Badlands (Terrence Malick, 1973)

No director who has only made four films in nearly 35 years is as acclaimed as Terrence Malick. While I don't necessarily have a problem with that (for once), I am a little confused. Sure, his movies (I've seen them all but The Thin Red Line) are beautiful and contemplative, but I've never thought they had enough character development to be considered true masterpieces. Badlands is the same. Malick's debut, a film he almost seems to remake with Days of Heaven 2 years later, focuses on Kit Carruthers, a violent 25-year-old garbageman who meets Holly, a 15-year-old girl, and they fall in love. Well, they fall in puppy love, but when Kit kills Holly's father ("We'll have to talk about that sometime" is my favorite line of the film), they run away together across the badlands, a desolate place where Kit kills four or five other people and Holly watches. The most fascinating part about the film is the total lack of awareness in Holly, played blankly (and perfectly) by Sissy Spacek. She is 15, it's 1959, so there is undoubtedly going to be a sense of naivete about her, but she doesn't even question Kit until it is far too late. Most any person with as solid a relationship as Holly seems to have with her father would have been destroyed by her father's murder by her boyfriend, but Holly doesn't even cry. She just follows Kit (Martin Sheen, as a killer who is not even sure why he's killing) as he lights her house on fire and leaves town forever. Holly is not a real person, a girl in her most formative stage; she mentions in the film (and it's even on the poster) that she doesn't really have any friends, so perhaps she's just grateful that someone loves her as she is? But she never seems desperate for love, just passive and willing to go with the flow, no matter what happens. Until it's too late. Holly's resistance near the end of the film is what brings their run to its end, a surprisingly strong statement from a girl who had yet to do much of anything in the film. The movie is a comment on restless youth (Kit is compared to James Dean more than once), on female roles (Holly is always a companion to either her father and then Kit), on the desolate nature of the American wild and the American spirit, and one that is infinitely more interesting to think about than actually watch (as I've realized while writing this). Malick uses his simple characters to convey the complexities of the American self, class differences, violent nature, and all. 7/10

Stumble It!

Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick, 1978)

This dreamlike piece of the American dream gone awry was only Malick's second major directorial project, and in the almost thirty years since, he's only made two other full-length films. It's no wonder Malick has an almost legendary reputation, solidified by the dreamy and beautiful imagery in his first two films. Days of Heaven stars Richard Gere and Brooke Adams as Bill and Abby, two turn of the century lovers who, along with Bill's sister Linda, travel around as laborers, searching for work so they just don't starve for another few months. Bill and Abby decide to pose as brother and sister in their travels, because, while it's never really explained, as Linda says, "When you tell people something, they start talking." There are rumors, as another laborer gets punched by Bill when he makes a joke about Abby keeping Bill warm at night, but they are mostly left alone. When they work at the farm of a sick farmer, nameless and played by Sam Shepard, who falls in love with Abby, Bill pushes her to marry him because he'll die in a year and leave them all his money. Well, love is a better medicine than anything else the farmer has tried, so instead of dying, he stays the same, and even gets Abby to fall for him a little. The emotions that Bill had hoped to manipulate come bubbling to the surface in a surge of violence that has consequences for every character. The movie is extremely atmospheric, with many scenes of fields of grain blowing in the wind and other turn of the century scenery. The scene with the fire, where everything around the characters is on fire and there are locusts everywhere, is as much a scene of hell as anything I've seen on screen ever. While the setting is beautiful, the dialogue is less so, but that is because these are rough people who don't say much, much less beautiful, poetic speeches. The narration is given by Linda, and her young, rough accent is hard not to fall in love with. The movie, then, has almost a dreamlike quality; these lives seem to be predestined, and there's no use talking about it, because what happens, happens. All the performances are pretty great, especially Brooke Adams as the conflicted Abby; there are plenty of scenes that you can see the conflicting feelings in her fighting it out on her face, and it is a very realistic, heartbreaking performance. This movie is quietly devastating, and the last scene really speaks to the enduring nature of human spirit. 8/10 RIYL: Badlands

Stumble It!