It’s
far past time that I write something about what I’ve long considered to be the
most beautifully photographed movie ever, Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven. Thousands of other people, of
course, have already made this assessment. But when a film is so filled with rhapsodic images, that’s
how individuals respond; they rhapsodize, and they do so because the astonishing
principal cinematography by the late Néstor Almendros guarantees such a
response. When an audience is
quietly presented with one rapturous image after another, the viewer’s
perceptions are elevated (or sublimated) to a higher level, at which expressing
in words one’s appreciation for a newfound understanding of beauty becomes
almost too daunting a task.
There’s
a narrative here that I’ll go into later, though it’s best to start with the
importance of the images themselves.
Rarely does a director of Hollywood movies choose to let the images do
the vast majority of the work.
Silence is expensive unless it’s written into the film itself, as
Malick’s sparse screenplay exemplifies.
The long stretches of silent contemplation soothe as much as they
unsettle, in order to convey fully the feeling of being alone in the
world. The film follows a group of
nomadic migrant workers, whose solitude is palpable even when they’re together,
forming a kind of desperate, haphazard community.
The film's cinematographer, Néstor
Almendros, died of AIDS-related lymphoma in 1992. His eyesight was already beginning to
fail when Days of Heaven was being
filmed. He worked carefully and improvisationally,
insisting that the movie incorporate as much natural light as possible. (Apparently, some of the lighting crew
quit the film in frustration because he didn’t give them enough work.) This technique was inspired by early
motion pictures from the silent film era.
Rightly, Almendros won the Oscar for Best Cinematography for his work on
Days of Heaven, his first Hollywood
feature.
I
remember the first time I saw Days of
Heaven, on the big screen at the Harvard Film Archive about twenty years
ago, which was a mesmerizing and unforgettable experience. I also recall that I was alone in the
back of the theater, with only a group of several film students who were
sitting together in the middle row of the auditorium. They applauded when Néstor Almendros’ name appeared on
screen during the opening credits.
I took note of that then, and soon after, I understood why. Days
of Heaven is often referred to as a poetic film, and it’s because poetry
relies equally on the beauty and strangeness of its imagery to convey its
implicit messages.
The
movie was filmed on the wide plains of Alberta, Canada, but the landscape is a
stand-in for the open wilds of the American midwest just across the border. No film better captures that landscape
and its euphoric aura of boundless autumnal light at harvest time. Many of the scenes were filmed during
“magic hour,” although as Almendros made clear in retrospective interviews, it
was never an entire hour. Most
scenes at that time of day, after the sunset and before nightfall, were filmed
in about twenty minutes.
Days of Heaven
is endearingly narrated by a feisty young girl, Linda (Linda Manz), who’s
traveling west by train from Chicago with her older brother and guardian, Bill
(Richard Gere), and Bill’s girlfriend, Abby (Brooke Adams). Bill got into a fateful skirmish with a
foreman at his factory job and had to skip town fast. To avoid problems on the roads and rails as they seek
migrant farm work for a few dollars at a time, Bill and Abby masquerade as
brother and sister, too, which ends up causing them trouble with suspicious
strangers on more than one occasion.
Deep
in the American heartland, they find work as sackers on a sprawling, idyllic
wheat farm owned by a handsome young overseer who’s billed only as The Farmer
(Sam Shepard). Eavesdropping on a
house doctor’s visit, Bill learns that the farmer is slowly dying from a
terminal illness and may be dead within a year. He convinces Abby, somewhat against her will, to pursue a
relationship with the farmer, hoping that within a couple of years, they’ll
inherit the farm, house, and a sizable amount of money. The ruse works, and Abby becomes the
farmer’s wife, while Bill and Linda stay to live on the farm as members of
Abby’s family, or so the farmer initially thinks. Before very long, his suspicions grow and turn into anger at
the perceived deception and his failing health.
Clearly,
Malick’s quietly intelligent screenplay is built on an archetypal story, a love
triangle with a revenge subplot.
As often as Malick relies on seemingly formulaic narrative components,
each of these instances is handled so distinctively that they belong entirely
to this film. Romantic scenes of
the happily married couple riding a sleigh through the snow in winter on the
abandoned farm are so precisely picturesque that they become Malick’s own, as
do the frantic scenes of a plague of insects that invades the wheat crop and
destroys the land when the vengeful farmer sets the fields ablaze.
All
of this is handled with a fluidity, grace, and immediacy to which most other
filmmakers can only aspire. This
sort of classic tale requires classic storytelling, yet what gives Malick’s
film its lasting power is how thoroughly it creates its own impressionistic rules. As audience members we know where all
of this is going, but scene after scene still takes us by surprise in some
unexpected way. The emotion intensifies
as the pace slackens; then the emotion will suddenly relax as the pace speeds
up again. After the film’s main
trio must flee the burnt-out farm and make their way to a boat to escape, the
whole tone shifts in a way that’s perfectly sensible and also feels like we’re suddenly
in another movie, when in fact we’re just in the final act of this majestically
tragic adventure that’s both too beautiful for reality and totally true to
life.
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