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I couldn’t get through it; I gave up an hour in. I really really liked Days of Heaven, and the meditative, fragmented way he puts the story together is very similar, but I just could not plug into this one at all. (9/12/05)
I’ve (re-)discovered a few things over the course of the recent Days Of Rage. Some of them are great!
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a lonely girl in possession of a library card must be in want of a twin. The child who spends a lot of time in books also spends …
Hey. I don’t know what we do now either. I DO know that we’ll need each other going forward, as we always have, for support, mutual aid, and information on where to get high-quality wide-calf …
Aw, I really love this one, Sars. Not as much as Days of Heaven, but enough to have seen it complete several times. To do justice to it would take up an inappropriate amount of space, but I tuned into it more as though it were a kind of cinematic symphony or tone poem than a standard film. He has a remarkable gift for texture and mood, and I zeroed in on that and just was content to drift where it took me — in and out of all these people’s lives and minds, through the grass and the sky and the water, etc. Too, with the exception of a couple of jarring star cameos (Travolta’s was embarrassing), the actors achieved marvelous freedom under him. I found Penn, with his rueful underplaying, a hundred times more interesting here than I have in some of his more celebrated performances where he’s done “more.”
Malick’s an interesting study. He’s one of those directors a la Kubrick who get to work at their own pace, make exactly the films they have in their heads, and secure financing and A-list acting/technical talent based solely on prestige and esteem, because the films are unlikely to be highly profitable (the list could include names from Woody Allen to David Lynch to Todd Haynes). But unlike some of them, who hopscotch between more and less challenging films, he’s moved (tortoise-like) in a perfectly straight line: every one of his few films has been more demanding — slower; more fragmented, as you say; seemingly improvised; less clearly defined and shaped on the narrative level; almost willfully vague — than the one before. Days of Heaven was more that way than Badlands; The Thin Red Line was more that way than DOH; The New World went even further than TTRL. I’ll admit, I found The New World a tough sit (and I don’t think I’ve ever been in a theater where I’ve sensed more impatience and eventually outright hostility from the audience). I hope he has not reached my jumping-off point too.
(I was prompted to follow up on this older entry by my ordering of the Days of Heaven Criterion release.)