Beauty, Chance, Life, and Death on Earth in Days of Heaven

 

In 1978 Terrence Malick released his second film, Days of Heaven, in the humble opinion of this writer, the most beautiful film of all time and surely one of the greatest. Malick is known more than anything for his obsession with beautiful images, often leading his camera to meander from the scripted action to instead follow a butterfly that suddenly darts in front of his shot. But there is no superfluous pointlessness in Days of Heaven. Every image has a purpose, every word has weight, and it all accumulates, shot after shot, image after image, sound after sound, into a masterpiece on the mystery of mankind, simultaneously God’s most promising creature and his greatest disappointment.

Days of Heaven is a midpoint in Malick’s career between a more narrative film Badlands, and his progression towards more experimental work like The Tree of Life. In Days of Heaven there is doubtlessly a distinguishable plot: a young violent man, Bill, played by a gorgeous Richard Gere, accidentally kills his boss working in a Chicago factory. To escape from the law he flees with his girlfriend Abby and little sister, Linda, train hopping across American and finally ending up working on a farm in Texas where a kind but lonely nameless farmer, played with poetic, stoic silence by writer Sam Shepard, takes a liking to Abby. Knowing the farmer is dying of an unmentioned disease, Abby agrees to marry him, seeing in him an opportunity to get herself and her ‘family’ out of their vagabond lifestyle. Unfortunately for all, nothing goes as planned.

While one can follow the narrative action, Malick is less concerned in filming concrete scenes, and more interested in shooting and juxtapositioning images that move the plot forward, and more importantly, capture unexplained ideas and feelings, fleeting before our eyes for brief seconds but speaking volumes. The film itself is almost silent. The dialogue is sparse. For example, the killing that takes place in the beginning of the film is told visually, with the sound of the factory blurring out any intelligible words in the argument between Gere and his boss. The rest of the film plays out as a silent film as well. We intuitively understand the story through the editing of the farmer’s sad face in close up, Bill and Abby’s longing, secretive looks, Linda’s quizzical curious stare, impressive, sweeping long shots of the numerous extras playing the workers in the wide open fields, and invigorating and impactful images of the beautiful natural setting and the objects and beings that inhabit it. It is not the script that tells the story, but the camera.

As will be even further exaggerated in Malick’s later films, he is just as interested if not more so in the artificial and natural world that surrounds his protagonists. The human actors are not the only stars of the film, but must fight for screen time against the sunsets and sunrises, the fog, fire, and plagues, the animal creatures like dogs, horses, birds, insects, rabbits, and skunks, the imposing gothic farmhouse and gazebo, jetting out of the landscape as if their human architects were challenging the creator’s impossibly expansive, neverending flat landscape, and, of course, the railway whose pollutive yet enchantingly beautiful smoke puffs cloud up the sky and whose tracks cut through the previously untouched earth below it. Through the lens of brilliant Spanish cinematographer Nestor Almendros’ camera, Heaven really does come to life before our eyes. The impressive man made structures like the railway, factory, train, and that amazing house, and the open skies, the fiery colored clouds and air, and the wheat blowing beautifully like a sea of fuzzy golden waves in the invisible wind all come together to create an impossibly stunning Heaven on Earth.

While The Tree of Life may have depicted the literal birth of the universe, it is in Days of Heaven where the unknowing mystery of the universe is first present. Though the film is a period piece, one sees the essential, unforgiving reality of the kill or be killed nature of the world that has existed since the beginning of time, paired with mankind's inability or refusal to accept itself as part of that nature, not above it. However, nature has a way of reminding us that we are powerless against its forces. This idea is best represented by an enormous wooden gateway that serves as the imposing entrance to the farm. This towering structure shows man's foolish attempt to claim ownership over land. The gateway is as grandiose as it is flimsy. It essentially has no purpose other than to be a marking point of where the farmer’s property begins. There is no fence along the gate, and no doors to close it. The land on each side of it is exactly the same, the only difference from being outside it or inside it is entirely an invented human construct that society has accepted to be true. The farmer’s land is nothing more than land. The animals, storms and plagues, obviously unaware of man’s naive and arrogant claim, completely ignore this invisible barrier. Not since Jean Renoir’s brilliant La Grande Illusion has our laughable acceptance of supposedly permanent borders been better dissected and depicted on screen.

