March 14, 2016 Issue

Anthony Lane’s comment on Terrance Malick’s Knight of Cups, in this week’s issue – “It’s worth seeing just for the underwater shots of dogs as they plunge, mouths laughingly agape, into a pool to grab a tennis ball” – made me smile. It pretty much sums up where criticism is today regarding Malick’s vacuous follies. Lane writes,

The aesthetic compulsion is so pressing, in “Knight of Cups,” that someone can approach a person, possibly homeless, who is sleeping on a stone bench, and lay down not a dollar bill or a sandwich but a flower. Malick’s pursuit of the beautiful was already devout in “Days of Heaven,” in 1978, and in recent decades it has grown more flagrant still. In “The Thin Red Line” (1998) and “The New World” (2005), it was touched with environmental anxiety, as the pristine glories of the world were menaced by war and by colonial invasion. Since then, in “The Tree of Life” (2011) and “To the Wonder” (2012), the impulse to seek out grace and loveliness—in weather, in women, and in rhapsodic flashes of the past—has all but blunted the dramatic urge.

I’d go further. Malick’s pursuit of the beautiful has all but blunted his sense of reality. David Denby, in his review of To the Wonder, said that Malick’s work has fallen into “a kind of gorgeous emptiness.” He said,

A Malick sequence has now become a collection of semi-disconnected shots, individually ravishing but bound together by what feels like the trivial narcissism of Caribbean-travel ads on TV. The sun sinks in flames on the horizon, tides ripple, oceans batter rocks, but this time the natural splendors return to an inane, undeveloped situation. Passages of music by Berlioz, Wagner, and Henryk Górecki lend an aura of solemnity to scenes as insubstantial as the wind.

Insubstantial as the wind. That’s mild compared to what Pauline Kael said about Malick’s Badlands: “The film is a succession of art touches. Malick is a gifted student, and Badlands is an art thing, all right, but I didn’t admire it, I didn’t enjoy it, and I don’t like it” (“Sugarland and Badlands,” The New Yorker, March 18, 1974). Forty-two years on, Malick is till making those art things. Nevertheless, I might go see Knight of Cups. I’m curious about those underwater dog shots.

Postscript: It should be noted that The New Yorker's Richard Brody has consistently championed Malick’s work. He says of Tree of Life, “Malick daringly tries to capture not just memories but the feelings aroused by the act of memory—indeed, to represent subjectivity itself, by way of the cinema” (" 'The Tree of Life': Roots and Shoots"). In "The Cinematic Miracle of 'To the Wonder,' " he writes, “There is perhaps no film in the history of cinema that reveals such attention to light, which seems to suffuse the space of every frame and to imbue the characters with its moral and spiritual element.” And in his "Terance Malick's 'Knight of Cups' Challenges Hollywood to Do Better," he calls Knight of Cups “one of the great recent bursts of cinematic artistry, a carnival of images and sounds that have a sensual beauty, of light and movement, of gesture and inflection, rarely matched in any movie that isn’t Malick’s own.” This is eloquent praise. But I’m not persuaded. Malick is way too cosmic for my taste.

April 15, 2013 Issue

Is Terrance Malick’s The Tree of Life a great movie? David Denby thinks so. In his “Terrance Malick’s Insufferable Masterpiece” (included in his 2012 collection Do the Movies Have a Future?), he says,

Interminable, madly repetitive, vague, grandiose; an art-history Summa Theologica crossed with a summer camp documentary on the wonders of the universe; sexless yet sexist, embracing of everything in the world but humour (and is wit not as essential to our existence as air?) – Terrance Malick’s The Tree of Life is insufferable. It is also, astoundingly, one of the great lyric achievements of the screen in recent years and a considerable enlargement of the rhetoric of cinema – a change in technique which is also a change in consciousness. An insufferable masterpiece, then; a film to be endured in a state of enraged awe.

“Great” and “insufferable” strike me as contradictory. I agree with the “insufferable” part. This week, in the magazine, in a review of Malick’s latest vacuity, To the Wonder, Denby repeats his ambivalent verdict regarding The Tree of Life. He says, “The movie could be unbearable at times, but the center held. It’s a great film.” But he goes on to pan To the Wonder in terms that are, it seems to me, applicable to The Tree of Life. For example, he says, “A Malick sequence has now become a collection of semi-disconnected shots, individually ravishing but bound together by what feels like the trivial narcissism of Carribbean-travel ads on TV.” This perfectly expresses my opinion of The Tree of Life, except I would change “has now become” to “is.” Similarly, Denby’s “And someone might tell Malick that beauty isn’t enough” gets at the core of what is “insufferable” about Malick’s movies: their unrelenting, dreamy-soft pictorialism. In “Terrance Malick’s Insufferable Masterpiece,” Denby touches on this point when he asks, “Hasn’t he [Malick] narrowed life down only to those elements that can be etherealized?” More than the lack of dialogue, more even than the absence of humour, it’s this ethereal quality that saps Malick’s films of life’s juice and constitutes their most serious flaw. Pauline Kael was onto this thirty-nine years ago when she said of the protagonists of Malick’s first film, Badlands, “Kit and Holly are kept at a distance, doing things for no explained purpose; it’s as if the director had taped gauze over their characters, so that we wouldn’t be able to take a reading on them” (“Sugarland and Badlands,” The New Yorker, March 18, 1974; included in Kael’s brilliant 1976 collection Reeling).