The films of Terrence Malick are an acquired taste,
and The New World is not likely to gain him any new fans. The
New World is only Malick’s fourth
feature in a career that spans more than 30 years, but, despite the
Hollywood veneer, it is his most idiosyncratic. Audiences who aren’t
accustomed to Malick’s penchant for dwarfing his actors with natural
vistas may be bored by the slow pace and fragmented storytelling. You will,
however, never see a more vivid re-creation of the settling of America.
Malick’s first credited feature screenplay is for the thoroughly
oddball truck-driver comedy Deadhead Miles (1972), starring Alan Arkin. After sitting of the shelf
for a few decades, it finally popped up on late-night television. Pocket Money (1972), a
contemporary Western about cattle rustlers, proved that Malick could pen a
regular Hollywood feature. The Paul Newman-Lee Marvin starrer is one of
those quirky gems from the ’70s that deserves a rediscovery.
Malick’s jump to directing, Badlands (1973), is widely considered one of the greatest
directorial debuts in film history. The Charles Starkweather-Caril Fugate
murder spree of the late 1950s served as the basis for Malick’s
exploration into existential madness. Badlands was not a hit, but it help bolster the growing
careers of Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek. Malick proved to have work habits as slow as the pace
of his films, but his second feature, Days of
Heaven (1978), was certainly worth the
wait. Richard Gere stars as a steelworker on the run from the law who takes
a job in a Texas wheatfield. An odd love triangle develops between the farm
owner (Sam Shepard) and Gere’s lover (Brooke Adams), whom Gere passes
off as his sister. Malick typically strips the story of drama, focusing
more on his visual canvas. Believe it or not, the flowing wheatfields rank
among the cinema’s most enthralling images. And then Malick disappeared. The Thin Red Line (1998), a poetic meditation on war’s encroachment on nature, ended
Malick’s 20-year exile. Excitement over his triumphant return was
quashed by disappointment that he dared to deliver another Malick film. He
isn’t Steven Spielberg, so why was a traditional war film expected?
Instead he is an artistic visionary of the caliber of Ingmar Bergman and
Michelangelo Antonioni. There may be World War II movies with more action,
but none is better. Malick is now four-for-four, and we can expect No. 5 in
about seven years.
New releases on DVD on Tuesday (Feb. 7): Doom, Just Like Heaven, Elizabethtown, and Wallace & Gromit: The
Curse of the Were-Rabbit.
This article appears in Feb 2-8, 2006.
