Movie: Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick, 1978)
Never has farm equipment been depicted so lovingly. Malick lingers on key mechanical parts and drops Ennio Morricone's score just to listen to the sound of wheat harvesting machines doing their work. They create perfectly cultivated wheat fields, stretching as far as the eye can see. In gorgeuos shots we see trains crossing these landscapes; they transport wanderers from all over the US looking for work, housing and a sense of community. They find it during harvest season in the Texas Panhandle where they bale, frolick, dance, pray and eat and drink in unison, before moving on to some other corner of the country. All of it looks so perfectly beautiful that you can easily imagine seeing your time here as the days of heaven. But when perfection is in one's grasps, the yearning to obtain it intensifies. Some need money, some need love, but all will go far to get it.
Bill (Richard Gere) and Abby (Brooke Adams) need money. They have spent all their lives going places and would like now to settle down somewhere and to own and be something. The (unnamed) farmer (Sam Shepard) who owns the wheat fields is rich, but also terminally ill and seemingly not someone for whom social interactions come naturally. When he falls for Abby, believing that she is Bill's sister, the 'siblings' decide to continue their ruse, hoping they will inherit the farm once its owner dies. As he keeps not dying, and is also kind and handsome, that leads to a sitation that is ripe for tragically hopeless romanticism, but for a long while it's left entirely up to Malick's directorial flourishes to conjure that.
The actors, in particular Adams - I don't remember seeing her before, but she is spectacular - approach the situation with blunt realism. Their close-ups are fascinating, communicating both their emotional turmoil, but also their acceptance that having made up their bed, they gotta lie in it. I like too that among his many conflicted feelings, Gere at times also projects a sense of contenment that feels only to some extent self-deceptive, accepting that the arrangement he made has its flaws, but also has actually led to him living an easy life in luxury. At the same time, the farmer may not be the most worldly figure, but he is not entirely naive either. Shepard makes clear that he is making an active choice to believe that there is nothing shady going on between Gere and Adams. The question is not when he will 'find out', but when he will stop accepting it. This clear-eyed approach is only further emphasised by the performance of Linda Manz, who plays Bill's (actual) younger sister and also narrates the film with a directness that doesn't allow any delusions. As a result this becomes a story about four essentially decent, rational-minded, highly specific people who have to find ways to constantly (re)negotiate their thoughts about an absurdly impossible reality of their own making.
It's cool to see that Malick's big bravura sequence here was obviously the main inspiration for the stunning hellfire in Killers of The Flower Moon. It's not surprising that Scorsese would have had Days of Heaven on his mind when making a movie about an arranged marriage in which a party awaits the promised death of their partner, while accidentally (maybe) falling in love with them. The film becomes even more interesting and perverted though when you consider who is in the position of Gere, Adams and Shepard, and how its hellish imagery and atmosphere (its other main reference point is Rosemary's Baby) contrasts Days of Heaven.
A film that fares less in my mind after seeing Days of Heaven is Malick's own The Tree of Life. I liked that at the time, with some major reservations. The idea that our surroindings shape our feelings and actions is interesting and wonderfully depicted in Days of Heaven. The Tree of Life goes many steps further into some sort of unappealing mystic ecospiritualism that argues that nature, history and the built environment have an inescapable soul that defines our identities. As a result Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain are essentially playing Fatherhood and Motherhood, rather than actual individual people. I should perhaps revisit it. If you can make Days of Heaven, you deserve the benefit of the doubt for the rest of your life.
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