Days of Heaven (1978)

Terrence Malick is less a storyteller than a visual poet. At times, the images in 'Days of Heaven (1978)' seem too beautiful to be believed – could Mother Nature even construct such moments of magnificence at her own accord? Cinematographers Néstor Almendros and Haskell Wexler (credited only as "additional photographer") consistently shot the film during the "magic hour" between darkness and sunrise/sunset, when the sun's radiance is missing from the sky, and so their colours have a muted presence, as though filtered through the stalks of wheat that saturate the landscape. Crucial alongside the film's photographers are composer Ennio Morricone – utilising a variation on the seventh movement ("Aquarium") in Camille Saint-Saëns's "Carnival of the Animals" suite – and a succession of sound editors, whose work brings a dreamy, ethereal edge to the vast fields of the Texas Panhandle. The film's final act, away from the wheat-fields, recalls Arthur Penn's 'Bonnie and Clyde (1967),' but otherwise Malick's style, contemplative and elegiac, is in a class of its own, more comparable perhaps to Kurosawa's 'Dersu Uzala (1975).'

Malick refuses to explore his characters' motivations. The viewer is deliberately kept at an arm's length, and Malick eschews cinema's traditional notions of narrative development. Instead, the story is told as a succession of fleeting moments, the sort that a young girl (the film's narrator, Linda Manz) might pick up through her day-to-day experiences and muted understanding of adult emotions. Note that the girl is always kept separate from the dramatic crux of the film – the love-triangle between Billy, Abby, and the Farmer – and her comprehension of events is tainted by her adolescent grasp on adult relationships and societal norms. I was reminded of Andrew Dominik's recent 'The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)' {another sumptuously-photographed picture}, which also refused to explore its title character, Jesse James, kept at a distance through the impartial objectivity of the historical narrator. In Malick's film, Linda's narration tells us one thing, and the viewer sees another. But one can never fully understand the complex emotions driving human behaviour, so perhaps the girl's perspective is as good as any other.

'Days of Heaven' derives its title from a passage in the Bible (Deuteronomy 11:21), and Malick's tale of jealousy and desire is suitably Biblical in nature. Essential to this allegory is an apocalyptic plague of locusts, which descend upon the wheat-fields like an army from the heavens. When the fields erupt into flame, quite literally from the broiling emotions of the film's conflicted characters, the viewer is confronted by the most intense manifestation of Hell-on- Earth since the burning village in Bondarchuk's 'War and Peace (1967).' But, interestingly, Malick here regresses on his own allegory: Judgement Day isn't the end, but rather it comes and goes. Life is driven by the inexorable march of Fate: The Farmer (Sam Shepard) is doomed to die within a year; Bill (Richard Gere) is doomed to repeat his mistakes twice over. In the film's final moments, Linda and her newfound friend embark purposelessly along the railway tracks, the tracks being a physical incarnation of Fate itself: their paths are laid down already, but we mortals can never know precisely where they lead until we g

Fmovies: My first exposure that I had to Terrence Malick was Badlands. While apparently every critic (and the overwhelming majority of IMDb reviewers) would say that this was a good choice to introduce me to one of the greatest filmmakers, I found the dialog awkward and strange. The actual film, while very effective of capturing the beauty of nature (a staple of Malick movies as I later found out) was not all that great. Still, it had a plot and characters with discernible motives, so I was able to somewhat reason away what I personally thought was a bizarre and pretentious style of making films. Probably the biggest reason I can give a pass to Badlands is that it gave Martin Sheen, one of my favorite actors, a boost into big Hollywood films. I was then told by a friend that I should give Malick another chance, and either Days of Heaven or Thin Red Line would be a good idea for my second film. Needless to say, after sitting through this, I probably will not be getting around to another Malick movie any time soon.

I should point out that there are several aspects of this movie that are excellent. As with Badlands, the cinematography, musical score, and setting are absolutely beautiful. If all of the dialog and scenes with actual people in the frame were removed, I might actually love this movie. What I'm trying to say is if Terrence Malick made a documentary for National Geographic, I would definitely watch it.

The dialog, much like Badlands, is absolutely awful. I don't find entire conversations conveyed through facial expressions, staring, and minimalistic bombastic sentences to be good storytelling. The narration is no better, and managed to annoy me more than anything else. This leads to a fundamental problem of the movie, the dialog and narration is so bad, that I am not able to really understand or relate to the characters. Why do they do what they do? What are there personalities? I don't know. This causes me to not care about them, or what happens to them.

Another problem is when a scene develops, occasionally the camera cuts to nature, or just moves on to another scene with the characters all together. This got so bad that my brother literally called a cutaway before it happened. As a scene was developing that implied sex was about to happen, my brother said, "Huh. I bet its gonna cut to rain or something right before anything physical actually happens." Guess what? Right when something physical was about to happen, it cut to rain falling on leaves. The cuts in this movie are predictably bad.

