Top 5 Terrence Malick Scenes | Archive

15:07Adam Kempenaar:He's been learning their ways, their language, learning to appreciate their world. And, of course, it being a Malick film, it's largely all told to us in voiceover, and he says that these people don't have words for lying, deceit, greed. They've never been heard. They don't have jealousy or a sense of possession. He could stay there forever with her, and if he could, he would, but of course they're happy to unload him back on his own people. He gets expelled, if you will, from this Eden that he's been living in. That's a theme that's going to come up again and again. And when he goes back to his world, it's that return to Jamestown that is my focus.

15:41Adam Kempenaar:The way Terrence Malick captures the shock of what he returns to, coming from what he just was a part of, what he just experienced. The gate opens and it's a single tracking shot that follows behind him. And we see, without seeing his face, we get just from the way the camera is slowly following him and taking in the world as he's seeing it in front of him. We recognize this settlement that he's returning to is not the settlement he left. It is not doing well. These are horrible living conditions. Things like lying and deceit and greed are clearly rampant. They're even worse. So are death, disease and starvation.

16:15Adam Kempenaar:And then that sequence culminates with a showdown with David Thewlis, who has made himself the president of this community in his absence. And you just get the sense watching it that John Smith is mostly in shock the whole time at what he's been forced to return to. He didn't want to go. Now he can't fathom staying. And we don't blame him.

16:34Josh Larsen:Yeah, I want to give the new world another shot, because especially as you talk about moments like that, I do remember some of the elegance that is brought to even moments of almost terror. Yeah. Like you're talking about there. I guess my thing, it's interesting because the way you responded to To the Wonder, especially in calling some of the scenes something like a J.Crew photo spread. That was my response to the new world. And I've seen other people say To the Wonder is almost self-parody. Malick has finally reached self-parody. And that's exactly what I felt about the new world is that this was a parody of what a Malick film could be.

17:06Adam Kempenaar:That's so weird because for me, the new world coming off the thin red line was the film that put me back onto Malick. It was the film that gave me hope that he was still, while in this abstract fantasy world, he was still tethered to the natural world and tethered to reality as well and tethered to a good, compelling narrative. And it brought me back to Days of Heaven and Badlands.

17:26Josh Larsen:Maybe there's only so much Malick you can take and you just have to be purged of it at one point. I don't know. My number three comes from, yep, the tree of life we'll talk about again. It's Dino Mercy. you could choose the whole creation sequence my next band name you like that go ahead you can use it i i didn't want to i didn't feel like that was fair to pick all of the creation sequence even though you easily could so i'm going to focus on this little bit and it's coming somewhat towards the end where a dinosaur is walking along a riverbed i'm not sure what kind of dinosaur so i'm not even going to try to misname it and he comes across another dinosaur injured different type of dinosaur laying there in the riverbed all of a sudden this mesmerizing mini drama unfolds.

18:06Josh Larsen:The larger dinosaur, the one standing, stomps on the head of the one on the ground, holds there for a minute, then lifts its claw, puts the claw back down, lifts it again, and then I love this touch, gives it one light little tap before going off and letting the other dinosaur live. And one of the deep theological questions that this movie explores is the origin of sin and the origin of mercy. So where do such things come from? Why are they both in us? This is the question that the older son is always asking himself. There's this new book out by Franz DeWalt. It's called The Bonobo and the Atheist.

18:38Josh Larsen:And it's all about this question of the moral impulse, especially as it exists in animals. I haven't read it myself, but the parts I've looked at are really fascinating, especially in how they reflect what's going on in this scene between two dinosaurs. It's just this bizarre, perplexing touch in the middle of a very bizarre and perplexing movie that I love. Amazon Health AI presents Painful Thoughts.

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21:29Adam Kempenaar:It seems obvious, but it's obvious for a very good reason. And I'm going with the locust, the scene that happens near the end of Days of Heaven, the locust plague. It's almost like a horror film, the way Malik captures it. It's very subtle. It's got a very minor beginning where you see a locust appear on a head of lettuce. And then you see a locust in a wash basin. but then each frame more appear. It makes me think of the birds a little bit in Hitchcock, right, and how they appear. Until you get to the end of this entire sequence, the wheat fields are ablaze and it's chaos everywhere. But that beginning, seeing those locusts go from that small beginning into the plague that they become, mixed with the beautiful cinematography by Nestor Almendros, the editing, the music by Morricone, of all people, they all combine to heighten that mood and the sense of something unnatural taking place.

