Add Tail Slate
to Your Site/RSS
| Blog: |
| Tail Slate |
Topics: |
| films, movies, television |
The New World grossed over $12 million. A spectacular failure considering the expectations last Christmas when the movie blasted into the critical circle with one glowing chant after another.
Everyone in Hollywood wants to be in Malick’s next movie, because his output stands the test of time so well, scanty as it is. But with the public Malick will always be a polarizer: Half the grades on Yahoo films were A" and the other half were flat out F grades, for instance. Word of mouth killed The New World.
Among filmmakers, Malick is still the gold standard. Never mind the cinematography or soundscape, for which his reputation is gigantic; check out how he uses silence, a primer for anyone telling stories, whether on silicon or celluloid.
To be in a trance, to be entranced, transfixed with awe, is a desire we all profess but too rarely feel, especially in a movie theatre. Today’s movies are often too graphic and too short to leave lasting impressions, never mind change lives. The current pulp from Hollywood, Kong and Spielberg and Ron Howard with Tom Hanks plotting an idiotic Da Vinci Code, is as bad as Hollywood gets, and 7,000 jobs have been lost here in the past year because of dropping box office numbers and slowing DVD sales.
Hollywood is in panic; the business section of the L.A. Times reads respectfully and fearfully like the obituaries. Hollywood surveyed 40,000 people this summer to see what was keeping them from the movie theatre; unbelievably, Hollywood thought the Internet was the culprit, but over 90 percent of the respondents said bad movies and high prices were the reasons, and the Internet only received 4 percent of the vote.
The studios are practically demanding a recount.
And now comes Terence Malick with his fourth movie in thirty years, his first movie since 1998. Anyone who knows a little about cinema inevitably reads in the press how provocative this guy’s “vision” is compared to his peers’. Nobody sees the world like Malick, say the critics. In 1978, my own appreciation for the movies was turned on its head by a movie called Days of Heaven, whose art and silence seemed a faraway language to me, who thought he appreciated all forms of artistic treasure.
Days of Heaven blew me away. It is unlike any movie I have ever seen, and it is filled with error and cliché. Malick’s first movie Badlands was ruined for me by the presence of Martin Sheen, whose family and himself are too lowbrow for any elitist to take seriously. But the scenery and Sissy Spacek were fine, and again I was mesmerized by that language of bursting silence.
Eight years ago, Malick’s third movie Thin Red Line came out, and for 20 minutes the movie was one of the most amazing pieces of art I’ve ever seen with my own eyes. Then he turned it into a war movie with Nick Nolte and George Clooney and the movie frittered into stupid gunplay, diminishing Malick’s name in the process (among the cineastes) and questioning his ability ever to bring in enough revenue to make a truly good movie (among the financiers). Could he make another movie, and could he bring his particular language to enough tongues to make the effort worthwhile?
I came out of filming in the Desert because the Arclight was playing Malick’s The New World a week early, and I wanted to hear and see it as soon as I knew I could. Somebody told me that when Ron Howard saw it, he re-edited The Da Vinci Code, and I believe it. The reviews were glorious, and the cognoscenti were drop-dead shocked at the film’s sensuous outer texture and its fecund inner soul. I believe you would have been hearing about this movie everywhere, read about it in the supermarket, evangel after evangel braying it praise.
If you haven’t already, see The New World as fast as you can, and lose yourself, or find yourself, in the secret of how much art can affect society. Because Malick influences Spielberg and Tarantino and Lynch and not the other way around. Because now Hollywood will scout their portfolios for other arty products to stick in Malick’s brazen wake. This movie will change the way Hollywood does business for the next five years. And from the first moment, there are mistakes. Technical mistakes of movement, costume, sound, shots dropped too short, cuts brought too quick, and too much GQ smarm in the hairstyles and hotpants, and never mind the dreary narration or hokey dramas, all of this stuff leaps out at you, because Malick lets his movie boss him around, and a movie is a pretty self-indulgent being.
You see the film the way he sees it, with no bungled interpretation of finance or emotion to get in the way, and the beautiful beautiful beautiful love story is allowed to unfold the way love stories always have, in moments of silent empathy, when you know your lover is looking at you and feeling as she or he has never felt, but does not need to say, and forgets to remember because the moment of fusion is too fierce to note in a diary or a calendar or tattoo or a lovesong, and then these moments return to shade the lives we are leading without such burning love, and as I walked out of the theatre back to my midget projects and grand illusions I felt as close to giving it up, to quitting, as I ever have in years and years of creative effort, happy to know someone has accomplished what I can only dream of imagining, and feeling so content with that realization that jealousy or envy are words I have only just now admitted into my head to write them in this note to you.
The movie Maborisi was the best love story I have ever seen on screen. Spellbinding. That movie has been on the top of my list of favorite cinema for years, and I never thought it could be equaled. And The New World is remarkably, eerily, similar in its plotting of love’s growth. Can you love twice in a lifetime? Can love repeat? Can love be repeated? Isn’t this the essential question for anyone who has been touched by love? Can love happen twice?
Malick’s locations and battle scenes and evocations of language and nature are not the feature, nor is the movie’s history, because the mechanics of loving is what he is trying to express. And if you think how much the movies try to capture love stories, and have always tried, and to measure the successes not against each other but against the standard of how much love can you see on a movie screen, then you’ll leave the movie as I did, drained, wounded, not knowing where to turn to touch real love, not knowing whether the molten glow love brings will ever ignite again in my heart or vein or soul or brain or wherever it flames to consume me. Can it be possible to live without such love again? Worse, can I die without such love? And worst, can my forever be without it? Who cares if the camera stutters, or the lighting is betrayed by several takes?
These things bother me in the wooden contraptions made by Clint Eastwood or Ridley Scott, but I forgive them with Malick because I know Dickens and Picasso and Shakespeare and van Gogh and the other luminaries of civilized art would recognize immediately what Malick is up to, what he is trying to speak, what he is trying to tell us that the language of love always has to say, but for our hunt for comfort and profit we never have the heart to hear. Please see this movie alone, and leave your current or long-lasting squeeze at home.
Love speaks to you directly, and only indirectly, if ever, to a couple. Don’t ask me to explain it, you’ll know what I mean when the lights come up and reality snatches you back from a fundamental fall, back from admitting all you want, all you need, is to bask in love’s glow, like a flower wishing for warmth, light, energy.
Share on Facebook
- 
-