Background
Malick, Terrence was born on November 30, 1943 in Waco, Texas, United States. Malick was the son of an oil man.
Malick, Terrence was born on November 30, 1943 in Waco, Texas, United States. Malick was the son of an oil man.
He was sent to Harvard and then awarded a Rhodes scholarship.
Badlands may be the most assured first film by an American since Citizen Kane. It does not have the persisting tragedy of another debut. They Live by Night, but it has the virtue of an oblique approach to a familiar genre and iconography that makes an easy transition from circumstantial detail to epic perspective. As a study of misbegotten energy run wild, it is as American as Kane. It was a modest film, though, whereas Kane set out to demolish and remake the temple of narrative film. Yet both films have a serene, willful disdain for the surrounding industry. In Welles’s case, that attitude was a challenge to the picture business. But for Malick it seems increasingly like the lofty indifference of deliberate art. Whatever his failings, Welles had a zest for show business; he liked to chew on audiences. Malick’s second film, Days of Heaven, underlined the European archness of the first, and it was as blithe and self-sufficient as a painting labored over in an attic. Whether we see Malick as leisurely or elitist in his approach, two such mannered films in twenty years bespeak an exquisite and uncompeting talent.
He read philosophy and alternated between journalism and teaching at MIT, before he tried Greystone, the AFI academy in California. He thrived there and started writing scripts. He has a credit on Pocket Money (72, Stuart Rosenberg), a studv of lugubrious male companionship that inaugurates the listless surrealism of dim people as conceived by a fine mind in the narration of Malick’s two feature films. It is unique and eloquent; but it comes close to being patronizing.
Badlands is derived from a real incident, but its tone is the half-understood legend of fame pursued by boys watching James Dean and girls steeped in romantic magazines. Its beautvis never obtrusive or patronizing toward the uncultivated characters. The story moves on with an energetic fatalism, worthy of You Only Live Once, another of its sources. The narration was poignant rather than portentous, and the playing by Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek was far more gripping than the numb gestures of Days of Heaven. Above all. Badlands balanced the externals of landscape and violence with their imaginative resonance. It was legitimate for the film to avoid explanation because the action was so dense and eloquent, the myth so solid and matter-of-fact.
Days of Heaven was a very disappointing follow-up. The imagery had become thunderous and stately, as if Malick and Nestor Almendros were so greedy for prestige that they couldn’t release a frame unless it had that sentimental, decorous spaciousness beloved by Andrew Wyeth. And as the image had growm in vanity, so the action subsided into a vague biblical allegory Monologue was used again, with such helpless repetition that one was forced to question Malick’s inventiveness. His obsession seemed defensive and wilting, even if it was unique. The young outlaws now appeared to be shadowy symbols becalmed by significance.
After that, Malick became not just an absentee but a recluse. It was said that he did an early script for what became Great Balls of Fire (89, Jim McBride). Occasionally, magazine journalists attempted to discover where he was and what he might have been doing.
There was enormous anticipation for The Thin Red Line. Of few recent American movies in which so many critics and viewers hoped to find glory and excellence. The Thin Red Line is “beautiful,” but that sort of beauty had always been Malick’s greatest jeopardy. It is also flagrantly incoherent and terribly arts. Too many of the dazzling cast are wasted, or embarrassed. One longs to hear the full story of how that film went astray.
Married Jill Jakes (divorced 1978). Married Michele Malick, 1985 (divorced 1998). Married Alexandra Wallace, 1998.