Terrence Malick was born in 1943 in Ottawa, Illinois, but John Bleasdale’s biography “The Magic Hours: The Films and Hidden Life of Terrence Malick” (the University Press of Kentucky, 292 Pages, $35) begins with the birth of all creation.
“Roughly 13.8 billion years ago, the entire universe was contained in a tiny dense point, which exploded—creating time and space,” Bleasdale writes, presenting the formation of the sun and the solar system as a mere prelude to the birth of Malick’s paternal grandfather in Persia.
By beginning with cosmic bravado, Bleasdale evokes the mystical grandeur of Malick’s films, especially “The Tree of Life” (2011). It is a devotee’s implicit declaration of both love and war: If you don’t think Terrence Malick is the center of the universe, you’re reading the wrong book.
Bleasdale wants us to know Malick—the films he started and finished, the people he loved and lost—but like Malick’s movies, the book is less a fine-grained portrait than a rippling reflection. It is a book about Malick, and also a Malickian book.
Malick, Bleasdale rhapsodizes, “has sought truth, pursued his inquiries, followed his vision, and asked simple yet unanswered questions, even at the danger of sounding naïve or unfashionably earnest.” In the name of spiritual solidarity, his biographer shares the risk.
While much of Bleasdale’s writing is fiction (he previously wrote novels about Sean Connery and the Peterloo Massacre), he emerged as a savant of cinema literacy on his podcast Writers on Film, discussing luminaries ranging from Sofia Coppola to Godzilla.
“I’m a huge fan of just reading film books,” Bleasdale enthused to Tom Shone (author of “The Nolan Variations”) on his inaugural episode. Emphasis on books: aside from being an Italy-based Brit, Bleasdale’s defining attribute is his advocacy for film analysis as an art in its own right.
Perhaps humbled by the shadow presence of his hero, Bleasdale infuses “The Magic Hours” with moody reverence, starting with his awestruck recollection of a visit to Malick’s childhood home, an oak-shaded bungalow in Waco, Texas.
“Here he grew up, went to church, played out in the street, and argued with his father so frequently it partly motivated his move to St. Stephen’s,” Bleasdale writes, mirroring a boy’s call to God in “The Tree of Life”: “I want to know what you are. I want to see what you see.”

For a biographer, seeing what Malick saw is more precarious than, say, chronicling Christopher Nolan’s quest for an early breakfast. In 1979, Malick gave his final formal interview, and in the coming years, his public appearances became so rare that TMZ once likened him to Bigfoot.
The worshipful curiosity of Malick acolytes only grew in the 20 years between his ethereal romance “Days of Heaven” (1978) and his spectral war epic “The Thin Red Line” (1998)—and Bleasdale savors the zany speculation that bloomed in Malick’s absence from movies.
“Gossip and legends filled the vacuum left by the director: He was walking across the country, observing birds, teaching philosophy at the Sorbonne,” Bleasdale writes. “He had become a hairdresser. He had retired from filmmaking entirely. He was a drug addict, or a hermit, or both.”
In reality, Malick is “more prosaic and more interesting,” Bleasdale argues. “The Magic Hours” may not puncture its subject’s mystique, but it presents a Malick more earthy than the visionary characterized by Variety as being prone “to get lost in the epistemological fog.”
To find Malick, one must lose themselves in his most overtly autobiographical films: “The Tree of Life” (an echo of his childhood), 2012’s “To the Wonder” (a requiem for his second marriage), and 2015’s “Knight of Cups” (a rumination on his years as an adrift screenwriter).
“Cups” stars Christian Bale as Rick, a spiritually empty script writer for hire. We never see him do any writing, but in one scene, a colleague casually mollifies him, telling him that “the assignment you didn’t turn in, you don’t have to worry about it. Here’s what happens: That goes away.”
“The Magic Hours” makes sense of this peculiarity, explaining the paradox of the well-paid but seemingly unproductive Hollywoodian. The path from page to screen may be development hell, Bleasdale tells us, but it’s “a well-paid hell with valet parking and a free bar.”
Malick escaped that hell—he currently lives in Austin with Alexandra Malick, his collaborator, wife, and childhood sweetheart—but “The Magic Hours” plays with time as fluidly as a Malick film, showing how a career’s forward motion can collide with chronological incongruences.
“The Tree of Life,” “To the Wonder,” and “Knight of Cups” may be an expression of who Malick is as an older artist, but they are also a record of who he was as a younger man. The more he aged, the more personal his films became—painfully personal, in the case of “To the Wonder.”

In “To the Wonder,” the stoic American Neil (Ben Affleck) falls for the effervescent Frenchwoman Marina (Olga Kurylenko). Malickologists have long believed that the characters are impressions of Malick and his second wife, Michèle Morette, but Bleasdale at once challenges and deepens that hypothesis.
At age 61, Morette died of an unknown illness in Paris. Decades had passed since the couple’s divorce, but they had remained in contact, and “To the Wonder” may be Malick’s attempt to communicate with Morette in the afterlife (a possibility even some seasoned Malick scholars may have overlooked).
While “To the Wonder” is poetically elliptical, Bleasdale elegantly decodes its surreal finale, tenderly describing how Neil “walks out to the garden, where a sizable family awaits him, but he seems to be a man distracted, a man who has just received some terrible news.”
In the moments that follow, Marina’s face is illuminated by a sudden light, followed by a shot of the graying beach at Mont Saint-Michel. “Beaches in Malick—‘The Thin Red Line,’ ‘The Tree of Life’—symbolize the passage from this life into the hereafter,” Bleasdale writes. “She is gone.”
After I read those words, I wept. I was already moved by “To the Wonder,” but now I was moved by Bleasdale being moved by Malick. That’s what it is to be a writer on film: to share an experience of art that conveys an essence of life.
In 2017, Malick’s longtime friend Jim Lynch told Texas Monthly that Malick had blanched at his recent films being construed as autobiography. “He didn’t want people thinking that he was just making movies about himself,” Lynch said. “He was making movies about broader issues.”
Malick’s films are about “broader issues”—fathers and sons, grief and love, lust and loneliness—but in “The Magic Hours,” Bleasdale shows us that Malick’s life was never hidden. It could always be seen by anyone who cared enough to look.
That truth crystalizes in Bleasdale’s account of the notorious “unposed, low resolution, and grainy” photo of Malick used to promote “The Thin Red Line,” taken by Malick’s father, Emil. “For all the arguments, Terry still saw himself through his father’s eyes,” Bleasdale notes.
Is that photo Malick’s Rosebud, an epitome of hurt and regret? Not in Bleasdale’s description of the image, which shows us a filmmaker who finds joy in the knowledge that cinema is but one branch of the tree of life: “He’s smiling, looking past the camera rather than at it.”
