Starring Richard Gere, Brooke Adams, Sam Shepard, Linda Manz, and Robert Wilke

So I’ve seen Days of Heaven twice now, and I love it, but I can’t quite figure out why.  Maybe it’s enough to say that “Days of Heaven” casts a spell, about a lost place that used to be right here, now gone forever.  We might be better off now that it’s gone, but it was where people lived and died, and because they did, this place has value and dignity.  Watching this movie is a celebration of vague loss mixed with unnamed regrets.  If “Days of Heaven” doesn’t teach us something, then it at least reminds us what it feels like to look back over something wiser, warmly, and a bit mournful.

Lately I’ve been hung up on the exact meaning of a movie, but that’s kind of silly.  Art isn’t always about something exact.  Sometimes it’s about juxtaposing images and ideas so that we see our world in a slightly different way, or at least we say “that’s purty.”  Part of what makes “Days of Heaven” so intriguing is that it continually sidesteps the obvious.  If it’s a defense of the working class, why is it so detached from its skid row protagonists?  If it’s a statement about the oligarchy’s oppression of the masses, why is the movie’s only oligarch a nice guy?  If the land is so beautiful, why is living on it so much work?

The movie is the hatchling of Terrence Malick, director of the forthcoming “The New World,” which is only his fourth or fifth turn in the director’s chair in the last 35 years (the lazy bastard!).  His last film was the deliberate and abstract “The Thin Red Line” from 1998, an unfortunate year to be released considering how it was overshadowed by Spielberg’s visceral Veteran’s Day speech, “Saving Private Ryan.”  A loser of seven Oscars, “Line” was not a popular favorite and divided critics at the time, although its esteem among the professionals has risen since then.  There’s a lot of juxtaposition in both films; “Line’s” nameless narrator waxes on “why the land contends with the sea” and “what’s this war at the heart of nature?”  Fitzgerald once said, and I paraphrase, that genius was the ability to keep two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still be able to function.

But you crave a summary, don’t you?  It’s Chicago 1916 and Bill (Richard Gere) is something of a waster.  He loses his temper, gets into a fight in the steel mill, and, before you can say “flight from the law,” he, his girlfriend Abby (Brooke Adams) and his sister Linda (Linda Manz) are on their way to the wheat fields of Texas.  Alongside migrant workers from all over the country, they are hired for the wheat harvest, and we follow them every step of the way.  You could practically learn how to run a farm just from watching this movie.  Like Abraham and Sarah in Genesis, Bill and Abby pretend to be brother and sister as they travel into a foreign land.

Abby catches the eye of the gentle and quiet man (Sam Shepard) who lives alone in the big house.  He falls in love with her.  Bill, who always seems to be looking for a quick score and is tired of wandering the country at the poverty level, encourages the romance.  (The second time through the movie I got the feeling that he might be more educated than we first believe.  Certainly if Abby could have been a dancer than there’s more to her story than actually appears in the 93 minute runtime.)  Things work well for a while, while Bill is her man at night and the farmer is hers during the day.  For a while…and just like God was vengeful against the powerful man who tried to take Abraham’s wife as his own, so too does the land exact Old Testament-style retribution.

All this is seen and told obliquely.  People hardly ever talk and, when they do, we can’t always hear them over machinery or over a great distance.  The words “Texas” and “1916” are never actually spoken.  “Days of Heaven” could just as accurately be summarized as being about a wheat field, a river, and an enormous sky, with some people occasionally popping up in it.  From the beginning the movie has the feel of something finished, set in stone, and now just being remembered.  We begin with a montage of sepia photographs.  The music (by Ennio Morricone) and obliqueness is dreamy, yet the “things”—settings, sunsets, crops—are all very concrete.  Attention is paid to how the migrant farmhands amuse themselves with games and dancing, yet always from a distance, and we’re never quite sure where they sleep at night (outside?).

Our narrator is the child Linda, who still speaks like a child and in a child’s voice, although she seems to be remembering the events years later.  She comments on her family without inflection or wonder.  Like a real child and not a movie child, it’s like she’s talking to us while doing something else that’s really holding her attention.  Large parts of “Days of Heaven” seem to be what she saw from a distance without proper understanding.  The emotions and motivations of the adult world are seen, not processed.  Again, the film feels finished and remembered.

Yet the episodes which are clearly from Linda’s point-of-view are juxtaposed with instances in which she is absent.  Is she creating these scenes in her mind by extrapolating, in retrospect, and what she thinks probably happened?  (“Now that I think about it, I bet they were fighting…”)  That doesn’t seem likely; her narration doesn’t sound mature enough.  Instead, it’s as if she’s telling the story to an adult, and we’re seeing the adult’s speculations on the scenes she missed.

