Director Terrence Malick’s BADLANDS is one of the greatest movies ever made. His next movie, DAYS OF HEAVEN, is close to great. After 15 years more or less hiding, his third movie, THE THIN RED LINE, is good.
It went downhill from there.
John Bleasdale’s The Magic Hours makes it clear that Malick’s BADLANDS barely got made. It had a non-union crew, had no decent financing, had trouble getting distribution once it was made, and nearly burned to death one of the crew when a house fire scene went (incompetently) awry. This is the story of an indie film that had Malick begging money from friends, colleagues, and parents.
We love these tough stories when they turn out well. BADLANDS turned out well, won awards, has worn fame well, and has gone down in filmmaking history. It established Terrence Malick as a filmmaking genius at a young age. Perhaps to his detriment.
How do you follow up an early act of genius?
Loosely based upon a real murder spree by a young couple, stars Sissy Spacek, Martin Sheen, and Warren Oates – with Malick as two different minor characters; money was tight – fill out the lushly-shot and atmospheric movie with murderous psychotic and erotic blankness.
When not randomly killing, they dance to music on a car radio. They plan their future. They dream of Canada or Mexico. They shoot fish. Sheen’s character Kit shoots bounty hunters.
Malick makes violence and murder mindless. Natural. Normal. Psychosis has no boundaries. Being psychotic is a lot like hanging laundry on a clothesline: banal.
And it’s brilliant. Haunting.
DAYS OF HEAVEN is set just before World War I in the plains of Texas. A wealthy wheat farmer brings in trainloads of poor immigrants to act as his peasants. Again, the movie is wonderfully atmospheric – Malick is a master artist – but it’s rather a standard story of love and jealousy and eventual murder.
HEAVEN is a great movie because of its feel and because of the voice-over by young actress Linda Manz. Spacek did a voice-over for BADLANDS, too.
These narrations acted as a kind of crutch for Malick. To his credit, he recognized that and tried to minimize using them in the future. But in his first two movies, wow, they make them really work. Spacek’s unique gravelly voice, and Manz’s even more gravelly 14 year old’s voice, are the things of dreams.
And then THE THIN RED LINE came about 15 years after his two classics. Bleasdale makes it clear that after two difficult acts of genius, Malick may have withdrawn because of the pressure to follow up.
Malick did follow up. Nothing he has done has been bad. But, to me at least, it’s the common story of genius slowly petering out the more and more we expect of it.
I see the same trajectory in novelist Don DeLillo’s career, only without the acts of genius frontloaded like they are with Malick. In DeLillo’s case, WHITE NOISE was a mid-career shooting star. Then he was told that he was brilliant, believed it, and tried too hard to write big-themed novels: the history of garbage in UNDERGROUND and a re-formulation of the JFK assassination in LIBRA.
But we have what we have, some great movies and some great books. We need to accept that not everything can always be perfect, and perfection is seldom repeatable.
Do artists retreat on purpose, to escape impossible expectations? Or is it mere entropy? Or erosion? Or overreaching?
Or, as in HEAVEN, is it . . . locusts, external factors, time and aging alone?
