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January 10, 2006
Running with The New New World
The official new runnning time: 2 hours, 15 minutes and 14 seconds. In City Pages, Matthew Wilder is the newest acolyte: "No contemporary filmmaker, not even Robert Bresson (who died nursing a dream of a film based on the book of Genesis), has removed everyday psychology from movie acting as Malick has here. By creating often wordless scenes in which his actors are focused on arduous physical tasks, Malick moves us back to a place discovered by the pilgrims of Christian portraiture: the revelation of the soul as the unselfconscious subject. In the magical alchemy between editing, music, and the guileless faces of his performers, Malick finds an inner light. Yesterday I ran into... critic F.X. Feeney on the street, and he couldn't contain his enthusiasm for The New World: "It's as good as Dreyer's Joan of Arc or Sansho the Bailiff! It's as good as anything!" ... 
There is something thrilling about watching the 62-year-old Malick trying to equal and exceed not his peers in the movie-brat generation, but Romantic opera, Whitman, and the Bible. Like [Walt] Whitman, Malick views his work as a nature-based Book of Life, a complete almanac in which wisdom is available for every living soul at every stage of life, the entirety of experience contained within a platter of film."
Posted by pride at January 10, 2006 11:54 AM
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