The existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once said, "If you are lonely when you are alone, then you are in bad company." This quote applies to many characters in the films of Terrence Malick — less protagonists than they are mirrors into the souls of his films' viewers. Malick has long shunned traditional narratives for filmmaking that is experiential, disposing of traditional three act formats for collections of vignettes that sometimes appear to not even relate to one another. It's ironic that he began his career in movies as a screenwriter, given his gradual abandonment of "story" as his career lurched forward, sometimes with hiatuses so long and a life so private that some may have questioned whether he was even still alive.

Malick made a big splash with his directorial debut Badlands in 1973, but from then on his films seemed to successively rely less and less on plot than on overarching themes of meditation, existential guilt, and the infinitesimal nature of the human experience. His actors are photographed almost as animals in the wild, and he doesn't allow us emotional investment in them using traditional exposition, often panning his camera to the beauty of their surrounding nature as a way of showing their triviality. It is odd though, that he still has films in his oeuvre that contain more tangible plots, such as in his most penetrable film, The Thin Red Line.

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Was Malick's completely unique style of filmmaking pretentious nonsense? Or was it groundbreaking avante-gardeism whose scope was simply too hard to retrofit into a two-hour feature? You have to go back to the very beginning of his career to examine these arguments.

Terrence Malick's Background and Early Films

Martin Sheen in Badlands movie
Warner Bros

Malick had as lofty an academic pedigree as any American filmmaker. He grew up in the Midwest, then graduated from Harvard University before receiving a Rhodes scholarship which he used to attend Oxford, afterwards returning to the United States to enroll at AFI while pursuing a career in journalism. His Ivy League background may have predicated his preference for film topics that rooted themselves in academia as much as in the filmmakers he admired.

One of his guiding lights was his mentor Arthur Penn, whose most famous film, Bonnie and Clyde, was a big influence on Malick's Badlands. Still, Malick's films were more ethereal than those of Penn, already distancing themselves from a studio system that would have given Malick less free-range as a filmmaker. Badlands was independently financed, but when it created a buzz at the New York Film Festival it was picked up by Warner Brothers for distribution.

Critical Acclaim for Days of Heaven Was Followed by a Two Decade Hiatus

days-of-heaven-1
Paramount Pictures

Malick's next film, Days of Heaven, may be his most influential, and firmly established him as a purveyor of Americana in filmmaking. Again, he chose a classic American story about outlaws on the run, and while directors from the New Hollywood school were choosing topics that veered away from Western and Frontier stories, Malick turned into them.

Days of Heaven remains a masterpiece, relying on atmosphere and visuals more than dialogue. The film won nearly unanimous critical praise, with Roger Ebert calling it "one of the most beautiful films ever made."

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Still, Malick may have been too heavy-handed for the film trends of the day, and subsequently went on a nearly 20 year hiatus from directing films after Days of Heaven. During this time he developed a script about the origins of the universe, so broad in scope that he didn't initially attempt to pursue this project using a studio. 30 years later it became The Tree of Life, a surprisingly common development length for the director.

Malick Returned to Filmmaking With 1998's The Thin Red Line

Thin Red Line
20th Century Fox

When Malick returned to filmmaking in 1998 with The Thin Red Line, he was still so revered that he managed to tie together one of the most incredible casts ever assembled, all working for scale in order to have an opportunity to collaborate with the director. The result was one of the greatest anti-war films of the 20th Century, showing the stark contrast between warring countries and the island nations where the Pacific War was fought, through the eyes of Private Witt (Jim Caviezal), who longs to abandon his battalion to live among the peaceful natives of Guadalcanal. The film's original edit was 5 hours long, again showing Malick's struggle to reign in the massive scope of his films to meet the standards of a studio. Still, the film won critical acclaim and many awards nominations, and returned the director to the prominence he originally earned in the '70s.

The Thin Red Line marked Malick's last attempt to negotiate his ideals with traditional filmmaking, and his next film The New World may have suffered for this ambition. While it was lauded for its attempt at historical accuracy, the performances seemed lacking, possibly due to Malick's attempts to make them organic and improvisational rather than relying on script. The film also suffers from being caught between attempts to give it a tangible plot while respecting the natural beauty at its thematic center. It begs the question of why Malick never attempted to develop any of his broad ideas as a series or trilogy of films, rather than trying to fit them into a two-hour theatrical format.

Malick's Later Films Can Be Difficult for Audiences to Relate to

knight-of-cups
Broad Green Pictures

All of Malick's subsequent films can be lumped together for their complete abandonment of structure and pursuit of philosophical and cosmological themes. Tree of Life, To the Wonder, and Knight of Cups all give a God's-eye-view of the worlds their characters inhabit, often darting around in time periods so broad they cannot easily be related to one another by the audience.

Was that the point? Is an overarching theme of all his work a disregard for the significance of time itself? When Tree of Life moves between present day scenes to Jurassic-era interactions between dinosaurs, it is difficult to trace their themes or intent. Similarly, the way he sets up scenes in Knight of Cups, which at first appears to move towards a plot about the fallacies of Hollywood, seems to leave the onus entirely on his actors to manifest a narrative using improvised performances with little dialogue. By this point, Malick seems to have strayed too far from the pre-supposed purpose of all films — to entertain their audience. His films almost become music videos and the audience is left to draw their own conclusions without a clear roadmap.

Malick is still working today, with a few features reported to be in development. Still, one wonders whether he will ever return to the structured and thematic stories that gave us his strongest films, or if he will delve deeper into the meta-scope of his last decade of films. No one can ever doubt the immense risks he has taken as a filmmaker, and so long as he continues to attract top-flight actors and critical praise for his films, we should expect to see more of the same.