Terrence Malick, Rehearsing the Unexpected, edited by Carlo Hintermann and Daniele Villa, Faber and Faber, £25
Terrence Malick is a man of mysteries. Over the last 40 years, the American director has released just six films, with a 20-year pause between the second and third. Unlike most directors, he shows no interest in being a gun for hire and only makes films he has written. He frustrates his studio bosses by spending years in the editing suite getting each scene exactly right. He never does publicity, forbids his image being used in promotional material and almost never gives interviews.
Yet the real mystery about Malick is the work. Shot through with natural imagery, philosophical voiceovers and unconventional plotting, his films sometimes baffle the viewer. Some critics regard him as overblown, humourless and overly religious. Just like great poetry, though, Malick’s films communicate before they are fully understood. And the mystery has a purpose: his subject is both divine mystery and the mystery we are to one another.
Fittingly, even Malick’s birthplace is uncertain. The editors of Terrence Malick: Rehearsing the Unexpected—a collection of interviews with the director’s collaborators including actors, producers, cinematographers and composers—plump for Ottawa, Illinois but other sources say Waco, Texas, where he grew up. Malick has an unusually intellectual background for Hollywood. After Harvard, he studied philosophy at Oxford with Gilbert Ryle and in 1969 translated Martin Heidegger’s The Essence of Reasons. He wrote journalism for the New Yorker before training at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles, where fellow director David Lynch later studied.
"When asked by one actor why they didn't rehearse more, Malick replied: 'Your whole life has prepared you for this moment'"
Malick shares with Lynch an interest in small-town America and surreal visuals. But while Lynch sees festering corruption under the smooth suburban lawn, Malick finds both wonder and violence in the natural world, and humanity even in killers. The American artist with whom he has the closest affinity is the novelist Marilynne Robinson, by coincidence also born in November 1943. Like Robinson, Malick fell into a long silence after early success, and like her he takes an unfashionable interest in theology. His films are the closest the medium gets to the interiority of great novels.
One novelistic technique that has become his cinematic signature is voiceover. Voiceover is used by many directors to rescue films they are unable to make coherent with the material they have shot. But Malick uses voiceover to add layers of complexity. He allows characters to articulate their inner thoughts or comment on their own actions in retrospect. It can provide the key to unlocking the whole work.
The opening shot of The Thin Red Line (1998)—the war movie adapted from James Jones’s novel that began Malick’s triumphant return to cinema—shows a crocodile slipping sinisterly into a river. We hear a soldier’s voice: “What’s this war in the heart of nature? Why does nature vie with itself? The land contend with the sea? Is there an avenging power in nature? Not one power, but two?” Over the course of three gripping hours, Malick exposes not only the horrors of war but the violence at the heart of nature—and humanity. The year is 1942 and the United States army is attempting to capture the Pacific island of Guadalcanal from the Japanese. The soldiers see their comrades killed and do their fair share of killing. During their drunken victory celebrations, they bind the mouth of the once-sinister crocodile and begin poking him. As so often in Malick’s work, cruelty to animals is the mark of the beast in man.
The contending sides in man’s nature are embodied in two characters: Sergeant Welsh (Sean Penn) and Private Witt (Jim Caviezel). Welsh interrogates Witt for absconding before the battle. Witt left his post to swim with the Guadalcanal natives, whose hopeful singing resounds through the film. (Malick tends to see native cultures as embodiments of optimistic wisdom. In The New World (2005), his flawed take on the Pocahontas story, the Indians are more innocent than their European conquerors.) Witt tells Welsh that he has “seen another world” beyond suffering, one where compassion is still possible. But Welsh doesn’t buy it. War has made him cynical. In battle, he says, all a man can do is “shut his eyes and let nothing touch him. Look out for himself.”
Their debate resonates in two of the film’s most extraordinary sequences. In the first, the soldiers troop onwards in the tense jungle on the lookout for a Japanese attack. Emerging from the distance, an elderly native man walks past in the other direction, minding his own business. The soldier at the front turns briefly towards him and for a moment he—and the audience—glimpse Guadalcanal from a totally different perspective. Perhaps Witt was right and another world exists right in front of our eyes. The second sequence takes place in the heat of battle as the US soldiers storm the Japanese camp. The camera follows Welsh and his comrades shooting and bayoneting screaming Japanese. In the corner of the screen there appears, very briefly, a Japanese soldier sitting calm and cross-legged with his eyes closed, impervious to the chaos. It is a miraculous moment—and a mysterious one. Is he, as Welsh advised, cutting himself off from the world and letting nothing touch him? Or is he the Japanese equivalent of Witt, trusting in God when all else is being destroyed around him?
The interviewees in Rehearsing the Unexpected reveal how Malick elicits such moments. For The Thin Red Line, he shot enough footage to make a 10-part series and then discovered the best stories while editing. Amazingly for such a complicated shoot in difficult locations, he filmed chronologically to make it easier for his actors to inhabit their characters’ journey. He casts actors according to their temperament as much as their ability. In Jim Caviezel, he saw “a kind of humility” that suited Witt; it also helped that during his audition, Caviezel gifted a rosary to Malick’s wife. The non-religious Sean Penn, on the other hand, brought a tough humanism to Welsh’s character. When asked by one actor why they didn’t rehearse more, Malick replied: “Your whole life has prepared you for this moment.”
