Biographies of great artists are of inherent interest, but in the case of Terrence Malick, one of the greatest living filmmakers, there’s an extra fascination because of the great question mark that looms over his career: the twenty-year gap between his second feature, “Days of Heaven,” released in 1978, and his third, “The Thin Red Line,” from 1998. Moreover, Malick hasn’t granted any interviews since 1979, further inflaming the special cinephilic hunger aroused by the very notion of a Malick biography. Now that book is here: John Bleasdale’s “The Magic Hours: The Films and Hidden Life of Terrence Malick” (Kentucky). It’s a rapturously detailed, sensitively observed, critically insightful account, in which the filmmaker emerges as someone whose presence, long kept out of public view, appears to have entranced more or less everyone with whom he crossed paths—and whose personal life stands in peculiar and powerful relation to his artistry. It also illuminates his two-decade hiatus as a time of hidden art but art nonetheless.
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