22:19Adam Kempenaar:Despite how natural it is, this is something that farmers can't experience. But when you talk about a plague of locusts, you're getting biblical. You're getting almost supernatural. And that makes me think of how it reflects on the story at that point in Days of Heaven, where you've got a couple who have been pretending to be brother and sister as a way to try to steal money from this farmer that they're working for. And this sham is coming to an end. And I think that locust plague not only helps exacerbate that, It makes it literally come to a showdown between the farmer played by Sam Shepard and Richard Gere's character.

22:53Adam Kempenaar:But it also metaphorically gives you the sense that this unnatural scheme is going to come to an end and there are going to have to be consequences for it. I will say about the fire, too, a little bit that it takes me back to Badlands and a scene I did consider, which is where they kill the father. He's already killed Holly's father, put him in the house and then tries to destroy the evidence or whatever. And he sets the house ablaze. and Malick in that scene, the way he shoots that house, he really lingers. We don't need to see that house. We could see the spark start and go on to the next scene, but he really lingers on showing that house go ablaze for many minutes.

23:25Adam Kempenaar:And I always kind of saw that as a metaphor for the entire film Badlands, where something seemingly small, something that just seems to affect two or three people becomes something that gets way out of control very fast. That's what we see with the fire. That's what we see with the characters in the film Badlands. And I think we see it as well reflected in the way this locust plague just gets completely out of hand in Days of Heaven.

23:48Josh Larsen:That's my number two. Actually, I'm going to focus a little bit more on the fire part of that sequence in Days of Heaven. And the fact that it gets out of control, it almost seems like they've started it to burn the carcasses of the locust. Right. And then it starts to get out of control just at the moment that Shepard comes after gear and challenges him. And I love the line he uses there, let it burn. Previously, Shepard's Farmer has been pretty much this gentle figure, you get the feeling. And here he just goes nuts. And I think for all the biblical illusions and imagery in Malik's work, this is really the only moment where he's gotten apocalyptic.

24:23Josh Larsen:Even something like the thin red line, the warfare there, it's constantly held in parallel with the natural beauty. Here it's just apocalyptic as the fire burns. We go from the human faces of the workers to these ghoulish silhouettes. Suddenly we're further back. We don't see their faces anymore. They're almost as if they're dancing in front of the fire is what it looks like. The tractor in the scene becomes this demon beast. So this really stands out among all the other moments in Malik's films for me.

24:50Adam Kempenaar:I did find a bit of an interview with the cinematographer Nestor Almendras online, and he talked about how they achieved the effect of the locusts. He says that for our foreground, we use live locusts supplied to us by the Canadian Department of Agriculture. But for the wide panoramic silhouetted tractors and blackened workers, we used a technique used in the good earth, running the camera in reverse and dropping peanut shells from helicopters. when the film was projected forward the locusts would appear to be flying up of course this meant everything had to act or perform in reverse specifically the actors and the tractors that could explain some of the weirdness yeah definitely well for my number two i'm going back to the tree of life maybe not surprisingly a film i love as much as i did i'm going to find two really stand out memorable sequences from it and this one i'm simply calling innocence because that's what the chapter is called on the dvd we've just gotten through the beginning of the universe creation of all life as we know it.

25:42Adam Kempenaar:And Malick then takes us to the creation of this universe, the main character's life, his birth. That's how the sequence starts. It's as breathtaking a montage I think you'll find anywhere. It's what really solidified The Tree of Life for me as the number one film of 2011. Some of those images that recur throughout it, the tiny foot, I think it's on the DVD cover actually, that image of Brad Pitt as the father holding that tiny foot in his hand. The baptism, the boy crawling under the table after the ball, walking in the yard, learning to read. We get these great POV shots looking up at the mom, looking up at the dad, running through the house, running through the yard, and it all culminates with a shot of the new brother in the crib and him going over to that creature.

