**** (out of ****)
Starring Richard Gere, Brooke Adams, Sam Shepard, Linda Manz, and Robert Wilke
Directed & written by Terrence Malick
1978
93 min PG
So I’ve seen “Days of Heaven” twice now, and I love it, but I can’t quite figure out why. Maybe it’s enough to say that “Days of Heaven” casts a spell, about a lost place that used to be right here, now gone forever. We might be better off now that it’s gone, but it was where people lived and died, and because they did, this place has value and dignity. Watching this movie is a celebration of vague loss mixed with unnamed regrets. If “Days of Heaven” doesn’t teach us something, then it at least reminds us what it feels like to look back over something wiser, warmly, and a bit mournful.
Lately I’ve been hung up on the exact meaning of a movie, but that’s kind of silly. Art isn’t always about something exact. Sometimes it’s about juxtaposing images and ideas so that we see our world in a slightly different way, or at least we say “that’s purty.” Part of what makes “Days of Heaven” so intriguing is that it continually sidesteps the obvious. If it’s a defense of the working class, why is it so detached from its skid row protagonists? If it’s a statement about the oligarchy’s oppression of the masses, why is the movie’s only oligarch a nice guy? If the land is so beautiful, why is living on it so much work?
The movie is the hatchling of Terrence Malick, director of the forthcoming “The New World,” which is only his fourth or fifth turn in the director’s chair in the last 35 years (the lazy bastard!). His last film was the deliberate and abstract “The Thin Red Line” from 1998, an unfortunate year to be released considering how it was overshadowed by Spielberg’s visceral Veteran’s Day speech, “Saving Private Ryan.” A loser of seven Oscars, “Line” was not a popular favorite and divided critics at the time, although its esteem among the professionals has risen since then. There’s a lot of juxtaposition in both films; “Line’s” nameless narrator waxes on “why the land contends with the sea” and “what’s this war at the heart of nature?” Fitzgerald once said, and I paraphrase, that genius was the ability to keep two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still be able to function.
But you crave a summary, don’t you? It’s Chicago 1916 and Bill (Richard Gere) is something of a waster. He loses his temper, gets into a fight in the steel mill, and, before you can say “flight from the law,” he, his girlfriend Abby (Brooke Adams) and his sister Linda (Linda Manz) are on their way to the wheat fields of Texas. Alongside migrant workers from all over the country, they are hired for the wheat harvest, and we follow them every step of the way. You could practically learn how to run a farm just from watching this movie. Like Abraham and Sarah in Genesis, Bill and Abby pretend to be brother and sister as they travel into a foreign land.
Abby catches the eye of the gentle and quiet man (Sam Shepard) who lives alone in the big house. He falls in love with her. Bill, who always seems to be looking for a quick score and is tired of wandering the country at the poverty level, encourages the romance. (The second time through the movie I got the feeling that he might be more educated than we first believe. Certainly if Abby could have been a dancer than there’s more to her story than actually appears in the 93 minute runtime.) Things work well for a while, while Bill is her man at night and the farmer is hers during the day. For a while…and just like God was vengeful against the powerful man who tried to take Abraham’s wife as his own, so too does the land exact Old Testament-style retribution.
All this is seen and told obliquely. People hardly ever talk and, when they do, we can’t always hear them over machinery or over a great distance. The words “Texas” and “1916” are never actually spoken. “Days of Heaven” could just as accurately be summarized as being about a wheat field, a river, and an enormous sky, with some people occasionally popping up in it. From the beginning the movie has the feel of something finished, set in stone, and now just being remembered. We begin with a montage of sepia photographs. The music (by Ennio Morricone) and obliqueness is dreamy, yet the “things”—settings, sunsets, crops—are all very concrete. Attention is paid to how the migrant farmhands amuse themselves with games and dancing, yet always from a distance, and we’re never quite sure where they sleep at night (outside?).
Our narrator is the child Linda, who still speaks like a child and in a child’s voice, although she seems to be remembering the events years later. She comments on her family without inflection or wonder. Like a real child and not a movie child, it’s like she’s talking to us while doing something else that’s really holding her attention. Large parts of “Days of Heaven” seem to be what she saw from a distance without proper understanding. The emotions and motivations of the adult world are seen, not processed. Again, the film feels finished and remembered.
Page two of "Days of Heaven." Back to home.