This movie being pretentious is just my opinion. I am of the belief that characters and character interactions are more important than setting or scenery, and it is obvious that Malick does not share this philosophy, and this means that I probably will never like a movie that he makes. Most will call this good film, and I simply cannot agree with that. This movie is barely 90 minutes but I would rather watch Gettysburg than watch this again. I wanted to like this movie, and that may be why my reaction is so strong. I do not want to try to take away the joy that some moviegoers get from watching this movie, and in the end can only hope that we can agree to disagree about Malick films.

Days of heaven is exactly what this is. The magic hour (when much of the film was shot), those moments before dawn and after dusk when everything is indirect, dreamlike, breathless, heartwaking. There's no real story, as such. Sure, there's a general plot line which should satisfy any casual viewer. This isn't, after all, a hard film to follow. It is simply that the environment is the main character as opposed to the human elements. Linda Manz's young character narrates the story sporadically, like a sleepy traveler beside the campfire telling you of half-forgotten memories, and wonderful, casual observations that will seem clearer in the morning light, but no longer worth mentioning. Her voice is halting and uncertain, belying a personality that is confident in all other respects. Other actors, good (Brooke Adams, Sam Shepard) and not-so-good (Richard Gere) blend in perfectly. Their performances are so understated that you forget they are actors playing characters. Even Richard Gere, who never learned subtlety and would never again employ it, is almost invisible here.

This is not a long film. For all its leisurely pace, ninety-six minutes is all it needs to tell its tale. Terrence Malick is out for sight and sound. There is nothing lost to unneeded expression, nothing not shared in the space in front of you. That leaves cinematographer Néstor Almendros with the freedom to photograph, to observe without opinion whatever seems to be happening most openly before him.

When I first finished watching "Days of Heaven" it felt like waking from a dream. I couldn't be sure how much time has passed. It seemed so long, but the silence was the same, and little had changed outside my window. Nothing but the heavy quiet was all around me, and I felt the desperate desire to move. Everything beneath my feet felt moving, quietly slipping past and all I had to do was put soles to earth and start walking. This is a film of photographs, images of the purest sort. Open your eyes.

Days of Heaven fmovies. Days of Heaven is, in fact, what its highest praisers want you to believe: awe-inspiring cinema, sometimes even mind-blowing in what can be filmed and brought forth in a beautiful, seamless mold of narrative and poetry, photographed with an eye for the prairie and fields like very few others and for the period detail. But it's also wonderful- and haunting- because it evokes what it is to look back on something and remember things vividly, clearly, with a subjectivity that is startling in its scarred interior. This is child-actor Linda Manz, her first role in what is a relatively small career, and she voices, in grungy but fine vocal, from afar at times even as she's one of the principle players.

She's the kid sister of Bill (Richard Gere, a very good if not extraordinary performance compared to others), a factory worker who kills a man by accident and runs off with his girlfriend Abby (Brooke Adams), and the three of them end up working for a farmer (Sam Shephard), and soon there's a love triangle formed wrapped around an elaborate con of Bill and Abby being brother and sister. These are just the facts, but director Terence Malick isn't after just those, but after a sad look back from a perspective of wonderment and horror and a kind of fractured innocence. It goes without saying that since it is a Malick picture one will expect the painterly landscapes of the fields, those intimate close-ups with bugs and waving fields of grass. But Malick is able to put a unique vision into the perspective of that of a little girl, who is seeing and experiencing everything as it is, not as it may be really imagined or wanting to be.

So there's a lot of interest already just in the nature of the farming on this panhandle in early 20th century. But there's just little things, little fantastic bits that stick in your mind, probably forever: the workers in the field toiling away; the black man tap-dancing by the barn; the airplane circus people coming by and showing silent films. Most notably, as well, are near biblical visions like the plague (and extinguishing by lots of fire) of locusts. And through all of the many, many beautiful shots, there's a tender and perfectly tragic love story played out with great work by Adams and a young Shepherd. Manz too, I might add, is excellent in a role that could have been mucked up by anyone else (also trumping a later future first-time performance in Malick's own The New World with the woman playing Pocahontas).

And as if the crisp eye of Malick and his DPs Nestor Almendros and Haskell Wexler weren't enough, there's Ennio Morricone on the soundtrack to boot. Here's a crucial part of Malick's success in translating the theme of remembrance and feeling both the moment and the mood of the whole period and characters in the film (sometimes combined): just listen to the theme of the movie, used later in movie trailers and commercials, as it reckons a nostalgic tinge for something that one can't firmly grasp but is felt deeply and without really fully knowing the whole scope. Overall, Days of Heaven is almost too good, too beautiful- it's the kind of picture that defines reputations, for better or worse. Like Malick's. A+

Oh, I better come out and say it: I love Terrence Malick. I think he's one of the few filmmakers who has completely and utterly captured filmic form. "The Thin Red Line" was, to me, an astonishing experience; beautiful, horrific and the best movie of the 90s. "Badlands" is the best lovers-on-the-lam movie I've ever seen (it certainly makes "True Romance" look like a gimmicky fraud of a movie). Malick somehow manages to make everything seem painfully beautiful: his landscape, his actors, his dialogue. There's something always elegiac about his movies.

There's a picture of James Dean I saw from his youth -- a baseball team photo -- and the caption said something about how it captured his face, and in it, wisdom and sadness far beyond his years. That's what Malick does in his films and particularly in this film.