26:24Adam Kempenaar:You see where I'm heading with this, Josh? Beholding him, almost like that dinosaur we saw not too many minutes before, going over and having to take that in, this new life, and deciding how he's going to engage with that life. That whole film was about that relationship with the brother, really, when it comes right down to it. So I think there's a clear juxtaposition there. But you get, in those sequences I described, in those images I described, the whole of young childhood in its entirety. Raising a kid, your first kid, there is an innocence. I think all parents out there will recognize this.

26:54Adam Kempenaar:There is an innocence and something unique, clearly, and special about that first child that you simply can't have with subsequent kids. And those moments are almost like you're in a paradise. They are their own kind of Eden. Everything is new. Everything is perfect as you discover the world together. And at this point, going back to my number five scene, these kids can't disobey their God, the father, the father who created them. There's no reason to. Everything is just that perfect moment, the creation of life, and them existing in this beautiful world together, this harmony together. In nature, in this case, it's their yard and their house.

27:30Josh Larsen:It kind of makes you want to give up on recording any video of your children whatsoever after you've seen the Tree of Life. because you're just like, I'm not going to be able to even come close to this. So why bother? I'm going to stick with the tree of life for my number one. I could have honestly probably have done all five from the tree of life. So it had to be my number one. And it's the brothers with the BB gun. This is when the two older brothers head out on their bikes into the woods. And speaking of tracking shots, as we did recently rewatching this, I had forgotten what a beautiful moving camera there is in this scene.

28:02Josh Larsen:It's following the older brother's bike as it glides into the tall grass. And you know, as you do to be cool at that age, you just hop off your bike while it's moving. Right. And the bike keeps going into the grass. And then without cutting, the camera catches the second brother following, doing the same thing. He jumps off his bike and just follows them running along into the woods. Really lovely. So once they're there, they do some shooting at squirrels and fish. And then we get the moment in which the older brother, played by Hunter McCracken, dares the younger brother to put his finger over the end of the gun.

28:31Josh Larsen:Put your finger over. Look at that. Come on. After a terrible, terrible pause, sure enough, he shoots him. Malick doesn't linger on this action. He sort of glides away and then comes back to McCracken's face. How good is McCracken in this movie? I feel like when we talked about this film the year it came out, I know we mentioned him and probably here and there, But we didn't go on like I did, particularly for someone like a child actor like Quavanjane Wallace in Beasts of the Southern Wild last year. I think he's equally good in The Tree of Life. And he gets a voiceover shortly after this scene where he says, crucial line for the movie, what I want to do, I can't do.

29:15Josh Larsen:I do what I hate. Keep in mind that this scene follows these two brothers where they're also doing that lamp dare. The older brother has the unplugged lamp that he's daring the younger to stick a piece of wire in the socket. So it parallels with that. What this moment did, and a lot of the movie did, is bring back those memories of childhood where you first start realizing that you're navigating moral waters and for some reason, inexplicably, you make the wrong decision. You do the wrong thing.

29:41Adam Kempenaar:Wow. I had completely forgotten about that sequence and I didn't come across it last night in my scanning, but you're right. It's a great one. My number one, we might as well end where we began with a little bit of overlap. I can't help but feature that treehouse hideout in Badlands as my number one. It is that moment. they've only hurt her father at this point. And the fact is, you could argue, I'm being, of course, very general when I say this, he kind of deserved it. He doesn't seem like a good guy, right? He didn't deserve what he got. But at this point, they haven't hurt any truly innocent people.

30:12Adam Kempenaar:They haven't gone on their killing spree. You're right, the music is so wonderful, not just the non-diegetic music, but the diegetic music in the form of Love is Strange. There's a point where they dance. This is their moment of freedom. This is them playing house, as you put it, out in this fantasy world. And, of course, I'll go back to this idea of it being Eden. And they're making use of their surroundings. She talks about in the voiceover the plants and the trees and the water. And we see the fish and how they're surviving on that. They're at one with nature. And at this point in the film, they're at one with each other, more or less.

30:44Adam Kempenaar:And that's one of the things I love is the matter-of-fact narration we get from Sissy Spacek as Holly.

