Every article written about Terrence Malick will inevitably reach a tired and obvious conclusion: he is not exactly a prolific filmmaker. He has directed four films in 33 years. After his first major feature, Badlands, Malick waited five years to release Days of Heaven. Then he waited two decades for The Thin Red Line, and then another seven years before making The New World. In that time, Francis Ford Coppola directed 15 films, Woody Allen directed 31, and Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg have had full careers. The reason for this lack of prolificity is vague. An associate told USA
Today that Malick prefers to think long and hard about his films, often for many years, before even the earliest stages of preproduction.

             Every article about Terrence Malick will make another observation: he is something of a recluse. He grants no interviews and is never involved with his films' publicity. His contracts guarantee that no photographs are to be published and only nine unofficial photos of Malick seem to exist. He is rumored to be an Orthodox Christian and his films suggest an elastic, but intense faith that is either Buddhist or Christian mystic. Only the barest details of his biography are known. Born into the oil industries of Texas and Oklahoma, a scholar at Ivy League institutions, and a grad school drop-out who drifted from job to job, Malick seems to have more in common with George W. Bush than the great filmmakers of his generation.

             His reclusiveness and slow production have led many to dub Malick the cinematic equivalent of J.D. Salinger. I cannot decide whether this comparison is superficial or insightful. Still, Salinger and Malick share similar spiritual concerns, and in this the comparison between them may possess considerable insight.

             Malick's kinship with other American writers is more apparent. Just as Werner Herzog's films seem firmly rooted in 19th century German philosophy and literature, Malick's roots are deep in the tradition of American transcendentalism, and in this he shares little with other great American filmmakers. (I have always detected a dash of John Ford in his work, but Ford's influence may be ubiquitous in American cinema.) Malick extends naturally from Ralph Waldo Emerson and the poets Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, and Wallace Stevens.

             As for Malick's cinematic kinship, I am tempted to cite Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, though the cultural gulf between them seems too great. They are like two distinct trees of similar height, whose branches mingle and produce similar leaves and fruit, but which sprang from different seeds and whose trunks extend into different soil. Like Malick, Tarkovsky filled a necessary void in Russian cinema, and paid a political price for it. Malick's only setback is the commercial unviability of his films, and it is a price he seems more than willing to pay (his rumored financial stability presumably makes the burden light).

             This leads to the third (and most useful) observation every article on Terrence Malick will inevitably make: his films are slow. They move at their own pace, in their own time, to their own rhythm and timbre. If one was to seek a musical equivalent of Malick's work, perhaps a whale song would come closest. His films are long, and often seem longer than they actually are. Malick is content to linger on any detail indefinitely, testing the endurance of even the most patient audiences. Meanwhile, his voiceovers have a hypnotic effect that can either inspire viewers or lull them to sleep. But for the devoted cinephile, one is hard-pressed to find a more exhilarating experience than watching a film like Days of Heaven or The Thin Red Line. They have the rare quality of being at once highly emotional, deeply serious, spiritually profound, and intensely beautiful.

             Malick's next film will be titled Tree of Life, though no details about the plot have been disclosed. Colin Farrell is reported to have signed on to the project, and at least part of the film will be shot in India (a Mumbei-based film company is co-producing). Malick began work on Walker Percy's The Moviegoer in the mid 90s, and enlisted Tim Robbins and Julia Roberts ... but nothing came of it. Over the years, a persistent rumor has circulated that J.D. Salinger sold the rights to Catcher in the Rye under the stipulation that Malick alone write and direct the adaptation, though the rumors remain unsubstaniated.

             Still, Malick adapted James Jones' inimitable The Thin Red Line, capturing the novel's spirit with integrity while still making the film his own. True, it is difficult to imagine a cinematic version of Catcher in the Rye (I'm sure it's the sort of project Gus Van Sant would jump at, much to the ire of Salinger devotees), but if any director were ideally suited for the project, it would be Malick. Salinger's novel may be a masterpiece, but Malick directs only masterpieces.

BADLANDS
(1973)

One of the great cinematic experiences in my life was seeing Badlands in a packed arthouse theater. I had seen it before many times, but I never fully realized what a side-splittingly funny screenplay Malick had written until I heard an audience roar with laughter at the dialogue, delivered to perfection by Martin Sheen and making the "random" elements of Napoleon Dynamite seem sensical. Sheen plays Kit, a young hooligan from a small town in Nebraska who seduces a teenage girl (Sissy Spacek), murders her father, and takes her into the Badlands of the Dakotas and Wyoming, committing acts of violence along the way.

