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In his debut, Terrence Malick is an uncanny creator of pearlescent forms, a very stark balladeer, Mark Twain's coolly ferocious heir. Small-town life in the 1950s makes for a void filled with outlaw vanity and magazine-stand enchantment, garbage-man punk (Martin Sheen) and teenage baton-twirler (Sissy Spacek) meet and harmonize apathetic psyches in "the big marble hall" of Nature. He's a James Dean wannabe acting mostly with his shoulders and pockets, a scarecrow with a rifle in the fields and suddenly a cracker-barrel philosopher when facing a recorder. She reads gravelly from Hollywood gossip digests and is told to enjoy the scenery, a freckle-dotted blank sheet of paper crouching by her murdered father (Warren Oates) in an image from Buñuel's The Young One, "no shame or fear, just kind of blah." Their killing spree through the Midwest is an unsettlingly dreamy account of days and nights in the forest—Eisenhower spawn in comatose upheaval, children watching the movie of their own making unspooling in slow-motion, their amoral equanimity as elemental as the hills and streams around them. The view of the desperado couple is derived from Bonnie and Clyde and stripped of psychological gloss: Instead, Malick marries a self-policing lyricism (sunsets as painterly as Monet's, a revolver fired into a placid lake) with continuous dissociation of narration ("We had our bad moments ... at times I wished he'd fall in the river and drown, so I could watch"), dialogue ("What a nice place." "The tree makes it nice." "And the flowers. Let's not pick 'em") and music (Orloff's "Musica Poetica" over a burning house, Satie and "Love Is Strange," Nat King Cole in the darkness). Parodies of domesticity amid the trees, Faulkner's catfish in the melon patch, Godard's nitwits with guns (Les Carabiniers). Beginning with naturalism and modulating into hallucination, a tabloid item that closes with an ascension into the clouds. Cinematography by Tak Fujimoto, Stevan Larner and Brian Probyn.
--- Fernando F. Croce |