In August 1973, a quiet young courier took a print of Terrence Malick’s debut feature Badlands from Los Angeles to Manhattan for submission to the New York Film Festival. After the screening, festival chief Richard Roud said to the messenger, “Would you please tell Mr. Malick that we loved Badlands and want it as our closing-night film?” The unassuming fellow replied, “I’m Mr. Malick.” After that, he was harder to find. In his fulfilling but furtive 38 years since Badlands, Malick has spawned just four more features: Days of Heaven in 1978, The Thin Red Line in 1998, The New World in 2005 and The Tree of Life, the highlight of this year’s Cannes Film Festival. The legendarily shy auteur skipped his new movie’s press conference, leaving his star Brad Pitt to explain things, and materialized at the end of Tree’s black-tie screening after insisting that paparazzi be banned. Some who saw The Tree of Life think it’s as maddeningly Delphic as its maker. At heart a portrait of a 1950s suburban-Texas family, the O’Briens — father , mother and their sons Jack , R.L. and Steve — the film scoots backward a dozen years, forward to the ’60s, when the mother learns one of her boys has died, and into the present and the celestial future. Near the beginning, Malick breaks all narrative rules by offering a wordless history of the cosmos, from the Big Bang through the emergence of plant and sea life and finally dinosaurs. Those viewers who don’t go, “Wow!” may say, “Huh?” or “Phooey.” The man who provokes such apposite reactions has an imposingly wayward rsum. The son of an oil geologist, Terry grew up in Oklahoma and Texas, working summers in oil fields and as a farmhand. Settling in Austin for high school, he then studied philosophy at Harvard and as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford. By his mid-20s he was teaching philosophy at MIT and had translated a treatise by German existentialist Martin Heidegger, while writing for LIFE, Newsweek and the New Yorker.