"Malick is a master at finding universal themes in everyday interactions"
For those less susceptible to the experimental transcendence of the late work, the early films remain his best. Yet the same theme of the darkness at the heart of man recurs, though it is traced with a cooler eye. In his first film, Badlands (1973), a young man called Kit (Martin Sheen) goes on a killing spree in 1950s South Dakota with his teenage girlfriend Holly (Sissy Spacek). Unlike in the more schlocky films on the same subject—Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1994) comes to mind—Malick does not view his protagonists as mad, or even especially bad. Kit’s murders are motivated by a banal desire for adventure and glamour. (He compares himself to James Dean.) As Holly’s voiceover reveals, she went along for the ride without thinking much about the consequences. The most affecting scene is one of those mysterious moments with which Malick’s later work is filled. While on the run in the middle of the night, the couple stop on a lonely highway and dance to Nat King Cole illuminated by the car headlights. They could almost be dancing at the prom—endearingly innocent and chillingly callous.
Malick films the American landscape with lavish attention in Badlands. He has an intimate feel for natural imagery. His cast and crew often become frustrated as he diverts the camera from the scene ostensibly being filmed to capture a flock of rare birds or a passing butterfly. While making Days of Heaven (1978), a love triangle set on a farm in Texas in 1916, he made considerable use of the “magic hour”—the time between the sun setting and darkness falling, which suffuses the screen with a dreamy glow. That glow is ignited for the denouement, when the wealthy farmer played by Sam Shepherd realises that his wife has married him for money. A Biblical plague of locusts invades the sky and attacks the crops. The farmer starts a fire that rages out of control—just like his anger at his wife, leading to inevitable tragedy.
The Biblical symbols present in the early work become more explicit in Malick’s most recent two films. The astounding Tree of Life (2011)—the title is a reference to the Garden of Eden—begins with a quotation from the Book of Job. God is chastising Job after sending upon him a host of ills: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth… when the morning stars sang together?” Human suffering and cruelty are once again Malick’s grand themes, but unlike his previous films, The Tree of Life is highly autobiographical. We are in Waco, Texas in the 1950s, following a
middle-class family with three brothers—one of whom, we learn at the start, will die as a young man. Malick also grew up in Waco in the 1950s with two younger brothers—one of whom committed suicide while studying the guitar in Spain.
In a rare interview from 1975, Malick said: “I was raised in a violent environment in Texas. What struck me was how violence erupted and ended before you really had time to understand what was happening.” In the film, the brother’s death is foreshadowed in the aggression shown by the father (Brad Pitt) towards his sons. He is especially harsh on the eldest boy, Jack. He terrifies him with his rages at the dinner table; he shouts at him for saying “daddy” instead of “sir”; and punishes him for banging the front door by making him open and close it quietly 50 times. Jack prefers his mother (Jessica Chastain), a gentle woman who, like Private Witt, follows what she calls the “way of grace,” while her husband, like Sergeant Welsh, follows the “way of nature.”
Malick contrasts the couple by assigning them different pieces of music. The mother dances in the sunlight to Bedrich Smetana’s joyfully invigorating Moldau. Her husband enjoys the sombre grandeur of Johannes Brahms’s Fourth Symphony, to which he compels Jack and the boys to listen, telling them in awe that Arturo Toscanini recorded the piece 65 times before he was satisfied. (Malick was perhaps thinking here of his own tyrannical perfectionism.) The middle brother sits on the veranda playing the guitar, a musical middle-ground between his mother and father—and a tribute to Malick’s own guitarist brother.
As Jack gets older, he discovers violence. He tortures birds and frogs and shoots his brother with an air gun. He hates his father so much he prays for him to die. One day, he finds him working under the family car. The camera follows his eye to the jack elevating the vehicle and he imagines pulling
it away.
His dark thoughts are paralleled in the extraordinary mystical prologue to the film that shows the beginning of life on earth. A dinosaur approaches an injured dinosaur lying by a riverbed and considers crushing its head—but, like Jack, in the end decides not to. Malick is a master at finding universal themes in everyday interactions—nowhere more so than in The Tree of Life, where each scene is both a richly observed social situation and a metaphor of good and evil, suffering and compassion.
Malick’s most recent film To the Wonder (2012) tries to pull the same trick but is less successful; it’s all metaphor and hardly any story. The lovers played by Ben Affleck and Olga Kurylenko barely speak a word to each other over the two hours. Their falling in love is supposed to represent man’s relationship with God—the Biblical para-text here is Song of Solomon—but the film never quite catches fire. The subplot about a priest (Javier Bardem) losing his faith feels obvious.
And yet Malick’s skilful overlapping of images and music creates magical scenes. When the lovers visit the spectacular Mont Saint-Michel abbey in Normandy—known as “the Wonder”—they caress each other to the sound of the prelude from Richard Wagner’s Parsifal. The musical theme is ominous: the opera is about the rejection of romantic love in favour of the divine. In the end, the relationship does fail and the last shot of the film is Kurylenko’s character back at Mont Saint-Michel, now alone. But when the same Parsifal music plays it no longer seems threatening; rather it washes the character and the audience with compassion. Having given each other great pleasure and great pain during their relationship, only after breaking up do they discover a greater love in forgiving each other. It is a quintessential Malick moment.
