When it comes to respected filmmakers within the cinephile community, Terrence Malick is one of the most celebrated, if not the most mysterious and eccentric, of all the American auteurs.
His career started with a bang in 1973 with the raw Bonnie & Clyde-esque crime-drama Badlands, starring Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek. The film, based on a true story, follows a 25-year-old James Dean wannabe who falls in love with a 15-year-old girl and then takes her on a killing spree (the correlation to Badlands in Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers is uncanny). Malick followed Badlands five years later with the stunning and visceral masterpiece Days of Heaven, before he seemingly dropped off the face of the planet.
Malick returned to filmmaking in 1998 with an adaptation of James Jones’ World War II novel The Thin Red Line. While it was overshadowed by Steven Spielberg’s WWII epic Saving Private Ryan, critics and fans cheered for the film and welcomed Malick back with open arms. The film went on to earn seven Oscar nominations (Malick lost to Spielberg for Best Director) and then, in typical Malick fashion, he disappeared again.
It took another seven years before Malick unleashed his biggest failure, the John Smith/Pocahontas tale The New World. Starring Colin Farrell, Christopher Plummer, and Christian Bale, the movie did not connect with critics or audiences, but what Malick and his cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki achieved onscreen by using only natural light amazed the industry, and the film was nominated for a Best Cinematography Oscar (it ultimately lost to Paul Haggis’ Crash).
Malick is back once again with what is shaping up to be one of the most important movies of the year, The Tree of Life. It won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival last month, and with a cast that includes Brad Pitt and Sean Penn, it’s also becoming a box office sensation for U.S. distributor Fox Searchlight even though it’s only playing at a handful of theatres. With The Tree of Life opening in Toronto at the TIFF Bell Lightbox on June 17 (it opens at other theatres in Toronto on June 10), the TIFF Cinemathque has put together a retrospect to celebrate Malick’s work.
Entitled New Worlds: The Films of Terrence Malick, the series will screen all of Malick’s films starting with Badlands on June 4 and ending on June 17 with the opening of The Tree of Life. Seeing a Malick film on the big screen is an experience you’ll never forget and we highly recommend getting out to one of the shows.
For more information on New Worlds: The Films of Terrence Malick, visit tiff.net.
Top image: A scene from Badlands. Courtesy TIFF.
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