Once inside the farm, it soon becomes clear that the animals running for their lives against the onslaught of tractors destroying their homes are not the only ones threatened by the advancing human technology. Our protagonists themselves can be compared to these furry and feathered creatures as they become victims of the advancing industrialization and classism of human society. With this said, the film is not only fight or flight and survival, but also about the joyful moments and our ability to enjoy and analyze that does put us above our animal brothers: our ability to dance, sing, admire nature, tell jokes, make love, laugh in a circus, and dream and aspire for a better life. In this romantically filmed depiction of the early 1900s Malick represents the joys and struggles throughout human history up to the present through simple images, light, and sound. The sun rises, a storm comes, two bodies embrace, fire consumes, the wind moves the grass, a cadaver falls dead and motionless, and as these images flash by, time moves on carelessly and unrelentlessly.

While there is a chain of events, and cause and effect chronology, there is some larger force at work here, which Malick represents in images of Biblical epicness. Though Malick’s Christian beliefs do not seem to correlate with an all knowing, all loving and benevolent God, there is a feeling that there is a higher being of some sort watching over this world. The events occur with a natural flow that seem to be anything but predetermined, but there comes a perfect storm of plague, fire, smoke, and death that coincides with the eruption of the knowledge of human treachery. Malick’s world is a harsh balance between good and evil, yet no judgement takes place on the part of the filmmaker. He sees human beings as imperfect in an imperfect world. He recognizes the inequalities of society. There are poor people who starve and work themselves to death, and there are rich people who are born with unfair privileges. But Malick does not blame the farmer for being rich, or Bill for being poor. Bill’s wrath at the world, and Abby’s self prostitution is a product of their oppression, and the farmer is no happier than they are for being rich. Despite his goodness and his money he is unable to truly win over Abby, someone who despite living in the same physical space as him, occupies another economic world. Deep down he is probably just as aware of the importance of money in their relationship as she is. His wealth makes them being together impossible no matter how young, good, and beautiful they both might be.The character of the farmer’s right hand man, a wonderfully cast stern, wrinkly old man with wisps of white hair and a hard, cold, blue eyed gaze is also given touches of sympathy as he does his best to protect the man he sees as a son.

The larger than life myth of the American West is used wonderfully by Malick to portray mankind's flawed and tortured soul. The film has characters with names and an Eden-like setting with a distinct place and time, but it all feels so much bigger than this. Bill, Abby, and Linda seem to be nothing more than three people Malick’s time travelling camera happened upon in its own investigation of the mysteries of humankind and unanswerable questions as to why things happen the way they do. Malick’s film may be a universal study on man’s struggle to live up to its promise on earth, but he uses a trend that is wholly American that has everything to do with movement, adventure, and the search for a better life. The train system and the American West is to Malick what the Mississippi River was for Mark Twain, and the Highway was for Jack Kerouac.

As the railway symbolizes man’s hope and desire to find its place, the characters themselves portray clear universal archetypes. Richard Gere’s is not so much Bill, as he is masculinity incarnate: short tempered, passionate, angry, cheated, and anxious to be somebody. Abby is a stand in for women through the ages. She is subject to tie her own fate and survival to other men, be it Bill, the farmer, or a possible soldier on a passing train who catches her eye. Linda is the most compelling character in the film. Actress Linda Manz narration is one of the strangest and most wonderful in film history. She seems to be the spirit of youth itself, an unmoving, tireless adventurer who takes life as it comes without batting an eye, without flinching. For all Bill and Abby’s plotting, she seems to be the one who really understands life, who resigns herself to her own reflections, profound and naive at the same time. While I have given all the credit to the editing and images in communicating the story and its larger themes, Manz improvised narration deserves at least just as much of the credit, if not more. 

To top off this mysteriously soul invading experience is the musical score by the one and only Ennio Morricone. The film opens up with Morricone’s version of Camille Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals, a beguilingly beautiful, yet fantastical piece of music which sets the tone for a film that seems to represent our world, but is too strange and perfect to be real. The music hints that the film is not just a period piece with a plot, but is almost an out of body experience. The film penetrates you because inside it seems to have discovered and found a way to visually reproduce the existential mysteries we have all felt at one time or another. Malick gives us no answers, but represents life and Earth in all its bizarre beauty.

Days of Heaven is like a film about the magic of being alive, an overwhelmingly, all encompassing film that washes over me and through me everytime I see it. I see the past, present, and future in this alluring piece of cinema. The world is a paradox. It is a cruel, unforgiving place to live and paradise at the same time.