TERRENCE’S TRILOGY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXRYA1dxP_0
Let’s get this point out of the way early: Yes, Terrence Malick used to work at a much slower pace and when a new project of his did arrive it was usually after years of silence. Yes, post THE TREE OF LIFE he has drastically increased his output of work. In fact, in his almost 45 year long career Malick has released over half his entire output of work since 2011. Hell, he’s even doing public appearances – I had the pleasure of being present for an actual Q&A with the man after an IMAX screening of his voiceover-less director’s cut of VOYAGE OF TIME – and the man who once was a cinematic Bigfoot who would come out of the wilderness maybe once a decade now is as prolific as Woody Allen (one film per year every year) or Steven Spielberg (routinely releases two films in a twelve month period). It’s easy to say “The Magic of Malick” has been lost, that the elusive idea that he embodied is gone and he’s now a shadow his former self… of course I disagree.
Yet, I understand and fully support the disregard of “New Malick”. As a filmmaker he has intentionally traversed so far from traditional storytelling into doing his own thing that it’s impossible to argue with negative attitudes towards his work of the last half-decade. When someone says his new work “is garbage” that’s not an outlook to argue against because the new films are so far deep into doing their own aesthetic/experiential thing with such specificity that someone’s response being negative is pretty much a given. It’s not about being entertaining and passing two hours but is something that tries to touch a little deeper and good art is as just as likely to profoundly affect the viewer as it is to push them away. Hating Malick’s post 2011 work is as perfect a response as embracing them and as films they are very challenging features! Hell, they don’t even work for me all the time.
The year was 2013: over eighteen months from seeing Terrence Malick’s THE TREE OF LIFE in a relatively packed matinee showing in downtown NYC. That feature was a mind-blowing experience that not just affected me profoundly – thinking about the meaning of existence after watching the universe come into existence – but on the personal – I never had a brother but Jack’s relations with his siblings wasn’t too far removed from my own – and had me signing the man’s praise. It was like nothing I had ever seen and I loved every moment of it. Learning that Malick was releasing his new film, TO THE WONDER, couldn’t leave me more excited! So imagine my surprise when I left the theater and my overall response to the film was more of a shrug than anything else.
To quote a question often brought up in Malick’s now traditional and oft-parodied breathy voiceover – Why? Why did Wonder leave me little wonder? The same factors for success were there. Emmanuel Lubezki was still behind the camera and is incapable of making a frame less than picturesque. Jack Fisk was still on production design making sure the world on screen is real. Most important of all, Malick was again making a film that was intensely personal to his own life experiences. Perhaps it was Malick moving from something everyone has gone through – childhood in Tree of Life’s case – to something less easy to define – falling in and out of a great love – because it’s an experience I haven’t yet found myself. Maybe the cast of Wonder just didn’t have that special something that his last film did? I mean, there are few performances as incredible and real as the one Hunter McCracken’s gave in The Tree of Life. Maybe it was just all the damn twirling? Whatever it was there was something missing and for years if anyone asked me what my least favorite Malick was the answer was easy. To The Wonder.
The year was 2016, KNIGHT OF CUPS is about to be released in theaters… well a theater to be more precise. The cast was pretty much made up of actors I greatly admired and the idea of Malick dealing with Hollywood hedonism couldn’t leave me more excited. Instead I found myself experiencing Malick’s most challenging work. A film so completely devoid of narrative and character that it plays at one note for two hours and ultimately comes off as nothing more than a 120-minute montage. When I walked out of Knight it was hard to argue that movie is just the following: Christian Bale is sad and sleeps with a hot blonde, Christian Bale is still sad and sleeps with a hot brunette, Christian Bale continues to be sad and sleeps with a hot Indian actress, repeat. With lots of twirling and lots of ass shots!
