The Promise of Beauty

Malick is a descendant of Emerson and Thoreau, and their liberating sense of American possibility; the New World is the aboriginal place, this Midwesterner returned from Oxford and Paris is here to tell us, where, ideally, we can recover a sense of glory that should not be tampered with. His subject is what Emerson called the Oversoul, and how the fields of America, the great tabula rasa at the heart of the New World, are the means by which we step back into the world of myth. The New World is, in fact, quite similar to Pocahontas, a virginal creature wooed and then corrupted by visitors from exhausted Europe; though, crucially, she never loses entirely her sense of where she came from.

Malick’s latest movie, however, suffers from the absence of the wry, vivid, scuffling narrative of the fourteen-year-old Linda Manz in Days of Heaven, which gave the film the salt and tang of Huck Finn, and grounded its otherworldly flights. The mystic, more than anyone, needs irreverence to keep him honest. The New World also lacks something of the randomness—the wandering dialogues, the hobo dances—of that earlier film, which compressed the entire Biblical story of Abraham and Sarah and the Pharaoh into ninety minutes of American Greek drama. But Malick is still gazing on sibylline old languages (it was Hebrew in Days of Heaven, it is Greek in Oxford’s Bodleian Library in The New World), still leading us into ceremonies and archetypal rites that bring us into the world of the “dread Day of Judgment.” The visionary, you could say, keeps tilling the same soil in order to deepen his vision, not needing to move laterally, but always pushing his single impulse farther and farther. His groundlings are residents of an Underworld, one feels, even as the England that Pocahontas is taken to becomes a garden of tamed nature and ordered hedges that contrasts, almost too tidily, with her natural home.

There is less concreteness in The New World than in the earlier pictures, less of an immediate sense of the “bone yard” that Linda Manz describes along the edges of rivers and forests in Days of Heaven, the “floating graveyard” that might be Ahab’s ship in The Thin Red Line. There is less mobility in Malick’s portrait of America as the spiritual home of new horizons, the return to a green world of cycles and abundance. The camera roams and glides down a river, as before, but there’s an inertness to what it sees, less of a sense of the life that’s on the bank. The New World can feel more like a mapping of Heaven than a journey there.

Yet what Malick does superbly in his latest work is offer us a vision of the apocalypse at home; he bodies forth and enters the naturals so intensely that we see how they can link us to the world of opossum and coyote, and even bring us back to a network we’ve fallen out of. Their prancing, cuckooing figures, weird with animal sounds, totemic masks, chanting rituals, promise to colonize us with innocence; their bodies dart and swarm through the trees, looming up out of the undergrowth or appearing around rocks as if to take us to a primal order. We feel the pulse, each time we cross the frontier between the native world and the colonized, of the difference between living in a world of presences and living in a world of death.

The mystic’s gamble is a ruthless one: in return for letting him carry us out of the everyday scheme of things, he will show us the web that lies above and behind us, the ocean into which we dissolve as drops. We live on two levels at once, the Dalai Lama says in The Universe in a Single Atom, and the mystic’s aim is to take us out of “conventional reality,” all event and personality and chatter, into silence and space, the hidden plotting of “ultimate reality.” Malick’s post-human movies offer us none of the consolations of daily life, none of the solace even of morality; they bring us simply, as in Dante or Melville, to the landscape of the soul.

“Who are you Who are you” each of the three lovers in The New World asks, and the voices that keep overlapping on the soundtrack begin to suggest the voices in our heads, as we play out, each one of us, the almost daily struggle between the angels and the beasts in us. “What do you dream of” Pocahontas’s new English husband asks her, as if concerned only with essentials. “I like grass,” she says, much as Linda Manz did in Days of Heaven, and, if those not won over to the Malick universe will say that Pocahontas is just stoned, those who sign on for his adventure will see her response as the right—the natural—answer. As in Sigur Rós again, the sense of voices all around, not always meaning something, takes us into the realm of dream.

Beauty will lift the soul into the heavens: that is the impenitent, almost sacrilegious promise of a Terrence Malick film. Many, many movies these days are beautiful—more and more—but in no others that I’ve seen is beauty used as an actual promise, a force, almost a main character. Few other films dare to try to invoke a presence of the divine so strong that beauty seems its instrument. Malick’s aim is to take us back to the time when man and what’s beyond man had a contract—the world of Mozart or the Renaissance painter—and he humbles me, shakes my heart with his cathedrals of light through the trees. Then he makes my tears real and deep with the philosophical weight that lies behind his images, the insistent questions about how we get back to “those other shores, the blue hills.”

He cracks me open, in fact, in ways that make other films of the day seem very small. Instead of characters he gives us fire, water, soil, and sky, and instead of dialogue he gives us a perpetual dusk, grunts scrounging to the sound of the final movement of Fauré’s Requiem, In Paradisum. It is as if in film—just the play of light, a scan across a lake, a wolf suddenly appearing at the crest of a moonlit hill—he finds an ancestral form that rhymes with the very promise that first brought pilgrims to America. Malick is the best hope we’ve got, I find myself believing, because hope, the best in us, is what keeps dogging and haunting those savages, in the light.