Review of Days of Heaven (1978) by Parker M — 10 Jun 2011

3.5 Stars out of 4.

Days of Heaven does not just embody its world, it confronts it. It is a story of romantic crises yet the film is distant and dispassionate. The environment is enlivened with a lively but silent and still romanticism surrounding characters who are flat and unexpressive. It's a period piece, circa 1916, but at the same time floats completely out of space and time. The world of Days of Heaven, Texas, comes to life while very distilled by its graceful, self-effaced plot. We see a world touched and, with its profound imagery, personified.

It is directed by Texas-native Terrence Malick (Badlands), who I have started to coin the "anti-Spielbeg." That is neither a good or bad thing. He is a different filmmaker who is fascinated with using other, less conventional techniques that are not exactly about depicting a time or place but observing it from afar, without a certain realism but indeed an approach.

His Days of a Heaven is a pretty great film about an undefinable, ineffable atmosphere that gracefully appears in the foreground as the characters enter it from the background. Malick engages in this story through an emotional filter, trying to understand the texture of the 1920s, painting more a picture than using special effects to achieve realism. This is a film about mood more than emotion. For the average movie goer it is not an easy view, it is a challenging one. But the "view" itself is a stunner, capturing movements with an intricate impressionism.

Right, the story. It's about a Chicago labourer named Bill (Richard Gere), a character who always seems to be in exile. He flees from his manual labor when he accidentally kills his boss. From there Bill and his girlfriend Abby (Brooke Adams) become a part of a large group of seasonal workers at a large farm run by a wealthy but terminally ill farmer (Sam Shepard). To avoid gossip Bill and Abby pretend to be brother and sister, and that leads to the farmer asking for Abby's hand in marriage. Bill wants her to marry him so that they will inherit his fortune.

The rest of the story exists in the background, narrated by Linda (Linda Manz), Abby's kid sister, who acts as a parallel commentary to the unfolding events across the vast landscape. She is not dictating the storyline but describing her past without any traces of nostalgia but with simple-minded naiveness, as if telling a dark fairy tale without the darkness. What this does is strip Days of Heaven of any melodrama and makes it austere, distant, and unaware. Linda is the remaining character at the end of the tale, the one who remained untouched, unbruised and always observing.

Days of Heaven then becomes a film that requires its audience to float from above, moving with the wind while never being grounded in the action. We watch these characters engage in a story but we barely feel a part of it. This is so very much the point and Malick is not punishing his audience with some sort of haphazard alienation but blessing them with the ability to watch and develop a feeling, one that exists outside narrative and melodrama, for its world.

The cinematography was done by Nestor Almendros, who Malick admired for his work on The Wild Child. Both of them collaborated strongly, playing off each other's proclivities for natural lighting and eye for shooting exteriors. Most of Days of Heaven in fact takes place outside and the few moments indoors involve plainly-painted walls and scarce furniture. The outdoors represent a minimalistic lifestyle, one surrounded by beauty that soon - to symbolically relate to the characters - loses its grace and is overwhelmed with incoming cruelty.

With Days of Heaven I do not want to talk much about the story. It's really the leaves on the branch, the seeds of a flower idealized by a director who likes to look at the forest instead of the trees. The film, like Linda, isn't concerned with the events but what encompassed it. It looks at the details of the exterior world in exchange for incessantly (and perhaps aggrandizing) the character world. Almendros shoots the scenery like it's in a silent film, where the wind plays like music and lighting is so very dim and impassive. Apparently Almendros shot most of the outdoor scenes at "magic hour", when they had only twenty minutes to shoot while the sun had set and the sky was grey before it faded to night. Genius.

While filming Days of Heaven, Malick - similarly to his personal life - was cold and distant. He did not want to use much of the script and improvised the dialogue as much as shooting the scenery. The philosopher that he is went for more Tolstoy than Dostoevsky. Therefore, instead of bringing out the pain and suffering of its world Malick precipitated the story with biblical undertones, which puts Days of Heaven in an enigmatic parable.

There is one great scene when the farm is cursed with a locust storm and a massive fire explodes in the field, bringing a world of hell and fury brought on by the cunning actions of the characters. How amazing it is that Malick never uses CGI to convey the quiet madness of his world. To create the illusion of the locust storm he had helicopters drop thousands of peanut shells and when Malick had closeups of the bugs, he borrowed them from Canadian Department of Agriculture (some of the footage in Days of Heaven was from Whiskey Gap, a ghost town in Alberta).

The ending of the film is not a tragedy though most filmmaker would be desperate to make it so. With many of Malick's films they never exactly "end". They stop. We sense there is more to tell and that this world will keep on going, and its trees will continue to sway impassively in the wind. I do not know if Days of Heaven has a happy ending, but it touches sadness and then gracefully slides to notions of hope, believing in a moral and fulfilled future (that as how Linda would see it at least).

This is a very good movie. I saw it recently in Toronto and I admired the visuals, even though the story is underdeveloped because Malick likes to strip down narrative in order to see the world outside arcs, payoffs, and simple motivations. The film was not successfully restored and still looks too bleak for its own good. I must note though that Days of Heaven is not a cheerfully beautiful film (in that its world is drenched in emptiness and loneliness). It's visually profound in its little details, shot like a Monet capturing movements and energy.

Days of Heaven, as expected, has been praised for its complex imagery and criticized for its dead emotions. But this is not about emotional investment. The characters themselves are flat and deadpan. Maybe too much. None of their features are embellished through lighting so they have this raw, untouched look that seems to represent human nature the best. It has slow moments, stalls when the story may not bring enough magnitude to the pace. But if I criticized any further I would probably contradict everything I just said.

I can see some people watching this movie and be - almost literally - left cold. Some who dislike it will surely agree it looks incredible, but then may quibble that it's like staring at art work for 90 minutes and it gets boring. I don't think so. Malick had a choice. He could paint a picture or he could watch someone else paint it. In a way he does both.

As a second film Malick has become an accomplished director who sets up the minor details and lets the audience grow to understand what it all means and what it evokes. I read Roger Ebert's review of Days of Heaven (out of curiosity and advice) and he discovered the exact purpose to Days of Heaven: "This is a movie made by a man who knew how something felt, and found a way to evoke it in us." And - while always on the outside - I felt it.