Lost Treasures
Days of Heaven (1978)
director: terrence malick
cast: richard gere, brooke adams, sam shepard, linda manz, robert wilke, jackie shultis, stuart margolin
“Days
of Heaven” (1978) came out in the year of “The Deer Hunter,” “Saturday Night
Fever,” and “Midnight Express.” A year that saw “Grease,” “Animal House,”
and “Superman” make millions. It is a visual masterpiece of nostalgic beauty
and lonely landscapes by Terrance “I-make-a-movie-every-ten-or-twenty-years”
Malick (“Badlands”). “Days of Heaven” has only one requirement: if you can’t
see this film on the big screen make sure you rent the widescreen letterboxed
video edition.
“Days of Heaven” is a turn of the century Greek tragedy of a love triangle told from the pseudo-future tense point of view of the young Linda (Linda Manz “The Game”). It is a rock-solid morality play with locusts, barnstormers, terminal illness and a flying circus. The story involves Bill, her older brother, played by Richard Gere as a Chicago mill worker who accidentally kills the foreman in a dispute and must go on the lam. Wow, a Richard Gere movie I actually like, perhaps its because he doesn’t have too many lines to speak. His girlfriend, Abby (Brooke Adams “The Dead Zone”) is dragged out of the city slums to jump a boxcar going west. The three end up in the Texas panhandle where they accept jobs working on a wheat farm. In his screen debut, Sam Shepard is the shy land baron with a never-explained fatal disease who owns the wheat farm.
In an effort to avoid
talk Bill and Abby pose as brother and sister. This is pre-First World War
America after all. The “farmer” becomes infatuated with Abby. When Bill learns
of Shepard’s illness he tries to convince Abby to 
marry
him, in hopes he will die soon and she will become a rich widow. She reluctantly
marries the farmer when the harvest season is over.
It is Malick’s ever-present
use of nature that works with and against the drama that is not only a backdrop
but also a living character. There is barely a scene that takes place indoors
and the limitless prairie stretches forever into panoramic vistas of vivid
colors and textures. Can you tell this is a gorgeous movie? Check out “Badlands.”
This is important because the movie is primarily a visual one with very little
dialogue. The entire film was photographed during “golden hours” which is
that time of the morning just after sunrise and at the end of the day just
before sunset. Oh, wait till you see all that golden grain and the huge Victorian
mansion on the plains of Texas. It was shot entirely in Alberta, Canada over
the course of several years due to the fact that the movie covers various
seasons of the year. Nestor Almendros won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography
for 
the
film with, as the credit states “additional photography by Haskell Wexler.”
The credit has always pissed Wexler off and in a letter to critic Roger Ebert
he described sitting in a theatre with a stopwatch to prove that he shot more
than half of the footage. Ultimately, Paramount decided the credit.
The characters communicate on a very subtle level. The audience understands them without being force fed every last detail about their lives. If you’re like me, you will find it a welcome relief from the constant machine-gunning of banal dialogue in most films today. These people are not into speeches about how horrible their lives are. Linda’s voiceover is the primary dialogue and plot filler of the movie. She pathetically speaks in a strange cynical poetry, both melodramatic and enlightened yet always streetwise. I just can’t quite think of another film like this one.
Anyhow,
Abby marries Shepard while both Bill and Linda enjoy the good life for awhile.
Two strange things turn the scheme on its head though. One, Linda falls in
love with Shepard and two, Shepard’s disease-ridden terminally ill body seems
to get better each day he’s with Abby! Hello! Shepard is suspicious of the
“siblings’” relationship when he sees them kissing! It is a story of love
and loss as Gere has it out with Abby and is resigned to leave with the flying
circus… that’s right. The story is unclouded by sentimentality which has given
it the unearned reputation of being cold and distant. When Gere returns to
reclaim his love, things heat up quick.
The music by Ennio Morricone is simply mythic and powerful. I’m sitting at home typing this when suddenly I hear the theme music used in a commercial for Colombian coffee. Can you say sacrilege? The theme is a variation of the Saint-Saens piece “Carnival of the Animals.” The tagline for the film was quite appropriate: “Your eyes… Your ears… Your senses… will be overwhelmed.”
Which
brings me to Terrence Malick, the ex-MIT philosophy professor and former journalist.
There has been too much mystery surrounding the secluded filmmaker. Since
“Days of Heaven” he has not made a film till last year when he directed two,
“The Thin Red Line” with Sean Penn and “The Moviegoer,” with Julia Roberts
and Tim Robbins. Many critics dismissed “Days of Heaven” when it came out
as just another pretty picture. Malick is in full command of the tools of
the cinematic medium. He has been known to fix microphones to tree trunks
and plants in order to bring the power of nature to his films. All the characters
in his films (all two of them) seem powerless against the forces of nature
and fate. Finally the awards the film garnered say it all. On top of the Cinematography
Oscar, “Days of Heaven” was nominated for three more. It won Malick “Best
Director” from the Cannes Film Festival, The National Society of Film Critics
and the New York Film Critics Awards. Almendros also walked away with a dozen
other awards that year for his work. Don’t miss the night of the locusts…
it is a thing of cinematic beauty. -- Guido Sanchez
© 1999 Hollywood Outsider