30:48Josh Larsen:We had our bad moments, like any couple. Kid accused me of only being along for the ride.

30:54Adam Kempenaar:while at times I wish he'd fall in the river and drown so I could watch. Just so I could watch him drown. That's what she says, but just says it so matter-of-factly like she's talking about her favorite Elvis Presley record. It's so great. A couple other things I noticed re-watching this scene last night. The sense of violence that we get throughout this film. You have to go back and consider this is 1971, the height of the Vietnam War. And throughout the movie, there aren't explicit connections that I recall made to Vietnam, But you do wonder if Malick is trying to say something about our association with violence and how you can start to see violence on TV and the bodies pile up and see it as abstract and see it as something that you can't really relate to.

31:34Adam Kempenaar:And you wonder if there is a connection he's trying to make there. This is that most explicit moment where when you see Martin Sheen, of all people, the guy who's going to be Willard in Apocalypse Now, running around with his shirt off with a gun, looking like he is trying to attack someone in the jungle. You can't help but there in that scene. Think of Vietnam. Now, the thing I do really love about this sequence, though, Josh, the thing that makes it a truly special moment in this film, though, is just like in the Garden of Eden, this is Holly's bite-the-apple moment. This is when she finally becomes self-aware in this film and becomes aware of what they're about to embark on.

32:10Josh Larsen:One day, while taking a look at some vistas in Dad's stereopticon, it hit me that I was just this little girl born in Texas whose father was a sign painter who had only just so many years to live. It sent a chill down my spine and I thought, where would I be this very moment if Kit had never met me or killed anybody? This very moment.

32:38Adam Kempenaar:And she starts to see herself in the larger context of history. And she realizes that she's a part of this history and she's also part of the future. and that she's going to have a future that exists well beyond Kit, that this is just an episode for her and something she's doing right now, but she knows she's going to go on to something else.

32:57Josh Larsen:For days afterwards, I lived in dread. Sometimes I wished I could fall asleep and be taken off to some magical land, but this never happened.

33:07Adam Kempenaar:And that's that moment of knowledge when nothing can ever be the same between them again, and it never is.

33:12Josh Larsen:Yeah, she's playing at innocence as much as she's playing at making a home or this new life. So sure. Yeah, really is a fascinating scene. Those are our top five Terrence Malick scenes. What about honorable mentions, Josh? The one I considered a separate scene almost the dancing at the end of the making a home in the forest sequence. I almost consider that separate. Yeah, the love is strange. Yeah, I really like that little moment. Also, just a shot. This is almost just a shot from the Tree of Life. The kids' shadows while they're playing in the street. That one sticks with me. And you mentioned the house on fire in Badlands.

33:42Josh Larsen:That was an honorable mention as well.

33:43Adam Kempenaar:Yeah, such a good moment. I had an honorable mention from Badlands as well. It's the ending of the film and the way the law enforcement people regard Kit and how Kit is just taking all of this in and gives them his comb. We talked about celebrity, Max Ophels and Lowell Montez. As you think about how they are just fascinated by this character who exists outside their realm of rules and does whatever he wants to do. And they want every piece of them they can get. I love that sequence. I mentioned the falling in love montages in the new world. I also love just the beginning, the ships arriving, the natives in their natural environment, and then these boats, these invaders coming towards them.

34:20Adam Kempenaar:And as if we haven't talked about the Tree of Life enough, the he's gone sequence, the phone call that they get early in the film. these parents. Now we've transported more to the present day, speaking of Vietnam, and they get a letter in the mail about their son. And Jessica Chastain reads the letter, and then she calls Brad Pitt. He's at work, and he's at an airfield, and he can't really hear her. It's all communicated visually, really, because we can't hear what they're saying to each other, and she's reading a letter. And I'll be honest with you, I watched that again last night at about two in the morning, and it wrecked me.

34:54Adam Kempenaar:Yeah, I believe it. It wrecked me. It just destroyed me watching that scene again.

34:57Josh Larsen:I remember watching the first time and it's so oblique again to use that word as a lot to the wonder is that it took me a while to realize what they were communicating but again you knew at heart it was something terrible. Unless you love

35:12Adam Kempenaar:your life will flash by

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