He must have been a fan of James Dean (probably one of the reasons he chose to make "Badlands," as a sort of homage), but not in the sense that coolness comes from a perfectly combed coiffure, a red leather jacket (which it wasn't -- it was a windbreaker) and a dark brood. There's a similar story here to that of "Giant," set on a farm with that remarkable house, two men and one girl. Only "Giant" didn't have a philosophizing and very strange little girl. It was also an overblown soap opera and while this film is, I guess, a melodrama, it certainly isn't melodramatic.

If Malick is anyone in the film, he's Sam Shapard; watching his love through a lens. Malick uses Manz as a sort of channel. If this is indeed some fashion of his own story, Malick tells us through her, with he visualized by Shepard, which is a somewhat brilliant approach. Manz is strangely philosophical; at once blunt and abstract. The story is obviously centered around her -- I don't see why this wouldn't be obvious -- but she's pushed into the background, commenting on the characters and informing us like God from above.

As always with Malick, his film is mesmerizing and hypnotic. I was surprised that the film was only a little over an hour-and-a-half. The great Ennio Morricone created a wonderful score for this film that seems to forebode impending doom. Unlike his more famous spaghetti western scores, it's never overly-flamboyant. And the cinematography, listed as belonging to Nestor Almendros, but well-known to be at least substantially contributed to by Haskell Wexler, is so much like an oil painting that it's just about liquid film. I'd be willing to pay a lot of money to see this one on the big screen.

It might seem obvious to state that this film is a transition between "Badlands" and "The Thin Red Line," after all it was the middle film. But this film has moments, especially in the finale, that are surprisingly close to that of "Badlands" and this is the film where Malick fully mastered his approach of lush, visual poetry told at a languid pace that never seems boring, since you're fully within the film;s grasp.

Pauline Kael said in her review that "the film is an empty Christmas tree: you can hang all your dumb metaphors on it." And Charles Taylor, always following Kael's lead (even from beyond the grave), said of Malick's two 1970s films, "Next to the work of Altman, Scorsese, Coppola, De Palma and Mazursky from that period, they're pallid jokes."

What never fails to get me furious is when someone viciousl

Days of Heaven (1978) ****

"Nobody's perfect. There was never a perfect person around. You just have half-angel and half-devil in you."

This line delivered by Linda Manz in Terrence Malick's gorgeous masterpiece, 'Days of Heaven,' sums up everything you need to know about life on earth. Much of Malick's themes have been devoted to man versus nature, and the idea of perfection is not outside that realm - imperfection is the nature of mankind.

Richard Gere, in his greatest performance, plays Bill, a hot headed, lower class worker, who in a moment of mistake accidentally kills his boss in a Chicago factory. We see that the boss is hassling Bill, but we never know why, we just see faces but no distinguishable voices over the roar of the factory. Bill, his sister (Manz) and his girlfriend Abby, played by Brooke Adams, take off for the panhandle, hitching a ride on a train. Bill and Abby tell everyone that they are all brothers and sisters, because as you know, "people talk." They find work on a farm owned by the rich farmer, played by Sam Shepard. Many other films would make the farmer the bad guy, giving him trade mark heel characteristics, but Shepard's farmer, who we learn is dying, is soulful, and yearning for love. He see's Abby, and is interested, and eventually will ask her to stay - after Bill hears the doctor tell him he has about a year to live. They decide to stay, and after some persuasion from Bill, Abby will marry the dying farmer so that they can be heir to his fortune. Suspicions arise, and hearts and lives are broken, and the Days of Heaven will come to a halting end.

The cinematography is some of the most breathtaking ever captured on film. 'Days of Heaven' could even considered a masterpiece for its aesthetic beauty alone, if the story were not so terrific. Everything about the film is magnificent. Ennio Morricone's score is haunting and beautiful. You will remember it forever, along with Linda Manz' unforgettable narration, likely one of the greatest voice overs in film history. Many have criticized Malick's distancing techniques and muted emotions. We are always kept at arms length away. But these people don't realize that the story is a memory, a memory from the real main character - Linda. Also, in a method that Robert Bresson used, by distancing us emotionally, it leaves us to add our own emotions and imaginations in the story, heightening the power of the film, as long as you are willing not to be spoon-fed what to think.

Terrence Malick is a filmmaker who came out of nowhere with his talents already fulfilled, and he has not stopped since. His films are filled with such heartbreaking beauty and symbolism, and he is one of the few living filmmakers who truly are creating art, rather than just entertainment. He had one of the greatest debuts ever, in the mesmerizing and haunting 'Badlands,' the deepest and most philosophical 'The Thin Red Line,' which is likely the greatest contemporary war film (as suggested by the late Gene Siskel)and the stunningly beautiful 'The New World.' His films are deep and meaningful, and to get into the underlying symbolism and themes of them here would be pointless, and better saved for a long essay.

Days of Heaven is one of the greatest, and most beautiful films ever made. Cinema is at a low point recently, but as long as Terrence Malick is still making films, we still have some heavenly art to look forward to.

PS - Hopefully s