| Much of this has to do with Malick's Salinger-like reclusiveness and limited output: between 1973 and now, he has directed just four feature-length movies, suggesting a strong purity of purpose in his work "" he makes films when he feels the need to, independently of constraints imposed by the studio system, or financial dictates. |
| Even a casual viewing of his films reveals a very individual style and a powerful, distinct vision of the relationship between human beings and their environment. |
| The most striking quality about his work is his interest in nature as a single entity, with man just one very small cog in the giant machinery. This doesn't mean that Malick's films are like National Geographic documentaries but no other director I know is as skilled at creating visual poetry out of the various elements of the natural world. |
| Watching Malick's films, you get the (sometimes eerie) sense that he has a special prism of his own: that he's detached enough to look at members of his own species no differently from the way he looks at the individual trees in a forest, or the individual leaves on a tree, or the blades of grass in a meadow. |
| And yet, this apparent undermining of the human element doesn't mean that his movies are clinical or emotionless. |
| Quite the contrary, they have a very particular, heightened emotional quotient "" in his best scenes, it's possible for a viewer to appreciate drama on many different levels, not just the human one. |
| A good example of this was The Thin Red Line, one of the most widely discussed films of recent years "" ostensibly a war movie, but one that was far less concerned with military strategising and the minutiae of battles than with the interior feelings of the protagonists and their relationship with the terrain they struggled through. |
| However, Malick's brand of filmmaking is fraught with danger: it can easily tip over into self-indulgence, and his latest film The New World is a disappointment. |
| This is, very briefly, the story of the first English settlers arriving at Jamestown in 1607, their encounters with the native tribes who have been living in this "new world" for centuries, and the love that grows between the mutineer John Smith and a young native princess. |
| Many of the early scenes are very beautiful in the classic Malick style, including the familiar depiction of nature as sentient: when two characters wade about on the sea shore, the sound of the water lapping against their feet seems heightened; it's almost like a refrain set against their conversation. |
| Other sights and sounds are similarly accentuated: the chirruping of insects, the rustling of blades of grass, a shot of migrating birds in formation, the violence of trees being chopped down by the settlers. |
| But The New World eventually sinks into tedium. The interior monologues don't have the same effect that they did in The Thin Red Line, partly because the characters don't carry much weight. The performances are uneven and the best actor on show, the 14-year-old Q'orianka Kilcher as the tribal princess, can't salvage the film single-handed. |
| And yet, even when a Malick film doesn't work, it can be just as interesting as the successes of other directors. Paradoxically, watching him produce an unsatisfying film makes me even more respectful of his approach to his art. |
| A Spielberg can make a turkey one year and then redeem himself the next with a film that is a commercial or critical success. A director like Malick doesn't have that bulwark. He can only trust his instincts, carry on working at the pace he is comfortable with and hope that something of his vision actually makes it to the final product and is appreciated, at least by a few. It must be a lonely feeling. |
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