TERRENCE MALICK: PARADISE LOST
Enigmatic, transcendent and wholly singular, no one directs like Terrence Malick. In the 1970s, when his New Hollywood colleagues leaned into the urban and the gritty, Malick went full pastoral, invoking the paintings of Andrew Wyeth and examining humankind’s place within nature. His unparalleled success in the 1970s, which garnered him a veritable carte blanche, as well as a blank cheque, resulted in a notorious two-decades long abdication, only to have him re-emerge in the late 1990s in top form. PARADISE LOST focuses on four Malick masterworks, each set within the hinterlands of rapture and melancholy, the profound and the profane, Heaven and Hell.
“There is simply nothing like it out there: profound, idiosyncratic, complex, sincere and magical; a confirmation that cinema can aspire to art” (Ian Nathan, Empire Magazine)
For his fifth feature film, Malick infused STAND BY ME with Spielberg’s JURASSIC PARK, creating an epic that is as much a coming-of-age drama as it is the Origin of the Universe. Impossible in scope, and as about as experimental as a Brad Pitt-starring film gets, THE TREE OF LIFE is a singular work. Returning to Cannes some thirty years after his Best Director win for DAYS OF HEAVEN, Malick took home the Palme D’or for his monumental rumination on family, tragedy and the alienation inherent in adulthood.
Set in Texas between the 1940s-1960s (and jumping to the 2010s), THE TREE OF LIFE follows a half century of the O’Brien Family, led by Jessica Chastain as Mrs. O’Brien and Pitt as Mr. O’Brien. As the family’s three boys grapple with their parents’ disentangling lives and impending tragedy, an adult Jack O’Brien (Sean Penn) contemplates the meaning of life through flashbacks and a buried treasure trove of resentment, confusion, and profound unconditional love.
Despite its Cannes win, THE TREE OF LIFE polarized critics and audiences upon its release in 2011. It was clear in 2011, as it was for all his previous films, that a future Malick masterpiece requires years before full maturation. However, what was undeniable at the time was the beauty of Jack Fisk’s production design, a culmination of nearly four-decades collaborating with Malick. (ALICIA FLETCHER)
Format: 35mm print courtesy of Disney
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