Nearly forty years after its release, Terrence Malick’s first feature, “Badlands” (which I discuss in this clip) is his “Breathless”—which is to say, not just an audaciously romantic yet pugnaciously anarchic ballad of a killer on the run with the young woman he loves, but also the film that put him on the cinematic map—and the one that, now, since his career has taken even more daring and original turns, some critics and viewers look back on as his best work. It is, of course, a backhanded compliment, implying, as it does, a repudiation of the things that Malick has done since—as seen in the controversy that Malick’s new film, “The Tree of Life,” arouses. It’s a jolt to see “Badlands” again after having seen the new movie; what seems, in the earlier film, to have been mere hints, adornments, and suggestions—background gleams, silhouettes, shots of nature and landscape, a fascination with the celestial, a sense of the cosmic—now look as if they had always been central to Malick, as central as his characters and their actions. That’s all to the good—except for those who found it all to the bad, such as Pauline Kael, who wrote about it here in the magazine, in 1974. After comparing it (unfavorably) to “Breathless,” she declared,
Kael complained that “the photography—empty skies and empty landscapes and Maxfield Parrish storybook color—makes an aesthetic point.” And she he thought that Malick distanced himself from his characters—that the relatively cool performance style of Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek implied their lack of feeling, and that Malick was thereby conveying a message: “The movie can be summed up: mass-culture banality is killing our souls and making everybody affectless.” As Sean Penn did in his recent negative remarks regarding “The Tree of Life,” and as some commenters did in the course of the controversy they sparked, Kael mistook Malick’s pursuit of a relatively inexpressive performance style for a lack of emotion, as if emotion couldn’t be implied or elicited without being stated. The preconception, on the part of critics and actors alike, regarding cinematic theatricality as a marker of feeling—a prejudice in favor of one particular school and method of acting—remains as much an obstacle to creation as to appreciation.
