In the last 27 years, Terrence Malick has directed only three films. That’s like saying Hershey’s built its reputation by only making Mr. Goodbar, Krackle and Mounds.
Based on Badlands, Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line alone, the writer-producer-director has established himself as the poet of American cinema—each of those movies achieving the kind of perfection found in T.S. Eliot poems or, for some, the chocolate bliss of a Mr. Goodbar. Malick has never won an Oscar, never took home a Golden Globe, never even saw his films become box office giants (though The Thin Red Line came close). Still, in film circles, Malick is universally regarded as equal parts oddball and genius.
Here at Epinions, several of us feel the same way. Welcome to today’s Badlands Write-Off, sponsored by Wokelstein. Other Epinions scribes who have turned their pens on this movie are: ZentropaJK, Mangiotto, MisterOrange and Mike_Bracken. When you’re through here, please go read their musings on the film.
Even though I’d only seen two-thirds of his oeuvre, I considered Malick to be one of the greatest directors of all time. He belonged to that generation of film-school prodigies whose other members include Brian DePalma, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and the wunderkind Steven Spielberg. In the 1970s, those other directors created a new wave of cinema, a literate, gritty, technically-creative way of telling life’s stories. They made some pretty good films. While all the others also went on to make some pretty bad films (Raising Cain, Bringing Out the Dead, One From the Heart and 1941, respectively), Malick disappeared off the Hollywood radar after making Days of Heaven.
He moved to France and lived the life of a recluse, refusing to give interviews (his last was with Women’s Wear Daily in 1974). He became the J.D. Salinger of movies. Then, nearly 20 years later, he surfaced to make the best war film of 1998 (yes, I’m one of those who favors The Thin Red Line over Saving Private Ryan).
On the surface, Malick’s films (all three of them!) are turtle-paced, sparse to the point of skeletal and hyper-intellectual. They are also three of the best films from the last quarter-century. His movies are bathed in stillness and silence. There’s a hush, even in the most active scenes, which forces you to lean forward and pay attention, to linger on the details of life where Malick focuses his camera. How refreshing to watch these cinematic pearls in an era of big-budget Dolby explosions which do nothing but distract us from the fact that there’s a lack of storytelling in most of today’s “blockbusters.”
Mr. Malick, ladies and gentlemen, is a writer who just happens to be a filmmaker. Unlike most of the grist from the Hollywood mill, he’s a true storyteller who takes his time and allows the dialogue and images to seep into our senses. Those images really linger in your brain, too. It’s been many years since I last saw Days of Heaven, but I carry it around in my skull every day.
And now, it’s gonna be a while before I can shake Badlands from my brain. Released in 1973, it covers the same blood-soaked territory of Bonnie and Clyde before it and Natural Born Killers after it. Loosely based on the Charles Starkweather murder spree in the 1950s, Malick’s movie tells the story of Kit and Holly (Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek at the dawn of their careers), two vacant-eyed Americans in search of an idyllic paradise they’re never going to find.
As Badlands opens, the 25-year-old Kit is working as a garbage man, heaving the contents of the cans into the back of the truck and rifling through the tossed-out lives of the people along his route (shades of Morgan Freeman’s hit man in the current Nurse Betty who declares he’s “a garbage man of the human condition”). He views death with cold detachment. In fact, his first line comes when he finds a dead dog and he tells his partner, “I’ll give you a dollar if you eat this collie.” Certainly it’s one of the most startling openings in film history. Later, Kit finds a dead cow in a field and stands on top of it—symbolically putting his victor’s foot on the chest of death.
Returning home from work one day, he spies 15-year-old Holly playing by herself in her front yard. It appears to be love at first sight—though you’d never know it by the placid-faced performances of Sheen and Malick. Kit strikes up an intense conversation with the pale, straight-haired teenager and she falls under his sway, much to the consternation of her father (Warren Oates). A brutal-tempered sign painter who somehow lives in a gorgeous Victorian mansion, Holly’s father thinks Kit is no better than the trash he collects for a living. To dissuade his daughter from dating the guy from the wrong side of the tracks, he takes her favorite dog out into a field and shoots it; then he forces her to take clarinet lessons. Father knows best, I suppose.
Kit models himself after James Dean (a fact the movie needlessly calls attention to several times); he’s cool, callous and rarely without a cigarette dangling from his lower lip. He’s a rebel looking for a cause. When a lawman, trying to figure out why he killed all those strangers, asks him if he likes people, Kit shrugs and says, “They’re okay.” Like Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle, his quest is to rid the world of those who rub against his grain, starting with Holly’s father. Kit shoots the gruff old man while Holly watches, then walks over with eerie calmness to check for vital signs. Spacek plays Holly with such emotional detachment, it’s hard to tell which upsets her more—the fact that her father’s dead or that she’ll now have to move out of that lovely house.
After a poorly executed fake double-suicide, she and Kit take to the road, running from the law as Kit guns down anyone who gets in their way. They pause long enough for Kit to go into one of those booths to record a record. Like most serial killers, he has to brag about his deeds, literally leaving a record in which he says, “We’re sorry. Nobody’s coming out of this happy. Especially us.”
They hide in the forest, building a Swiss Family Robinson fantasy as they pretend they’re spies on the lam. Malick’s films have always emphasized the natural world, filling the screen with lots of wind-tossed wheat footage in Days of Heaven and jungle vegetation in The Thin Red Line (one cast member of that movie complained, “He's obsessed with grass.”). Badlands enters a sweet, elegiac phase when Kit and Holly enter the woods. She sits in a tree and reads Kon-Tiki aloud, he practices rifle drills, they slow dance while a portable phonograph plays “Love is Strange.” Here, Malick is telling, is where they (and the rest of us) would be rightfully happy—we all have our lost paradise we’re looking for.
Soon, the forest primeval dream comes to an end as bounty hunters find their campsite and Kit finishes them off in a blaze of firepower. We wonder why Holly, who never picks up a weapon, would want to stay with a feral animal like Kit. “He was the most trigger-happy man I’d ever met,” she confesses in the film’s lyrical narration, but then later she adds, “I thought it was better to spend a week with one who loved me for what I was than years of loneliness.”
Spacek’s intermittent voice-overs are some of the best moments of the movie, providing the much-needed emotional core. Sure, they’re poignant confessions from a teenage diary, but some of the lines that Malick pens for her to read are absolutely crystalline: “At this moment, I didn't feel shame or fear, but just kind of blah, like when you're sitting there and all the water's run out of the bathtub,” she says near the end when the killings have really started to pile up. Lines like that really make my writer’s nostrils flare.
Badlands starts to run out of steam near the end as Malick becomes “obsessed with grass.” Kit turns a little too introspective and Malick slows the already lazy-paced film to a crawl to accommodate the cold-blooded killer’s musings. Generally, I like the rhythm of Malick’s movies (some folks say Days of Heaven is dull, I say it’s hypnotic…potayto, potahto); here, at the climax of Badlands, there are perhaps one or two sunset-in-the-heartland shots too many. They’re gorgeously filmed (by Tak Fujimoto, Stevan Larner and Bryan Probyn), but they don’t add anything new to Kit’s quest.
But, really, this is just a quibble in an otherwise beautiful, intelligent film. Make no mistake about it, Badlands is goodfilm.
[Trivia alert: watch for Malick’s cameo in this movie. He’s the guy in the white suit who rings the rich man’s doorbell.]
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