Like his other films, Days of Heaven is more poem than story, and Malick is infinitely more interested in evoking feelings than conveying narrative information. There is a consistency to Malick's cinema--from his juxtaposition of tranquility and violence, to his love of the natural world, to his insistence on using voice-over narration as a vehicle for his authorial voice--and while these traits sometimes work better than others, they find their fullest realization in Days of Heaven. Perhaps it is because of the simplicity of the plot, but Malick's artistry here feels neither misplaced (as it sometimes did in 1998's The Thin Red Line) or ponderous (as it often did in 2005's The New World). His directorial debut, Badlands (1973), was a striking reinvention of the romantic-criminals-on-the-run subgenre spawned by Bonnie and Clyde (1967), but it sometimes felt too much like an academic exercise in demythologizing. Days of Heaven, on the other hand, strikes a moving balance between elegant visuals and primal human emotions. Its narrative minimalism works with, rather than against, the expansive visual palette.

The story takes place just before World War I. The two central characters, Bill (Richard Gere) and Abby (Brooke Adams), must flee Chicago because Bill has accidentally killed his foreman at a steel mill. Along with Bill's preteen sister, Linda (Linda Manz), they escape by train to the Texas panhandle. Pretending to be brother and sister, rather than lovers, Bill and Abby join other itinerate workers harvesting wheat on a massive farm owned by a wealthy, but abjectly alone young man (Sam Shepard). The farmer's life is literally epitomized by his Gothic-style house, which is large and beautiful and utterly and completely alone on the top of a hill, more sad than powerful. The farmer falls in love with Abby, and asks her to stay. Bill has overheard a conversation suggesting that the farmer has only a year left to live (his exact illness is left vague), and so he suggests that Abby marry him, knowing that it will provide a short-term safe haven and, when the farmer eventually dies, long-term stability.

Thus, Malick establishes a love triangle in which Abby is torn between the two men, each of whom represents a different element of masculine attractiveness. Whereas Bill is free and wild and not entirely in control of his emotions, the farmer is wealthy and accomplished, but also shy and somewhat sickly. His love for Abby is a kind of puppy love, and the manner in which she and Bill exploit it is unnerving, although strangely understandable. The story is narrated by Linda, whose drawling child voice reminds one immediately of Sissy Spacek's similar narration in Badlands. The narration, which is often a weakness in Malick's films, playing like an unneeded philosophical crutch, works here because it aligns our perspective of the film's story with Linda's. We get the sense of fading memories and dark corners that were never fully understood, which helps explain why the film is told in a fragmented form, consisting primarily of images, rather than words. While exact words are always hard to remember, exact images are not.

The majority of this tragedy is played out against a backdrop of serene beauty--a seemingly endless rolling landscape beneath a dramatic sky (although the film is supposed to be taking place somewhere near Amarillo, it was actually shot in Alberta, Canada). Credit for the film's lush visuals goes to cinematographer Nestor Almendros, who had worked with many of the most famed French New Wave directors (including François Truffaut and Eric Rohmer), as well as Barbet Schroeder and American independent Monte Hellman. Almendros had an amazing sense of the tactile properties of light, and each shot in Days of Heaven carries with it a deep emotional charge. (The great cinematographer Haskell Wexler also shot a significant portion of the film, although he gets only a billing for “additional photography” and the Oscar went to Almendros alone.)

All the beauty of the landscapes, which Malick often uses as “pillow shots” between scenes in the same manner as Yasujiro Ozu, has a cumulative power that emphasizes the ultimately miniscule nature of humankind in the natural world, a theme Malick has returned to again and again. If the romantic triangle in Days of Heaven seems somewhat slight, I think that's the point. Malick is contrasting human triviality with the grandeur of the world, which has a Biblical intensity that reaches a fever pitch in the climax when a swarm of locusts descends on the farm like a plague. The resulting fire that burns the land is like a wrathful cleansing, and it should come as no surprise that the climax of the love triangle occurs on a scorched, smoldering field, thus bringing full circle Malick's poetic vision of human frailty.

Copyright ©2007 James Kendrick

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