When Terrence Malick returned to filmmaking in 1998 after a 20-year hiatus, no critic wanted to point out that the genius director’s re-entry had landed with a thud. So The Thin Red Line, his adaptation of James Jones’s Guadalcanal novel, received glowing reviews and was nominated for seven Academy Awards, and everybody pretended not to notice that the film was a gorgeous, plotless bore.
When Malick came out with The New World seven years later, though, the novelty of having him back had worn off, and the knives came out instead. His John Smith–and–Pocahontas epic wasn’t just a better movie than The Thin Red Line; it was a genuine masterpiece, perhaps the finest American film of the last decade. But reviewers who had given The Thin Red Line a pass seized the chance to gripe about Malick’s weaknesses — his pretentious voice-overs, his disdain for narrative momentum, his pantheistic longueurs. Shorn of its natural constituency, The New World died at the box office, and (in a year when the statuette went to Paul Haggis’s execrable Crash) it wasn’t even nominated for a Best Picture Oscar.
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