Days of Heaven

 
   It doesn't take long to watch all of Terrence Malick's films, and the finite quality of his career helps to make him more of a fascination to me.  How can a filmmaker of this ability only direct five movies in 40 years?  While I don't pretend to know the answer to that question, I can say that I am infinitely intrigued by Malick's enigmatic persona.  Days of Heaven is his second film, which was released in 1978 - five years after Badlands and twenty years before his third film A Thin Red Line.  Quality, not quantity.
   Days of Heaven stars Richard Gere as a young Chicago steel worker named Bill who accidentally kills a man and is forced to vacate the city and head West in search of new beginnings.  He hops a train filled with other cast-offs and ends up on a wheat farm in the Texas panhandle, somewhere near Amarillo.  The film's narrative starts around 1914 or so and follows the characters for about two or three years.  I wasn't exactly sure what the relationship was between Abby, who is Bill's girlfriend, and Linda, who may be their daughter.  Either I missed the whole connection there or Malick never really made it clear.  Regardless, they seem like a family of three, but pretend to all be siblings as they gain employment in their new surroundings.  The owner of the farm, known only as The Farmer, is a single, young man who, while obviously quite wealthy, is lonely and in need of companionship (played by a young Sam Shepard, who looks remarkably like Denis Leary).  Early on in the film, he finds out from a doctor that he is gravely ill and has at most a year to live.  Among the dozens of seasonal harvest workers, he notices the beautiful Abby and decides to try to get to know her.  The Farmer's foreman, who also goes nameless, is an old, wise man who always seems to read situations perfectly.  After a particularly fruitful harvest, the foreman tells his boss that he should get out of the business while he is ahead.  This is the first piece of sage advice that is offered.
   As the season's work is over, while most of the laborers head elsewhere to seek other employment, The Farmer asks Abby and her "siblings" to stay and work through the winter.  He promises that the work will be easier now that the harvest is complete.  She talks it over with Bill and they agree to stay on.  Eventually, The Farmer confesses to Abby that he is in love with her and wishes to marry her.  Bill and Abby both agree that this may be the best opportunity to get rich, since they are both aware of The Farmer's illness.  They marry and years pass with the four of them living under the same roof.  Again, the foreman offers a warning to his boss that he thinks Bill and Abby are con artists out to inherit his wealth after he dies.  The Farmer is hurt by this and asks the foreman to leave.  On his way out, the foreman tells Bill that he knows what he and Abby are up to.  Bill doesn't deny it.
   Days of Heaven is delicately narrated by the young girl, Linda, in typical Malickian soft-spoken style.  She is wise beyond her years and seems to know far more than the adults that surround her. "I think the devil was on that farm," she reflects.  And she is absolutely correct.  After the soothsaying foreman leaves the farm, everything spirals out of control as jealousy and anger prevail. Days of heaven quickly turn into days of hell.
  Malick gives us everything that we've seen in his other films: whispered narration, static shots of nature; close-ups of birds, bugs, plants; wind whipping through vast, beautiful landscapes.  He also has a knack for truncating scenes mid-conversation, which really gives me the feeling that the camera is merely a brief visitor in a world that is much greater than the film can capture. We are fleeting observers caught in a world that goes by quickly.  Malick moves the plot along at a much quicker pace than in his other films.  Days of Heaven, which is only 95 minutes long, doesn't require any patience at all like his more recent movies do.  If anything, I got the sense that I wanted more from each scene - I wanted to hear the end of the conversation that he left so suddenly.  But as I write this, I realize that Malick wants to give us enough information to drive the narrative but not overload us with extraneous dialogue.  It is economical and efficient.  That seemed to be the way that migrating workers lived their lives back then, working at a place for a few months, then moving on to something new.
  The style and tone of Days of Heaven are a lot like Badlands, which I wrote about a few months back.  It is a far more accessible film than, say The Thin Red Line, but its ambition and vastness are no less prevalent.
  I've read that Malick is going to grace us with an immediate follow-up to last year's unfathomably impressive spectacle The Tree of Life, which is extremely exciting.

*Days of Heaven is currently streaming on Netflix