Page - 201 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 05/02

Whereas these two chapters come from part II of the book (“Terrence Malick as Theological Auteur”), the next two come from Part III (“The Films of Terrence Malick: Theological Readings”). In “The Unique Difficulty of Days of Heaven”, Jonathan Brant combines an empirical methodology, in which 500 non-profes- sional reviews were taken into account, with professional readers’ criticism. The viewers’ frustration with watching a Malick film is expressed best by this on- line review quoted by Brant: “It’s a blah story but it’s fucking beautiful” (146). One of the terms that comes up for many of the non-professional viewers was the recognition of the “difficulty” of watching a Malick film, since it expects the viewer to perform the act of interpretation. The key to Brant’s reading of Malick is Rowan Williams’s book on Dostoyevsky, arguing that “open, complex narratives are more Christian than closed, tidy fables” (147). Brant focuses on how the difficulty in Malick’s method provides us with a God’s eye view into the lives and experiences of the characters in Days of Heaven. Brant’s using Wil- liams reminds viewers who are critical of the film that, “The Spirit is at work in any constructive puzzlement” (150). Furthermore, his use of empirical data to evaluate Days of Heaven calls to mind how unsettling finding an easy superficial solution can be for us and that even though the film offers “no neat theological explanation of the events it portrays”, it may “in its very difficulty […] hint at its object more in the moment of frustration, alienation, and distance than in satisfaction, resolution, and clarity” (154). In Clark J. Elliston’s contribution, “Reaching Toward the Light: Loving the (New) World”, he explores worlds colliding. Elliston says that Malick is doing neither metaphysics nor history, so what genre is The New World? While Ellis- ton does not use this term and may even disagree with it, his exploration seems to revolve around Rousseau’s concept of the “noble savage”. The English col- onists come to the new world of Virginia, and Pocahontas comes to the new world of England. Elliston’s claim, however, is that the spiritual world is rather the new world and that Pocahontas represents a christological figure, with re- demption the theological strand that runs through the film. Utilizing the term “worldliness”, he suggests there are two options: escape from the world or an Augustinian attitude in which “friendship with the world, despite its hostility, should be attempted” (192). Drawing on Bonhoeffer and Weil, Elliston adds to this the fact that “kenotic giving” requires a love of the world and that Poca- hontas fully exists between these worlds, “far from making her a mystic set apart from worldly realities,” (193) and that her “distinctiveness” and “other- ness […] does not earn her respect or acclaim” (194–195). Most interestingly, her openness to the world is explored by Elliston in terms of what Weil calls “at- tention”. Every image of the film reveals this vulnerability or receptiveness: “as a Native American princess wedded to an English tobacco farmer, she is unto herself a new world”, especially if “she was raped during her capture” (196) and Book Review: Theology and the Films of Terrence Malick | 201www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/2, 198–203