Every film buff knows the Terence Malick story by now: a visionary director who made a couple of landmark films in the 1970s, then disappeared for two decades before staging a late-life comeback, which culminated with "The Tree of Life" winning the Palme d'Or at Cannes last year. Fewer know the story of director Monte Hellman: a visionary director who made one stone-cold classic road movie in 1971, "Two-Lane Blacktop," then gradually faded into obscurity, his gem out of circulation — never released on video, and only on DVD some 30 years later — and his career a question mark of unfulfilled promise.
The comparison ends there, though: While both directors had an eye for taking genre material — such as a war movie or a road movie — and turning it inside out, Malick moved increasingly toward the mythic and spiritual while Hellman remained focused on real, grungy-looking people and the space between them.
Hellman came back in 2010 at age 77, after an absence of 21 years, with his new film, "Road to Nowhere," finally released in Japan this week — and like "The Tree of Life," it's a mixed bag.