The time is now, 2017, I was heading to see SONG TO SONG and I was worried. My love for Malick had been reignited by VOYAGE OF TIME, which I had seen project in IMAX the previous October and all the signs were there for a great cinematic experience but I had been stung before. Happily I had no reason to worry. Where I felt Wonder and Knight had respectively left me underwhelmed and disappointed, Song to Song reunited me with the original inspirational artist! Mind you, it’s definitely a part with the other two with similar visuals, pacing and mood but it’s a refinement! Malick and his peers have expanded on ideas from the previous two works and found a happy medium between pure personal filmmaking and having an austere vision. Or at least it did for this viewer. It helps that Song delivers more on the idea of Malick embracing hedonism than he did in Knight of Cups because in the new film people actually do genuinely fuck at times. Conceptually they changed the game a bit as well and it worked for the best. Example, Malick’s key direction to his male leads/stands in Wonder & Knight was “to not talk but listen” and let their fellow actors carry the scenes. This would explain why the talented Batmen Ben Affleck & Christian Bale end up spending great lengths of time in their respective films quietly following beautiful actresses as they coquettishly twirl around in fields backlit by the sun. Clearly, Malick never gave this direction to Ryan Gosling, Rooney Mara or the truly electric Michael Fassbender who all get to inhibit actual characters in this entry and not just function as a stand-in for someone in Malick’s personal life. There’s even an actual two-minute dialogue scene where Mara and Gosling get to bounce off each other. Best of all, Song to Song is (mostly) an upbeat and life-affirming experience, which carries a lot of weight when contrasted against the downbeat To The Wonder and the absolutely bleak Knight of Cups. Which made me realize these three films all tell the same story. What Song to Song ends up being is the closer to the unofficial trilogy in Malick’s career. The Terrence Trilogy. By design, it’s nowhere near as narratively cohesive as Richard Linklater’s Before Trilogy nor is it as thematically unified as Martin Scorsese’s unofficial religion trilogy comprised of The Last Temptation of Christ, Kundun & Silence, but it works as an experiential trilogy about chapters in life. If these three films told one characters life it would go as follows –
CHAPTER 1 – TO THE WONDER: A downbeat tragedy. The story about what it feels like to quickly discover a great love and then just as quickly fall out of it. It’s a melancholy experience that ends with the lovers moving on with their respective lives after separating.
CHAPTER 2 – KNIGHT OF CUPS: Life continues on after falling out of love. It has too. Depression and ennui settles in and you try to fill that emptiness with whatever you can find. If that means fucking a lot of random partners, doing work that leaves you unfilled and aimlessly looking for purpose then that’s what you do.
CHAPTER 3 – SONG TO SONG: All that fucking isn’t making you feel better. Those big dreams about becoming a famous artist aren’t coming to fruition. Maybe it’s time to move on. It might even be time to look back at your lost loves and possibly forgive them for past transgressions. Life has to continue and if you find that person who makes you happy then do what you can to keep them around.
Or at least that’s how I enjoy viewing it. The first film leaves you feeling emotionally drained, during the second you’re lost and then the third rekindles those lost emotions. In the end, this is how I am going to approach this era of Malick’s from here on out. I’d even happily argue the stance that these works aren’t Terrence Malick’s sixth, seventh and ninth feature films but rather make up his sixth masterpiece. I’m looking forward to a night in the near future after Song to Song hits Blu-ray where I can marathon the three back-to-back. I’ll also keep fingers crossed that the Criterion Collection will work through all of Malick’s movies and these give these three a boxset release. Either way, based on what he said at the Q&A I had the pleasure of being part of, this chapter of Malick’s work is ending as he “repents” and returns to more traditional filmmaking in his next feature, RADEGUND, the WWII drama of conscientious objector Franz Jagerstatter who was executed by Nazis for refusing to fight so this. Will it be a return to his pre-Tree of Life filmmaking or will it be a new stylistic chapter for the 73-year-old filmmaker? I’m curious to find out soon!
In conclusion, New Malick is easy to hate and anyone who feels that way is right in feeling so. The works are so much their own thing that saying any of them is “shit” is just as correct as calling them a “masterpiece”. I don’t know if I’d argue for any one of them by itself is deserving of the masterpiece title but as a trio they are magical!
NOTE: This was my first writing on this blog so please forgive it for some sloppiness. The writing is mostly done free form with little editing and forethought beyond an original thesis so it might meander, ramble and just be unfocused. We’ll see if this becomes something I regularly do or if this will just be a one off. Life’s weird so let’s see what happens next!