9 September 2008
Days of Heaven (1978)
I first saw Days of Heaven shortly after The Thin Red Line came out on DVD. I had convinced friends to do a Terrence Malick marathon, starting with The Thin Red Line and then going back to Badlands. That probably would have been enough, but I insisted on watching Days of Heaven after. I think we started it around 5am. I’ve had better ideas.
But then again, if there’s one reason why this movie has stuck in my brain, it was probably finishing it in the wee hours of the morning (no one else managed to stay awake, and even at that point I was telling myself it was like eating vegetables; that in the end, retrospectively, I would be a better person for it), and that golden light was spilling through dreadfully orange curtains into the hallway between the video room and the study room of my college dorm. It really made the movie seem small, and intimate when I was convinced what I was seeing was immense and spilling out from the television.
So how about that. I have a personal connection to one of the most impersonal movies ever committed to celluloid. How can one really explain what it’s like to watch this? (“It’s so immense, it’s like it spills from the television!)” The way the conversations between Richard Gere, Sam Shepard and Brooke Adams are so elliptical, as if always having just finished by the time we get on the scene. Or, if we do happen to witness the whole conversation, then the characters are unwilling to admit anything to themselves as if to suggest that Malick’s shoes were being filled by Werner Heisenberg.
It’s one of those movies where the director threw out the script and followed the actors to ‘find the story.’ And in a bunch of ways it seems to work. Everything is anchored by Linda Manz, who plays Gere’s younger sister. It really ultimately becomes her story, though too in a sort of elliptical way. We don’t really know or understand why we see her with the convent girl at the end, but the distance that’s prevalent in all of the curious voice overs seems to suggest a different life, not necessarily better, looking back on the events. There’s a kind of learned emptiness in the observations, particularly when they’re going down the river and everyone’s off calling for help or burying their pets, which is a great juxtaposition to what they’re actually doing after Bill tries to escape.
But beyond that – I have remarkably little to say about this movie. I never really noticed how the dialogue was mixed into the soundtrack with this movie before, and some of this may have to do with my television which makes it remarkably hard to hear dialogue in certain types of movies, but this movie in particular, it’s like they’re not even there. It’s like everyone’s voices are caught in the air, and they whisk away with the wind that’s cinematically coasting along the stalks of wheat in front of that solitary house throughout the whole affair. The narration is very heavily set on the center channel though, so it’s my inkling that this was Malick’s intention (The Thin Red Line is pretty similar with its juxtaposition between inner and outer diamonologues. Hilariously recall for a moment, if you will, Nick Nolte’s blistering reality with his somber inner struggle.).
This all leads to Linda Manz’s narration being all the more alien to the proceedings, but if you just sit back and let the visuals carry the movie (which they do, regardless of whether you’re trying to hear Sam Shepard ogle Brooke Adams or not), it’s a story that works remarkably well without any of the principles going through unnecessarily expository dialogue –there’s one hint dropped in Manz’s testimony about Shepard “gettin’ better or somethin’” from pills that seems to imply a huge mountain of Henry James’ plotting underneath that’s entirely beside the point.
The ending begins with a swarm of locusts after the harvest brings Bill (Gere), and by then Abby (Adams) has settled in with The Farmer (Shepard — and at least he isn’t named “Charlie Farmer”) and learned to love him, which causes the breaking point to be more of a misunderstanding rather than brooding unspoken rage between the three adults. Of course, the locusts (which, like the girl’s narration, are loud) are only the beginning of the end, but the biblical stuff ends there, as the story follows Bill, Abby and Linda’s (Linda Manz’s character is named Linda, which either attributes veracity to her narration or to the claim that child actors are not really acting) exodus (okay, maybe the biblical stuff doesn’t quite stop).
Nevertheless, the film ultimately turns off toward the train tracks somewhat unexpectedly, but then you have to remember: Bill always told everyone they was sisters, cause he didn’t like people asking questions.