Writing about a Terence Malick movie is like trying to describe a sunset. It’s kinda futile. Many better writers have done it before, and their efforts were probably ultimately futile too. You just have to see it for yourself to get the full effect.
Days Of Heaven stars Richard Gere (so much better here than in his later movies) as a turn-of-the-century vagrant and laborer who travels from state to state with his girlfriend (Brooke Adams) and his young sister (Linda Manz, who narrates). When Gere accidentally kills a foreman in a fistfight, he takes the other two and they flee Chicago for Texas. For discretion’s sake, Gere claims that both girls are his sisters. They quickly find work on a farm owned by a wealthy but dying man (the great Sam Shepard, the spitting image of Denis Leary in this movie), and when Shepard falls in love with Adams, trouble follows.
The photography by Nestor Almendros (with additional camerawork by Haskell Wexler) justly received an Academy Award: the sweeping shots of the trainyards and the fields of grain, the striking faces of the leads, the ripple of crops swaying in the breeze, the horrific and somewhat symbolic locust attack that leads to fire and desperation: All of these are images that will not leave you once you’ve witnessed them.
As always, Malick is a director who will stop to look at the local flora and fauna as his camera encounters them; however what struck me about Days Of Heaven is how efficient it is — it covers a lengthy span of time story-wise, but its many scenes are surprisingly and perfectly brief. There’s no extraneous business here; Malick’s writing is economical and it feeds the profound effect of his directorial work.
Typically wonderful score by Ennio Morricone too. It’s so natural to expect excellence from that most brilliant of composers, and he’s so prolific (particularly during this era, the 1970s) that it’s easy to take his work for granted, but I don’t. He’s great.
Watch Days Of Heaven sometime. For an hour-and-a-half of your valuable time, you will be rewarded by a true piece of artwork that entertains and enriches in equal doses.
