At film festivals, it’s common to identify the latest work from a beloved auteur by the director’s surname: the Scorsese, the Godard, the Almodóvar. But at the Toronto International Film Festival this year, the question “have you seen the new Malick?” requires an immediate follow-up: Which one?
It’s not unheard-of for prolific directors to have multiple films in the same festival: Chile’s Pablo Larraín is represented at TIFF this year with twin biopics on Jackie Kennedy and Pablo Neruda. But Terrence Malick’s Voyage of Time may be unique, because it’s two radically different versions of one film, which had their world premieres on the same day. One, subtitled The IMAX Experience, is 45 minutes long, narrated by Brad Pitt, and will open in select theaters in the U.S. on Oct. 7. The other—subtitled Life’s Journey—runs 90 minutes, is narrated by Cate Blanchett, and currently has no distributor or release date.
Considering that Malick’s The New World debuted in a handful of theaters on Christmas of 2005, then was withdrawn and recut for wide release less than a month later, the director is no stranger to releasing a film in multiple versions. (Both versions, as well as a longer “extended cut,” are available on the recent Criterion Collection Blu-ray.) Although Malick hasn’t done an interview in decades and his collaborators are wary of divulging too much about his process, it’s clear that his films are created in the editing room: Adrien Brody famously shot Malick’s The Thin Red Line under the impression that he was the story’s protagonist, only to be reduced to a nearly mute onlooker in the finished film; Rachel Weisz and Jessica Chastain were cut out of To the Wonder altogether. But this is the first time he’s produced two separate but overlapping movies in parallel. (Making matters more complicated, neither version shown in Toronto bore its designated subtitle on the print; technically, they’re both called Voyage of Time.)
Then again, Voyage of Time—or should that be Voyages of Times?—is like no project in Malick’s history. According to the film’s producers, he’s been talking about making something like it since the 1970s, and actively shooting for more than a decade, often in concert with his other features. Voyage’s cosmic trip spans the history of the universe, from the Big Bang to the destruction of the Earth, but it’s also a trip through Malick’s oeuvre; one moment you’re watching magma cool underneath the ocean, the next you’re back on the South Texas lawn from The Tree of Life. It, or they, feel like the movie(s) Malick has been working toward for years, stripping away the vestiges of narrative until all that remains is us, face to face with the universe.
Malick’s films, especially the most recent, have tended to polarize critics, and with Voyage of Time, that rift widens to a chasm. The New Yorker’s Richard Brody called it “an experience that I haven’t been able to shake, like a waking dream”; Cinema Scope’s Robert Koehler called it “drivel.” Can it be both? Although Malick is often referred to as a poet, the airy voiceovers in his movies don’t fare so well when separated from their accompanying images. That’s not, of course, their job, any more than it’s the job of song lyrics to read like T.S. Eliot. (There’s a strong case to be made, in fact, that movie dialogue, as the critic Erwin Panofsky wrote in 1934, “had better not be poetry.”) But from The New World on, Malick’s movies have heavily employed a kind of Whitmanesque apostrophe, lyrically evoking the bond between the heavens and the Earth, the sacred and the sensual. In Voyage of Time, Malick’s starry-eyed blank verse verges on self-parody—although for some, Malick jumped that shark years ago. What can one do with a passage like this, from the IMAX version: “What binds us together, makes us one? Love.” Is placing that sentiment in the context of the 40-year spiritual quest that is Malick’s body of work a better way of understanding it, or does it amount to a form of special pleading, elevating a Hallmark-card sentiment by associating it with Malick’s earlier, less wifty masterpieces?
Words are only a part of Voyage of Time, and a fairly small one: I’d be surprised if Blanchett’s voiceover comprises more than a tenth of Life’s Journey. There’s no adequate way to describe in print the overwhelming majesty of the images Malick puts up on screen, especially when, in the case of the IMAX version, that screen is 50 feet high. The shorter, Pitt-narrated version is more straightforward, more generous in explaining what you’re looking at, but there are still substantial chunks where it’s impossible to tell if you’re gazing at a distant nebula or subatomic terrain, and that’s part of the point: The patterns of life repeat at every level, from the micro- to the macroscopic. The longer version incorporates computer-generated models, although it’s impossible to discern of what, and smeary, low-resolution footage, shot with tiny Harinezumi cameras, of what might be the urban American South and an Indonesian marketplace. There are prehistoric fish and computer-generated dinosaurs, and a mildly goofy “early man” sequence in which aboriginals hunt with spears and dance. It would probably take several viewings to begin to understand the underlying structure of the longer version in particular—unless, that is, you conclude it hasn’t got one, that it’s simply a grab bag of groovy images haphazardly slapped together, an intergalactic whizbang without much more to say than: “Life. Pretty crazy, right?”
Although the longer Life’s Journey premiered at TIFF first, I’d venture that the correct order in which to see them is IMAX first, which, conveniently, is how they’ll be released. Despite the overlap—much, though not all, of the short version appears in the long one —they seem designed as complementary works, addressed to different audiences: The first words spoken in the IMAX version are “My child”; Blanchett’s first line in Life’s Journey is “Mother.” The IMAX version begins with a unique shot of a young girl standing in a field with abandoned buildings in the distance; Life’s Journey begins, like the universe itself, in darkness. Then: Let there be light. The more concise, expository IMAX version is Voyage of Time with training wheels on. Life’s Journey removes them, along with the brakes.
Taken together, the Voyages feel like the culmination of an abstract, anti-narrative strain that’s taken over Malick’s recent features, to the near-obliteration of all else. But Malick isn’t an abstract filmmaker, and Voyage doesn’t have the rhythmic cohesion of a work assembled accordingly to purely formal logic. (Put another way: It’s a Koyaanisqatsi in search of its Philip Glass.) It’s glorious and foolish, fearless and unrestrained, a movie that no one else could make, or maybe just no one else would. I’m glad it exists, in part because I hope it allows Malick to close a chapter in his artistic life and open a new, more promising one.
