Review: Days of Heaven

Days of Heaven was the first art film I ever saw, unless you count 2001: A Space Odyssey as an art film, which I do now but didn't when I was nine years old. I saw Days of Heaven in its first run, at a matinee with my parents at the Village Westwood. I remember seeing the scene with the raw cabbage on the cutting board and being mesmerized by the lighting and color. This is how you become the kind of person who watches four-minute shots of empty movie theaters with a straight face.

I remembered the movie on Oscar night when it made up, oh, a third of Michael Mann's "Bunch of Movies that Were Made in America" montage, and my partner found it at the library. Here's the review I wrote, which will also be preserved for posterity here.

It's good to see Terrence Malick in what is for him a flurry of activity, having released The Thin Red Line in 1998 and The New World in 2005, and coming in with Tree of Life next year. In the 20 years between Days of Heaven and Line he grew considerably as a director, but not enough to make up for the three or four films he might have made at a more conventional director's pace.

Days of Heaven is one of the most beautiful films ever made, no doubt thanks to having both Nestor Almendros (who won the Oscar) and documentary legend Haskell Wexler behind the camera. But even more impressive is how well it's grounded in a particular time and place. Malick started with a vaguely soap-opera tale of of a love triangle and turned it into a much larger story about young industrial America. Golden-hued shots of old-fashioned farm work are undercut by the harsh realities of labor exploitation. The deafening noise of a Chicago steel mill is echoed in the hiss and clang of steam-powered farm machinery. Migrants escaping poor countries and urban sweatshops ride the rails to the country at harvest time, desperate for work.

The story centers on Bill and Abby (Richard Gere and Brooke Adams), an unmarried couple who leave Chicago and pretend to be brother and sister. Along with Bill's teen-aged sister Linda (Linda Manz), they end up at a big Texas spread owned by The Farmer (Sam Shepard). His attraction to Abby leads to a tense arrangement that keeps the characters together on the farm for months before falling apart. But this is film more of images than of words. The cast, especially Gere, was well chosen to exchange smoldering stares more than lines of dialogue.

In that sense, Days of Heaven is of a piece with Malick's other work. His focus was already on nature: frogs, wild turkeys, tall grass rippling in the wind. Malick's fascinated with historical Edens and falls from grace, and like The New World, Days of Heaven takes place in a less spoiled America. But in his later films, Malick broke away more completely from convention. The environmental shots in Heaven are gorgeous but not as daring at those in Line and The New World. There's narration here, too, but it's solely in Linda's voice and is grounded in the story. Twenty years later, Malick shifted the balance, making stories into mere frames for the idyllic settings and philosphical musings at the heart of his films. But if this earlier work lacks the total mastery of image, pace, and tone Malick would achieve in Line and The New World (the latter of which notably suffered from similar story and acting flaws), its pleasures still overshadow its shortcomings.