Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

The best American film of 2019, A Hidden Life, was little seen, and nominated for nothing. Why be surprised? Or assume that our pictures deserve awards any more than the clouds and the trees? Try to understand how movies may aspire to a culture that regards Oscars, eager audiences, and fame as relics of our childhood. The ponderous gravity of The Irishman and its reiterated gangster fantasy, the smug evasiveness of Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, were signs that old movie habits were defunct. Parasite was no better or worse than cute opportunism. It was a wow without an echo. Whereas A Hidden Life was like a desert, known about in theory but ignored or avoided. I use that term advisedly, for Malick is a student who knows deserts are not dull or empty. They are places that can grow the tree of life as well as any forest. Simply in asking, what is hidden here?, Terrence Malick was leading us to ponder, What should a movie be? He had never volunteered for conventional schemes of ranking. His creative personality can seem masked or obscure, but his reticence is portentous too, and it belongs to no one else. Had he really taught philosophy at M.I.T. while doing a draft for Dirty Harry? Please say yes: we so want our auteurs to be outlaws.  His self-effacement, his famous “elusiveness,” was often seen as genius. Yet some early admirers felt he had “gone away” in the twenty-first century, or migrated beyond common reach. People regarded his private and idiosyncratic work as egotism, no matter how beautiful it might be. Some were disinclined even to try A Hidden Life after the inert monuments that had preceded it. But it was — I say it again — the best American film of 2019, a masterpiece, and it invited us to try and place Malick, and to ponder if our “map” was part of the problem. To put it mildly, A Hidden Life does not seem American (or even Austrian, where it was set and filmed). It is occurring in cultural memory as a sign of what we might have been. There was never a pressing reason to make up our minds about Malick. He was casual, yet lofty; he might be an artist instead of a regular American moviemaker in an age when it was reckoned that tough pros (like Hawks and Hitchcock) made the best pictures. Thus he began with two unwaveringly idiosyncratic films — Badlands in 1973 and Days of Heaven in 1978. He took in their awed reception and then stopped dead for twenty years, and let his reputation become an enigma. Did he really prefer not to appear with his movies, or give helpful interviews, so that he could be free to pursue ornithology and insect life? Was he unpersuaded by careerist plans, or cleaning up in the manner of Spielberg or Lucas? In never winning an Oscar, he has made that statuette seem a stooge. It has always been hard to work out his intentions. Going on the titles, Badlands could be a perilous vacation, while Days of Heaven might promise transcendence. In the first, across the empty spaces of the Dakotas and Montana, Kit Carruthers found his daft halcyon moment of aimlessness while being taken for James Dean, while in the latter, in its gathering of rueful magic hours, we encountered a broken family where a guy was shot dead, his girl was thinking of being a hooker to survive, and the kid sister was left alone with her mannered poetry (like Emily Dickinson voiced by Bonnie Parker). In its locusts and fire, and a screwdriver thrust in the farmer’s fragile chest, Days of Heaven spoke to the ordeal of frontier people in 1916 going mad, skimming stones at entropy, or posing for the pictures in Wisconsin Death Trip (published by Michael Lesy in the year Badlands opened). The two films together said that America was an inadvertently gorgeous place full of terrors.  Those early films were filled with love and zest for drab characters buried in the hinterland yet nursing some elemental wonder. But decades later, in 2012, To the Wonder felt like a crushing title for a film that had lost touch with ordinary poetry. Its women were models fleeing from Vogue. Whereas Sissy Spacek as Holly in Badlands (twenty-four yet doing fourteen without strain or condescension) was somehow routine as well as brilliant. Her unwitting insights hovered at the brink of pretension, but any doubt we had was lost in captivation for this orphan who packed vivid party dresses for her violent spree into emptiness. This was after Kit had shot her father dead, not just because dad didn’t approve of a garbage collector outlaw going with his Holly, but because he hadn’t the patience to listen to the rambling solo that was so folksy and menacing — “Oh, I’ve got some things to say,” Kit promised. “Guess I’m lucky that way.” And Holly did feel wonder for this vagrant actor. It was there in the flat adoration that Spacek offered him. She slapped his face for killing Dad, but then went along with him, too matter of fact to pause over spelling out love, but utterly transported by this signal for young getaway. Badlands was akin to Bonnie and Clyde, but you felt that Kit and Holly were in a marriage they did not know how to express. And they were sustained by Malick’s amused affection. He was close to patronizing his couple, maybe, making them babes in the woods in a surreal frame, but he felt their romance as much as he was moved by sunsets and the childish tree houses that they built. They were savage yet humdrum, and Kit’s killings were as arbitrary or impulsive as his funny chat. Yes, he was psychotic and headed for the electric chair, but the sweet interior desolation of their America understood them and treated them kindly. When Kit was captured at last, the horde of cops, sheriffs, and