Terrence Malick and Earlyism - New Yorker (blog)

Here's Thomson's idea: Malick's first film, "Badlands," was "by common consent … one of the most remarkable first feature films made in America." (Not according to Pauline Kael, though.) His second feature, "Days of Heaven,"

was widely acclaimed. It won for the prize for best direction at Cannes. Nestor Almendros's cinematography got an Oscar and the film easily recovered its $3m investment. But a few observers—I was one of them—said, wait a minute, this extraordinary talent might be headed for prettification.

And that's the charge Thomson brings against both "The Thin Red Line" and "The Tree of Life" (not a word about "The New World," though). I think he's wrong in his rejection of Malick's later films and wrong to think that they mark a change from his first one—everything he disliked in "The Tree of Life" is already there in "Badlands," albeit in smaller doses. (I discussed this in a DVD of the Week video on "Badlands" here last week.) In rejecting that earlier film, Kael was at least clear about that. (She didn't review "Days of Heaven" in the magazine; in a capsule review, she called it "an empty Christmas tree: you can hang all your dumb metaphors on it." Penelope Gilliatt did review it, and called it "one of the best films about America in a long time.")

The overall point concerns a basic trope of anti-modernism: earlyism. It takes in those who think that Jean-Luc Godard's best film is "Breathless," whose favorite piece by Arnold Schoenberg is "Transfigured Night," who favor the John Coltrane of "Giant Steps" or the Miles Davis of "Kind of Blue"—those who recognize the genius of these exemplary artists but stopped liking them when they, so to speak, went too far.

There aren't many critics who think that Shakespeare was at his apogee in "Henry VI" or that Beethoven's First Symphony was his best, and even the most hardcore silent-film fans are unlikely to exalt Hitchcock's "The Lodger" over his "Vertigo." (And, of course, there's the mirroring phenomenon of artists who, over the course of their careers, changed little and advanced little, and whose earlier works had the virtue of fresh inspiration.) It's only with modern art, in which artists dared to disassemble or to disdain the styles that rendered their art form widely popular, that the trope gains any traction.

And this is the underlying premise of Thomson's rejection of Malick's later films and of the argument overall: the director had become an élitist, had separated himself and his work from the usual ways of mass culture, despite belonging to it and even trading on its allure—and that, in departing from traditions and styles that were constitutive of the medium, somehow betrayed it. It's an argument that cropped up often, last week, in discussions about Sean Penn's displeasure with the way "The Tree of Life" came out—and, sure enough, Thomson cites Penn's remarks approvingly.

I'd say this: if you're going to be reactionary, be sublime about it, as Philip Larkin was (as in his two books of writings about jazz). He understood that modernism is no mere caprice or self-indulgence, but the expression of a worldview and a reflection of the world as it is. His sensibility was constructed around his blanket rejection of modernism, and he had no inhibition about throwing out artistic babies with their bathwater, of turning his back on the life of his times and declaring that the world had gone to hell in a handbasket. (I think he'd have had little use for the virtual realm and the new notions of identity that arise from it.) Though his tastes are narrow, his enthusiasms run deep, and their fruitfulness is proven by his poetry.