Terence Malick (pictured) is one of Eyewear's favourite directors in all cinema, and David Gordon Green is his de facto protege - more so even than De Palma (who also extends the work of his master Hitch through homage, pastiche and sheer bravado) becoming a remarkable second-generation director building on a considerable past oeuvre.Malick is a poet of the cinema, sure, and one with few slim volumes to his name. His two 70s films are immediately unique signatures, that created their own cinescape, their own microcosm, their own language almost: Badlands and Days of Heaven. Fixated (this is the word) on the connections between the natural world, the fallen human domain, innocence, interiority, and the violent liminal stages which break through and defile the thin angelic membrane that is best in us, these two films chart murder, love, desire and death, in striking settings, as no other American films have ever done. I consider Days of Heaven the second most beautuiful movie ever filmed, after Vertigo.
Mirroring these two luminous masterworks, and separated by an unbelievable creative gulf of seemingly decades, have come the second two films: The Thin Red Line and The New World. Again, the films are ravishingly shot, and feature the intersection of undefiled natural environments (in the Pacific isles and pre-European North America), innocents (indigenous peoples now, not children and teens) and even greater acts of violence than individuals can muster by their wild selves (war and total colonisation).
Neither of these films is as good as the first two, but then again, who would not have them exist? We are now grateful for all of Welles. Perhaps Malick's own Touch of Evil moment (his unexpected final masterpiece and resurgence) will come with his next film, the long-expected project that (ominously) seems to promise roles for Mel Gibson and Colin Farrell.
Casting has of late been Mr. Malick's own personal downfall, just as it was once his resoundingly-fecund personal helicon. Regardless of his sex appeal, which is major, Mr. Farrell is not an actor most people can watch without disomfiture, without the suspicion the laddish Dublin-born hunk is more chancer than chanced upon, his paycock satisfactions never letting us forget he's no method Marlon immersed deeply in the seas of deep talent. Farrell pretty much robs The New World of the gravitas and grace it in fact starts with, just as Kubrick's greatest achievement, Barry Lyndon, is somewhow wasted on the charming, callow pretty highwayman, Ryan O'Neal. But Malick likely knows this.
His art is too great to resist the need to play games with the industry that is Hollywood, and he is able to insert more than enough moments of genius into both of his latest pictures to keep most cineastes satisfied. In fact, while The New World could be cruelly re-titled as Virginia Vice, it is not a star vehicle, and its squalid depiction of English explorers, set against the sublime and tranquil perfection of the idealised Indian, is stunningly (and questionably) rendered. The Thin Red Line is also one of my favourite 30 or so films, and is by far one of the top ten of the last ten years or so.
Undertow, now out on DVD, and produced by Malick, is a homage too far - a bizarrely ill-thought out admixture of elements from Night of the Hunter, The Dukes of Hazzard, and yes, Badlands, with curiously weak peformances from the fine actors Jamie Bell and Josh Lucas. And yet, it is uncannily like Malick in enough places to be wonderful some of the time, and deserves to be seen for that reason alone. That and the inexorable Glass score which seems to reprise the best moments from the Thin Blue Line (is this an in-joke?).
David Gordon Green is not the next Malick. He is his own man. But thankfully, some of what he thinks and feels is Malickian.
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000517/
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