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Days of Heaven
Killer.
1978
Review: May 4, 2006
Director: Terrence Malick
Starring: Richard Gere, Brooke Adams, Sam Shepard, Linda Ganz
Might help, but not at all necessary.
THE SETUP:
A man persuades his wife to marry a wealthy but terminally-ill man so they can get his money after he dies.
DISCUSSION:
The first Terrence Malick movie I ever saw was The Thin Red Line, which I liked, but don’t feel I truly got. But one’s first experience of a Terrence Malick movie is often quite disorienting. Then I saw this movie about a year ago, and was completely enchanted, making The New World one of the few “prestige” movies I was really looking forward to last year. When I saw they were showing this one at Film Forum here in New York, I knew I had to see it again and was dying to take my boyfriend to it [he liked it].
The movie is set in the 1910s. Richard Gere, young and devastatingly handsome, is working in a foundry when he gets in an fight with his supervisor. This shows his proud, rather dumb, and impulsive character. He is romantically involved with Brooke Adams, and has a little sister, played by Linda Ganz, who narrates the movie.
If you’ve seen a Terrence Malick movie, you know that they are incredibly slow, poetic, and dreamy. The first time I saw this one I really had to keep reminding myself that it was only 90 minutes, as, much as I was loving it, it seemed like three hours. In this case the narration by Ganz is both hilarious and touching, as she comes off as a proud but ignorant waif of the 1910s. This very successfully sets the tone for the entire movie, as her simple nature and air of utter hopeless passvity toward life underlies all the events of the movie.
The trio hop a train from Chicago to the Texas panhandle, where they get work [for $3 a day] harvesting wheat for Sam Shepard’s farm. Malick and his cinematographer Nestor Almendros wanted to emulate the look of Vermeer paintings, which they accomplish by shooting mostly at sundown. The visuals also reminded me a great deal of Bruegel, in that you’re seeing a lot of figures spread across a rolling wheat plain in gorgeous sunlight and at dusk. Also throughout is Malick’s signature inclusion of a lot of nature footage. On the whole, I didn’t remember this movie being quite so beautiful.
So Brooke Adams soon catches wealthy farm owner Sam Shepard’s eye, and with good reason: she is utterly enchanting in this movie. This one movie will make you a Brooke Adams fan forever. She is beautiful, but her resigned expression of melancholy, which flashes out at regular intervals, really makes you fall in love with her. Gere has overheard that Shepard is terminally ill and has a year to live, so he encourages her to accept his advances [and an easy, year-round job for all of them] and later to marry him, as this means that they will inherit his money after his death. Gere and Adams claim to be brother and sister, and attempt to keep the real nature of their relationship unknown.
This story is a reworking of Henry James’ The Wings of the Dove, in which a woman convinces her lover to marry a rich but ill woman so that they will have the money to marry after she dies. This leads to him developing genuine feelings for the ill woman and beginning to regard his lover with disgust for her amorality in suggesting the idea. There is a pretty good adaptation of that novel starring Helena Bonham Carter, with an excellent screenplay adaption by Hossein Amini.
Things unfold in their beautiful, dreamlike way, gently following the arc of the James novel. I’m going to talk about the ending now, so if you haven’t seen it you owe it to yourself to stop, and you also owe it to yourelf to check out this truly magical movie.
SPOILERS > > >
Toward the end there is an amazing invasion of locusts to the farm. The slow build-up to it is handled incredibly well, with all of them noticing a lot more of the insects suddenly hopping around, little fluttering wings glistening in the sun. Then follows some of our religious content: it’s called Days of Heaven, we have a plague of locusts, and their blissful period comes crashing down in the hellish landscape of a massive fire in the wheat fields. This if one of those very plain, basic special effects that makes you say “How did they do that?” I guess they really just caught the whole field on fire. There are also some amazing shots that show a huge swarm of insects rising from the fields, which I still have no idea how they accomplished. Incidentally, the entire thing was shot in Alberta, Canada, which I can only assume is because America doesn’t really have any of its unspoiled plains left.
The ending is tragic and beautiful, and I won’t spoil it for you. The attitude of resignation continues past the ending. This is a truly special movie and I definitely urge you to check it out.
SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?
Yes.
