasé as
he shoots people who get in his way. She is a hopeless romantic, whose naïve
voice-over is Mr. Malick's most distinctive touch; a voice-over shaping the
film has since become his trademark. And all that editing time was worth it:
there is not a false move in this spare, 95-minute film.

Mr. Malick brought some kind of alchemy into the editing room for "Days of
Heaven," too. It may be one of the most beautiful films ever made and took
form largely after the fact. There is a simple eloquence to its story of a
man (Richard Gere), his lover (Brooke Adams) and his young sister (Linda
Manz), who leave Chicago to work in the wheat fields owned by a rich and
dying farmer (Sam Shepard, whose movie-star sideline to his playwriting took
off after this). The setting is as gorgeous as the romance is cynical, with
Mr. Gere's character suggesting that his girlfriend marry the farmer for his
money; their triangle ends in two violent deaths. But it is the young
sister's narration - her accent tough, her words often poetic - that gives
the film its elegiac tone, and that voice-over wasn't even planned until
after the film was shot.

Most people who spend two years in an editing room and drastically revamp a
movie wouldn't be able to see it after a while, would start making it worse.
It says something about Mr. Malick's rare, obsessive clarity of vision that
not a frame in "Days of Heaven" seems arbitrary. The voice-over even
supports his friends' claims that personally he has a sense of humor. "He
was headin' for the boneyard any minute," the girl says of the farmer, but
he wasn't "goin' around squawkin' about it."

Mr. Malick's friends and colleagues insist that he doesn't cultivate his own
myth, that he is truly (they don't say neurotically) private. And he is
surrounded by people who protect him. Jack Fisk, who has been the production
designer on all four films, spoke about Mr. Malick's work in a recent
telephone interview and said, "All of us that love Terry would never do
anything to invade his privacy."

In fact, those who spoke on the record for this article never went off the
record; and those who spoke off the record never went on, for fear of
unsettling their personal or professional relationships with Mr. Malick. His
friends' assurances that he was working during his 20 years away (living
mostly in Paris then, and mostly in Texas now) is technically true: he wrote
an early, unused version of "Great Balls of Fire!," the 1989 Jerry Lee Lewis
biopic, and worked on projects that never got far. Both Mr. Fisk and Sarah
Green, who produced "The New World," said Mr. Malick wrote a version of the
script more than 20 years ago; he apparently has a stockpile of others. But
that doesn't explain why someone would turn his back on a career that
offered boundless possibilities.

Speculation about his long absence is no more than that, though. Logic and
cheap psychology suggest that fear of success or fear of failure might be
involved. He may never duplicate the artistry and acclaim of his early
films, and it wouldn't be surprising if the prospect of competing with
himself caused creative paralysis in a filmmaker who likes every blade of
grass to be shot perfectly.

If we don't know why he left, we certainly don't know why he came back, but
he seems to have returned with the desire to apply his distinctive style to
films with a broader scope. "The Thin Red Line" runs 2 hours and 50 minutes,
and juggles a half-dozen main characters in telling the story (based on
James Jones's novel) of soldiers in the battle of Guadalcanal. Instead of a
single narrative looking back and commenting on the story as in the earlier
films, here the voice-overs come from many soldiers, who meditate on life,
death and war. The film's feel for nature is as strong as you'd expect, and
there is a new attention to action; it is, after all, a movie about a
battle. Unlike most war films, though, you can see the fear in these
soldiers' eyes.

But all that jumping from character to character undercuts the film's
emotion. And it's a good guess that Mr. Malick, who dutifully finished the
movie so it could make the Oscar-qualifying deadline in 1998, could have
used more editing time. Typically, there were drastic late changes. Adrien
Brody, little known before "The Pianist," was meant to play a central
character, but his role was cut to nearly nothing. Billy Bob Thornton, who
was not in the film, reportedly recorded an entire narration that was never
used.

"The Thin Red Line" didn't win a single Oscar and didn't make money, but the
experience seems to have unblocked Mr. Malick. He appears to have a renewed
energy for filmmaking, as long as he can work the way he likes: changing the
script as he goes along, shooting in natural light, taking his time to edit.
Mr. Fisk said: "I was looking at locations for him for four years before
'The New World,' for different films. Some of those things he couldn't get
set up because he wouldn't have had the freedom he wanted." He came very
close to making a film about Che Guevara, but "Che" and the other projects
"weren't as bankable as the John Smith story," Mr. Fisk added.

Set in the Jamestown settlement in 1607, "The New World" is being sold as a
love story, with Pocahontas caught between Smith, the dashing renegade whose
life she famously saved as her father was about to kill him, and John Rolfe
(Christian Bale), the more cautious settler she later married. (Most
historians doubt that there was a romance between the very young Pocahontas
and Smith, and some even question whether she saved his life, but the
filmmakers are comfortable with their fiction.)

Although Mr. Farrell and Mr. Bale are the big-name stars, the story belongs
to Pocahontas (Q'orianka Kilcher). Russell Schwartz, president for marketing
at New Line, said, "Terrence said to me very early on, 'This is our original
mother,' " meaning that her journey is that of America itself, as she goes
from her role as native American to a woman who embraces European
civilization when she is baptized and moves to London.

For a movie opening soon, though, there is still a ridiculous amount of
secrecy surrounding "The New World." Mr. Fisk guessed that Pocahontas would
do the narration and Ms. Green, the producer, would say only that there'd be
one. Mr. Schwartz described the voice-overs as internal monologues and said
that in the early version shown to New Line, "we start with Colin's
voice-over because we enter the world from John Smith's point of view, then
it's picked up by Pocahontas." That brings "The New World" closer to the
meditative narratives of "The Thin Red Line" than the commentaries of the
first Malick films. So does the length, an expected 2 hours and 15 minutes.
The film's trailer suggests two unsurprising elements: it is a work of
visual beauty and, following "Alexander" and "A Home at the End of the
World," Colin Farrell is having yet another bad-hair movie.

The film's budget of around $30 million isn't much by Hollywood standards
("The Thin Red Line" cost $50 million) and New Line expects the film to do
well internationally. Whatever "The New World" turns out to be, it isn't
likely that Mr. Malick will be considered a big risk for his next film.
Maybe he's getting more practical.

Or not. Mr. Fisk said: "There are a couple of other projects he's been
working on since the 70's. He hasn't yet made the projects most important to
him." What are they? "I can't tell you," he laughed.







-----Original Message-----
From: terrencemalick@yahoogroups.com [mailto:terrencemalick@yahoogroups.com]
On Behalf Of Adrian Martin
Sent: Sunday, November 06, 2005 2:49 PM
To: terrencemalick@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [terrencemalick] post the NY Times piece?

Hi everyone - I am not an on-line subscriber to NY TIMES - can someone
copy the text into a message for the good Malickian folks here?

Adrian




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