The screenplay is based on the 1958 Starkweather-Fugate killing spree, and both the murders and the film (with its trademark image of young Spacek twirling her baton) inspired the opening track of Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska. The film is not half as bleak as that album, but is surprisingly light and charming (the soundtrack features music from Carl Orff's Musica Poetica). The location gives Malick a chance to develop the visionary, meditative style that would become his trademark, and his camera massages landscapes that would have been mere backdrops in any other film. Spacek delivers the voiceover narration with an appropriate blend of innocence and insouciance. Aside from the glorious imagery and voiceovers, Malick's signatures are not yet dominant, and Badlands is a uniquely mainstream movie. The film's driving force is Malick's restrained screenplay, which mutes the horrors and brings Sheen's performance (possibly his best ever) to the forefront.

Many American filmmakers in the 60s and 70s delved into issues of violence, but few possessed the cinematic deftness Malick displays in Badlands.

DAYS OF HEAVEN
(1978)

Malick's second film is, in a sense, his first. Here all the elements align and we see his total vision, of which his later films are lovely iterations. Days of Heaven may also be Malick's most representative film, and is an ideal bridge between the others. It is more accessible than The Thin Red Line or The New World, if not quite as mainstream as Badlands. This is Malick's first overtly religious film, with a plot that echoes the Biblical stories of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, told through the eyes and voiceover narration of a young girl.

The film is set in the lean years prior to World War I. Bill (Richard Gere) is a steel worker who, after accidentally killing a man, wanders from Chicago to Texas with his girlfriend Abby (Brooke Adams) and sister Linda (Linda Manz). They are hired during the wheat harvest by by a wealthy, terminally ill farmer (Sam Shepard), who is told that Bill and Abby are brother and sister. Abby then convinces the farmer to marry her in a scheme to acquire his fortune after he dies. But the death seems to stall, and Bill grows impatient. These events are transmuted from melodrama to something like myth through Linda, who brings the same detached sentiment that Spacek brought to Badlands. The story is told against wildfires and plagues of locust, with a lush cinematography and visual splendor that is almost unparalleled in American cinema.

THE THIN RED LINE
(1998)

George Clooney. Nick Nolte. Adrien Brody. John Travolta. John Cusack. Woody Harrelson. Tim Blake Nelson. John C. Reilly. Miranda Otto. Jared Leto. Nick Stahl. When Malick came back, everybody wanted in, and the effect can be a little distracting in The Thin Red Line. Blink and you'll miss Clooney and Travolta's contributions, and no less than Mickey Rourke was edited out of the final cut (which was reduced to three hours from the original six hour monster). Yet two performances dominate this film: Sean Penn as Sgt. Welsh and Jim Caviezel (who would portray Jesus in Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ) as Pvt. Witt. Together they forge a religious and philosophic dialogue that permeates every frame.

Indeed, The Thin Red Line is Malick's grand philosophic treatise, and perhaps his most challenging film. It would be crude to reduce Welsh's worldview to pragmatic, Aristotelian atheism or Witt's to idealistic, Platonic Christianity. Those categories may be accurate, but they do no justice to the immediate, profound implications the film makes for them. "We're living in a world that's blowing itself to hell as fast as everybody can arrange it," says Welsh. "And there ain't no world but this one." This dialogue is combined with Malick's most innovative use of voiceover: a handful of characters narrate the film (including some Japanese soldiers), but it is impossible to distinguish between them. Instead, Malick suggests a kind of mystical unity—an equilibrium of voice and spirit.

Malick studied philosophy at Harvard and Oxford, and later taught philosophy at MIT. But there is an urgency in The Thin Red Line's philosophic speculations that would be anathema to most academics, and the film received harsh criticism from some of Malick's former colleagues, who found it too simplistic. The Thin Red Line may not earn Malick that PhD he never received, but it contends as one of the greatest philosophic films ever made.

THE NEW WORLD
(2005)

The Thin Red Line was criticized for not being a "war movie" in the vein of Saving Private Ryan. Likewise, The New World has been criticized for not following through with conclusions about the British colonization of North America. But as with his other films, Malick is simply using his subject (the story of Pocahontas, both as a historical event and a national myth) as a vehicle for his own ideas and obsessions. This is not to suggest that Malick chooses subjects arbitrarily, but that his interest in politics and history, in and of itself, is limited. His concerns run deeper, and The New World is no less than a spiritual odyssey between three souls and two worlds.

If The Thin Red Line is Malick's most philosophic film, then The New World is his most religious. It takes the idea of salvation seriously and finds potent visual metaphors of redemptive possibility, both in the idea of "the New World" and in the actual footage of North America as it would have seemed to the first settlers. Every character in the film seeks some new Eden, a concept that many serious filmmakers would have approached with irony. For Malick the possibility is real, though it eludes the settlers, for whom greed is too powerful, and the natives, who see their fate but not how to avoid it. Malick chooses not to dwell on the paradise lost, and quickly ties his narrative to the three voices who dominate the tale: John Smith (Colin Farrell), Pocahontas (carefully unnamed in the film, and transcendentally portrayed by Q'Orianka Kilcher), and John Rolfe (Christian Bale). Their stories form a narrative arch that carries us from hope through despair to rebirth, delivered with awesome beauty and grace.