The same lame ass voiceover and directionless storytelling that mar Malick's later work (The New World, Thin Red Line) is also present here. I suppose the predictably tragic nature of the story is supposed to lend it some gravitas, to make it allegorical for the impossible plight of the nation's poor during this period of American history. And maybe it does. But it's still a slow and boring film with a simultaneously cute and pretentious narrator who is speaking words that can't possibly be her own (and are therefore the words of the writer-director).
I don't mind a filmmaker taking a philosophical stance and having a point of view, that's the job of an artist after all. But Malick seems to be cloaking himself in aimlessness as if to say, "You can't pin this on me, this is how it was. And if you blame me for being aimless and pointless then you're also condemning the people of that time period and who are you to do that, you bourgeois prick." So I say, fuck Malick and his lovable pretensions. And fuck all the art school cineastes who would say that I just don't "get" Malick. His films are fucking boring. And I don't want to spend long hours in the dark studying something that's just plain boring. Any idiot can be pretentious but it's very hard to be entertaining. If you can be both you're a genius. But there aren't many of those. So if you have to be one or the other, I recommend the latter only because then you won't have pseudo-intellectuals following you around with their tongues hanging out. Oh, and you'll probably earn a hell of a lot more money that way, too.
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