Review of Days of Heaven (1978) by Tom B — 01 Apr 2010

The most beautiful film about farming ever made. Saw this tonight for the first time. We all liked it, but one, who felt he'd seen it before. It is a kind of universal myth and in that way instantly recognizable.

The exterior is so perfect it is overwhelming. When every frame and sequence proclaims itself a visual American icon it's tricky to find a comfortable perspective. What I have noticed is it sounds a pretty deep bell in me, since I feel it.

It's not like there's a lot to discuss about the simple story and straightforward visuals. It is in so many ways on-the-nose. And yet. And yet. Some things I can see seem to be the figures in landscape, people sprouting from the land, working the wheat.

Nature and people combined seamlessly, including the "story" and the entanglements of their lives. Hard to call it a story in some ways when it begs to be seen and felt as a movement, a shift of feeling and relationship.

But it is, of course, a straightforward story. No mystery except the mystery of why such visual beauty is so powerful, and the capture of motion. The wind in the wheat, the emotions across the screen.

And the dialogue, almost incidental, rendering this a film told in images more than anything. Yes, among the most beautiful images ever seen, in motion, on film. It is also an act of preservation. Perhaps one day such landscapes will be as forgotten as the era and the people who lived in it, or if not forgotten, gone, replaced by the greater advance, and films like this will be treasured for showing us something we can no longer find in the world outside of cinema.

A melancholy thought, perhaps, but better we have it on film than not at all. I wish I'd seen it back in the 70s and this was my fifth time seeing it. I'd have something more clever to say or think.

I guess I'll have to see it again sometime.