Week of May 4, 2006, Issue #550
FILM
Even with only four films in 32 years, director Malick is Heaven sent
BRIAN GIBSON / brian@vueweekly.com
Terrence Malick may be the best American director un-alive. After all, the man doesn’t seem to exist. There are few photos of him, scant biographical details and he doesn’t do interviews, preferring to let his films speak for him.Those films, few and far-between (four in the last 32 years), are haunting. A string of loosely connected images float onto the screen, accompanied by a mytho-poetic, voiceover narration. Past events and places (the 1950s South, the Battle of Guadalcanal, 1600s Virginia) unfold, showing what was lost and hinting at what could have been.
Yet this retrospective mood pulls against the vivid immediacy of Malick’s lyric images, the constant surprise of what comes with the next cut. Confrontations come haltingly, and dialogue seems to echo out of characters.
His films are sensory experiences and radically anti-narrative, condemning him to obscurity, even with the recent The New World, a sublime re-interpretation of the first encounter between Europeans and Natives that renders the moment simultaneously mundane and hopeful. Within cinema, though, he’s influenced such directors as David Gordon Green and Lynne Ramsay.
No film reveals Malick’s quintessentially cinematic obsessions with the fragility of time, the yearning for connection and the haunting of loss quite like his second, Days of Heaven (1978), set in the 1910s Midwest.
After the images flutter down onto the screen, what remains is a haunting sense of waywardness, of the drifting millions who have toiled away on fields and in factories, fading into the American past, unnoticed.
“Me and my bruther. It usta be just me and my bruther ... Dere were people suffering from pain and hunger ...” Linda’s (Linda Manz) narration tumbles through the film, her observations half-naïve, half-world weary.
After hitting his harsh boss in the factory, her brother Bill (Richard Gere) takes her and his lover, Abby (Brooke Adams, whose long, saddened face forecasts tragedy) away from Chicago. They get off the trains to gather and sack wheat for a Texan (Sam Shepard) who soon becomes interested in Abby. Bill, who publicly pretends that Abby is his sister to avoid talk, pushes her into marrying the Texan so they can finally live comfortably.
The wheat itself becomes a force. Cinematographer Nestor Almendros shows the rippling, swaying grass as a swelling, buffeting sea. The wind billows the fields, blows curtains, ruffles petticoats and shimmies through gauzy dresses. The prairie landscape (the movie was filmed in Southern Alberta) provides an amber-tinted backdrop for a palette of rosy dawns, purple dusks and blue, cloud-tufted midday skies. And Malick traces the complex eddies and currents of human moods, etching out the little flares of temper, instants of tenderness and moments of contemplation between people.
Bill, Abby and Linda hold onto a quiet, fierce pride even when they slip into the casual luxury of the Texan’s life. The sweat and toil of harvesting is shown in all its drudgery and off-hours leisure—capped by a great scene of a man kicking up dust on a plank as he tapdances to a harmonica—even as a sense of wistfulness and doom grows.
Days of Heaven reassesses our place in the order of things. Buffaloes, quail and badgers go about their business; humans seem small among waving stalks of wheat; nature destroys, reclaims and renews. And Malick suggests—in the story of a few common people slowly worn down by a life of cheap, hard work—a sense of the strange majesty within us and a beauty beyond us, a world we could reach if we were searching and striving for something more than what we settle for. V
Fri, Sun & Mon, May 5, 7, 8 (7 pm)
Days of Heaven
Written & directed by Terrence Malick
Starring Richard Gere, Brooke Adams,
Sam Shepherd
Metro Cinema, $8