The Magic Hours

October 21, 2024
Writers on Film podcaster Bleasdale (Blood Is on the Grass) delivers a workmanlike biography of director Terrence Malick. The author recounts how Malick spent his high school summers harvesting wheat around Texas, abandoned his Rhodes Scholarship to take freelance assignments for Newsweek and the New Yorker, and got into filmmaking after joining the inaugural class of the American Film Institute on a whim in the late 1960s (it “seemed no less improbable a career than anything,” he said). Offering in-depth accounts of the making of Malick’s films, Bleasdale details how the director’s stubbornness and inexperience hamstrung the production of his debut feature, Badlands, and how he privileged authenticity when filming The New World, erecting full-scale recreations of colonial Jamestown and its neighboring Powhatan settlement using only locally sourced materials and period-appropriate construction techniques. Background on how Malick’s personal life influenced his films open a window onto his work, as when Bleasdale explores how Malick recreates the breakup of his marriage to Michèle Morette in To the Wonder. Unfortunately, there’s not much new here to clear up the shroud of mystery around the enigmatic director, with little insight into his psychology or his 20-year hiatus in the 1980s and ’90s. This does a decent job of sketching the outlines of Malick’s life but never quite brings its subject into focus.