Welcome to The Weekend Watch, a weekly column focusing on a movie—new, old or somewhere in between, but out either in theaters or on a streaming service near you—worth catching on a cozy Friday night or a lazy Sunday morning. Comments welcome!
It seems like every Terrence Malick movie has the same mythic story. A studio frets about its investment while the idiosyncratic filmmaker shoots for thirteen minutes once a day. Tempers flare, the production revolts, the financing is pulled, and Malick tinkers with what he’s got for years after, disappearing into obscurity. And then, from the ashes, rises the ravishing result. I wouldn’t put too much stock in the legend—too many stand to benefit from the mythmaking. And yet…Days of Heaven is just as inexplicably amazing as the narrative surrounding it makes it out to be. As star Richard Gere celebrates his 75th birthday and the Criterion Channel features its collection of post-Bonnie and Clyde New Hollywood films, it’s as good a time as any to watch Terrence Malick’s sophomore feature. Days of Heaven is streaming on the Criterion Channel and, somehow, for free on Pluto TV.
From the opening notes of the score (Ennio Morricone referencing Camille Saint-Saëns’ The Carnival of the Animals suite, particularly the movement Aquarium, which I played once in Texan high school marching band of all places), there’s a displaced nostalgia to Days of Heaven. The ‘10s-set film, released in 1978, evoked the hardscrabble Depression and Dust Bowl somewhere in the hazy in-between of American history. It’s a strange nostalgia, pushing back in a very different way than Malick’s contemporaries like the boundary-pushing taboos of Taxi Driver or Dog Day Afternoon or Midnight Cowboy. Badlands, Malick’s first movie, already operated in Bonnie and Clyde mode. His second movie sprawled; it’s a yearning couched inside beautiful images for a time composed of violence, need, and cowardice.
It opens on a man fleeing a murder, driven by capitalism, and ends on the same. The foundation of the country is spelled out in these harsh sequences, over before you know it, as blunt as the Bukowski-like narration improvised by the young Linda Manz. Manz’ thick New Yawk accent and slightly-scarred face are the rock in Days of Heaven’s shoe—the smudge on its idyllic painting. Cinematographers Néstor Almendros and Haskell Wexler (who came on after production ran so long that Almendros had to leave for a prior commitment) shot basically the whole film in the brief golden hour of sunset, eschewing studio lighting set-ups for fleeting natural beauty, and the whole thing is all the more arresting because of how the camera stares at the human imperfection jutting out from the fields of wheat.
Manz, who plays a boxcar-hopping wanderer, accompanying her quiet, killer brother Bill (Gere) and his sad-faced girlfriend Abby (Brooke Adams), stares right back. The trio’s take-no-shit stance towards their rough-and-tumble life only picks up when they fall backwards into a scheme: the rich farmer (Sam Shepard) they’re seasonally laboring for has fallen for Abby. A love triangle ensues, more than a little like Bill pimping out his girl for an easier life. The real feelings of everyone involved simmer quietly, visible only briefly during the ellipsis inherent to the narrative’s perpetual sunset. If each frame is the best-looking moment of a single day, the emotions of its characters progress like they’re in an Oscar-winning flipbook.
And isn’t there something truly American about that too? Just like Days of Heaven can appreciate the rolling hills and uniform crops and bloodshot sky that made so much of my childhood in the bone-dry South look, to my eyes, boring, the film can also appreciate the stunted expressions of those who live there. Life and death, love and hate come and go during the brief film, and none of them has the impact as a single cloud of locusts. In flyover country, in the Texas panhandle, elemental forces overpower the small-time quibbles between people. If the first images arrested me with their uniquely lit glow, its later images swept me away into its near-reverential appreciation for fire, water, air. If this is Heaven, I fear Hell.
If all this sounds hokey, or artsy-fartsy, maybe that’s because describing Days of Heaven doesn’t get the easy out of just recounting the beats of a story. You actually have to talk about the images, which means you’re engaging with it—and trying to convince others of how it moved you—like something you saw at a museum. If I’m telling you about turning a corner at the Art Institute in Chicago and finding myself face to face with Georges Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, I’m not going to talk about the dogs running amuck or the actions of its lounging parkgoers. Instead I’ll mention the shade and the light, the way you can nearly feel the breeze coming off the water, the way tiny dots of color can create a whole world. Days of Heaven is a little like that, evocative beyond what fills its days.
Jacob Oller is Movies Editor at Paste Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter at @jacoboller.
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