RETURN TO FILM NOTES | RETURN TO FILM SCHEDULE
DAYS OF HEAVEN
1978
DIRECTED BY TERRENCE MALICK
6:00 PM WARNER GRAND THEATER
(95 minutes.) Writer, Director:
Terrence Malick. Cinematographer: Nestor Almendros, with additional
photography by Haskell Wexler. Editor: Billy Weber. Music: Ennio
Morricone, with excerpts from “The Aquarium” by Camille Saint-Saens,
and instrumentals by Doug Kershaw and Leo Kottke. Starring: Linda Manz,
Sam Shepard, Richard Gere, Brooke Adams, Robert Wilke.
Terrence Malick is a rare breed of filmmaker in any country, but especially in America: He is a poet.
Days of Heaven, his second (and for a 20 year silence which ended with The Thin Red Line
in 1998, his last) film, is a sweet-spirited ballad about the fleeting
nature of happiness -- set in a time of wonders when the 20th century
was new. The place is a farm in the north panhandle of Malick’s native
Texas -- though the film was shot in the golden wheat fields of
Alberta, Canada, to achieve a particularly ripe vision of Eden. Bill
and Abby (Richard Gere and Brooke Adams) are two unmarried lovers who
flee Chicago, with Bill’s grubby, angelic kid sister Linda (Linda Manz)
in tow. She narrates, with the streetwise serenity of one who knows and
loves the secret symmetries in things.
Bill has a hot temper, and may or may not have killed his last boss,
but he, Abby and Linda safely escape into the hordes of anonymous
migrants, sacking wheat on the prosperous spread owned by a farmer who
is never named -- he is simply The Farmer (Sam Shepard). When Bill
overhears that The Farmer is mortally ill, he pushes Abby to seduce,
and marry him. The man has no family, save for his highly suspicious
foreman (the perfect Robert Wilke). The ruse works well. Over his
foreman’s objections, The Farmer chooses to believe Abby’s claim that
she is, like little Linda, Bill’s sister, not his lover. For as long as
that lie holds, everyone knows happiness -- for a time. Then, with a
fatal inevitability that feels like the natural order of the universe
amid so many gleaming, rhythmic images of nature, catastrophe erupts.
One friend who hated Days of Heaven when it first came
out, and was trying to get my goat (for I was a devoted loyalist from
frame one), sneered that she rooted for the locusts who come swarming
through. For me, the locusts are the point: I suspect Malick roots for
them too, much the way God roots for them in the Bible; for this is a
movie about the hidden balances of all creation. Human beings and the
plagues which afflict them revolve in a peculiar, ecstatic harmony,
here. The lovers betray their hearts with a humanly understandable
directness, in the name of helping one another survive. The dying rich
man shuts his eyes to their hoax for as long as he can, seizing at love
(even crooked love) as his last chance at life -- with the tragic irony
that this love arrests his tuberculosis and brings him back with such
force that, as push comes to shove, he can't shut his eyes to the
deceit any longer.
Malick and cinematographer Nestor Alamendros, with a later assist from Haskell Wexler, filmed Days of Heaven
almost entirely at magic hour. Together they mint images that make
divinity visible, despite the wealth of destruction which overtakes
these lovers of life.