USA
4*
Director:
Terrence Malick
Screenwriter:
Terrence Malick
Directors of Photography:
Néstor Almendros
Haskell Wexler
Running time: 95 minutes
Terrence Malick is a big ol’ romantic; just consider Badlands and The New World. Days of Heaven is in the same vein, and its images are breathtaking. It stars Richard Gere and Brooke Adams, who pretend to be brother and sister, lest other people “start talking”, and go to work in the Texas Panhandle in 1916, where they sack the wheat on the farm of a bachelor roughly their age. The farmer is never given a name, but ironically, he is the best-drawn character of the three.
Days of Heaven starts with the music of Camille Saint-Saëns, the famous seventh movement (“Aquarium”) of his “Carnival of the Animals”, and the music sets the tone for the rest of the score, composed by the master, Ennio Morricone. Malick’s images are dreamlike in colour yet very clearly “of this world”, and his characters seem to float through existence even though we can easily project our own fears onto them. For once, I think the film’s images themselves surpass even the beauty of the film’s Criterion DVD cover (the poster image at the top).
The film was famously shot mostly at magic hour (that brief window of time after sunset and before darkness), and as a result, the horizon is often bright orange, the sky is tinted purple-orange and the characters are bathed in hues of pink. Malick’s decision to shoot primarily (though, importantly, not exclusively) at this time of day inevitably led to some trouble, including errors in continuity, because shots would change from magic hour to full sunlight in a single scene. However, his directors of photography, Almendros and Wexler, knew how to cope with the demands of their director, and for the most part, these changes in lighting are not very significant.
It is true that the film has less plot than some music videos, but honestly, one doesn’t really care. Malick is a visual storyteller, and he easily manages to fill an entire film with action set on a single farm. The majestic farmhouse, perched on a hill, which looks out over the whole property and is reminiscent of the famous farmhouse in George Stevens’s Giant, appears in many shots in the background, and sometimes the camera pans from the action in a pond or in the fields back to the house in the background.
Brooke Adams’s character, Abby, who looks like a young Ali MacGraw, catches the eye of the farmer, who asks her to stay on at the farm past the end of the season. Her boyfriend, Billy, had heard that the farmer is ill, and they decide to let Abby stay on so that they could inherit the farmer’s money when he dies. Of course, he doesn’t die as quickly as they’d like, and this fact generates some frustration in Billy. But Abby is carefree and starts to fall in love with the farmer, played by Sam Shepard, who never looked more handsome and genuinely cares for her.
Days of Heaven plays as a kind of memory – an idea supported by the voice-over of Abby’s young sister, Linda, who also joins them at the farm. But for some reason, the Linda on the soundtrack is the voice of the Linda as a young girl, which doesn’t make much sense. Also, the point of the view of the camera is always displaced from one character to another.
The inspiration for David Gordon Green‘s film, Undertow, is obvious, especially in the way both directors use dialogue in their respective films. In scenes with dialogue, Malick uses the age-old rule of starting a scene as late as possible and ending it as quickly as possible. These conversational moments are effective, although some scenes exist purely for the sake of producing one or two lines of important dialogue before we move on to the next poetic scene with wheat ears quivering under a gentle breeze.
Days of Heaven‘s finest moment, the attack of the locusts, may be compared to the buffalo hunt in Dances with Wolves, but it also has a very important symbolic role to play, as it comes at a critical point in the narrative, and Malick makes use of this moment to introduce his only vertically downward shot – a divine point of view that plays on the locusts’ significance in a biblical context as well.
But for all the beautiful imagery, the central story and, in particular, the characters of Abby and Billy needed to be fleshed out a bit more. Abby, in particular, seems to have no real attachment, and one doesn’t get a clear idea of her true interest. The film contains some interesting glances from smaller characters who are suspicious of the relationship between Abby and her “brother”, Billy, and these are well integrated into the flow of the story.
Terrence Malick’s film is enchanting and, despite any objections one might have about the story or the characters, he demonstrates that the cinema has a powerful ability to present even the simplest of stories in harmonious sounds and images that can be truly astounding.