Malick’s films have been noted by critics for their philosophical themes. According to film scholar Lloyd Michaels, the director’s primary themes include “the isolated individual’s desire for transcendence amidst established social institutions, the grandeur and untouched beauty of nature, the competing claims of instinct and reason, and the lure of the open road”.
He named Days of Heaven as one in a group of acclaimed films from the 1970s that were intended to revolutionize the American film epic. Like The Godfather films, 1975’s Nashville, and The Deer Hunter (1978), Michaels argued that the movie delves into “certain national myths” as an idiosyncratic type of Western, “particularly the migration westward, the dream of personal success, and the clash of agrarian and industrial economies”.[82] Roger Ebert considered Malick’s body of work to have a unifying common theme: “Human lives diminish beneath the overarching majesty of the world.”[83] In Ebert’s opinion, Malick is among the few remaining directors who yearn “to make no less than a masterpiece”.[84] While reviewing The Tree of Life, New York Times critic A. O. Scott compared the director to innovative “homegrown romantics” such as the writers Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, James Agee, and Herman Melville, in the sense that their “definitive writings” also “did not sit comfortably or find universal favor in their own time” but nonetheless “leaned perpetually into the future, pushing their readers forward toward a new horizon of understanding”.[85]
Malick’s body of work has inspired polarizing opinions. According to Michaels, “few American directors have inspired such adulation and rejection with each successive film” as Malick. Michaels said that in all of American cinema, Malick is the filmmaker most frequently “granted genius status after creating such a discontinuous and limited body of work”.[82] Malick makes use of broad philosophical and spiritual overtones, such as in the form of meditative voice-overs from individual characters. Some critics felt these elements made the films engaging and unique while others found them pretentious and gratuitous, particularly in his post-hiatus work.[86] Michaels believed the opinions Days of Heaven continues to elicit among scholars and film enthusiasts is exemplary of this: “The debate continues to revolve around what to make of ‘its extremeties of beauty’, whether the exquisite lighting, painterly compositions, dreamy dissolves, and fluid camera movements, combined with the epic grandeur and elegiac tone, sufficiently compensate for the thinness of the tale, the two-dimensionality of the characters, and the resulting emotional detachment of the audience.”[82] Reverse Shot journalist Chris Wisniewski regarded both Days of Heaven and The New World not as “literary nor theatrical” but “principally cinematic” in their aesthetic, intimating narrative, emotional, and conceptual themes through the use of “image and sound” instead of “foregrounding dialogue, events or characters”. He highlighted Malick’s use of “rambling philosophical voiceovers; the placid images of nature, offering quiet contrast to the evil deeds of men; the stunning cinematography, often achieved with natural light; the striking use of music”.[87]