The title of the movie is not quite ironic—in his cold and distant way, Malick loves his characters too much for irony—but wistful.  In its broadest sense, the “Days of Heaven” are any “good old days.”  We remember them fondly, imagining that “things then were better than things are now,” while even the slightest examination will reveal something unsavory about the past.  Malick does not condemn outright this oh-so-human trait of idealizing the past—indeed all his movies could be seen as long, fond remembrances of his childhood in East Texas farmland—but he examines it.  Malick is mournful as he deflates the “good old days,” not spiteful or self-righteous.

Everyone’s happy in the big house when Abby and the farmer are together, but only because the farmer doesn’t know about Abby and Bill.  The migrant workers should be happy on the plains of Texas, beneath the magnificently photographed skies and in those endless wheat fields.  But when we see them under a mechanically-induced barrage of wheat, or being fired for the slightest infraction, we realize the only advantage Texas has over Chicago is that in Texas you get exploited outdoors.  In the character of the farm supervisor (Robert Wilke), “Days of Heaven” makes it clear that the boss has the last say in everything and there is no recourse to his decrees.  Regardless of his location, Bill is always throwing something into some sort of fire, whether it’s in a steel mill or to power a wheat grinder.  Malick even frames the collection of wheat and the tossing of coals into a roaring fire identically.

The land itself is seen reverentially, even religiously, especially by the farmer, yet he reduces it to a commodity to be bought and sold as much as he has reduces the men and women slaving all day in the sun to merely mechanical labor.  Malick is not crying “hypocrite!” the way a less interesting filmmaker might, but is affectionately philosophizing over how the human condition cannot seem to include good traits without bad ones.  It would be so easy to show the farmer pulling Abby from the field, to screw her literally the way he’s screwed the migrants metaphorically, but no, he’s a nice man.

And, of course, America is on the verge of the Great War, which only pops up at the end of the film.  We briefly see soldiers hugging their sweethearts and climbing onto a train, as if the film is saying “and then you know the rest of the story.”  Whatever the days of heaven were, they’ve ended.  Whatever system or mechanism brought about so much happiness has proved faulty and come undone.  More than two decades later in “Russian Ark,” Alexander Sokurov similarly uses the Russian Revolution without actually mentioning or showing the Russian Revolution.  In both cases, we know the war is coming like a great storm, and we don’t need to be beaten over the head for everything we see to be colored.

But let’s put aside my garage sale Marxism for a moment and interpret “Days of Heaven” through a religious lens.  Is it commenting on the story of Abraham and Sarah in Egypt or is it just a loose retelling?  Or does Malick’s use of Genesis not have anything to do with Genesis at all, but is a way to put us in a religious state of mind when we view his huge canvases of land and sky?  If this is the case, then the land becomes a character unto itself and not a background.  The land is holy, patient, and takes abuse, not unlike the donkey in “Balthazar.”

Part of why “Days of Heaven” has never achieved mass popularity is because people like art to tell them they are the center of things.  But the people in “Days of Heaven” are distinctly not the center of things.  They must share the story with their land.  We like to think our destinies are shaped by our personalities and choices, but “Days of Heaven” shows characters shaped by a huge, overpowering environment.  The romance between Abby and the farmer is shaped by her needs and those of her makeshift family.  The characters are insignificant when compared to the land and just an indifferent memory to Linda the narrator.  Perhaps the allusion to Abraham and Sarah is to help cast Bill and Abby in the eyes of the Old Testament’s God:  distant, removed, not exactly uncaring but not enormously interested, as if in the days before Christ man had no way of relating to the cosmos and the God who used it as his face.

A simpler explanation as to why I love “Days of Heaven” might be because it’s so absurdly beautiful.  The photography by Nestor Almendros and Haskell Wexler is breathtaking, all rich orange, pink, and blue skies.  They famously shot the movie almost entirely at “magic hour,” when the sun is about to go down or come up, and the sky is its most alive.  The burning fields, cut again and again by shadowy figures, are unforgettable.  There’s nary a shot indoors and Malick gets some neat handheld stuff, first person shots, and some great pastoral footage in a river.  In addition to winning Best Director at Cannes, “Days of Heaven” won the Oscar for cinematography the same year that all the big prizes went to “The Deer Hunter.”

The acting for the most part is naturalistic and quiet.  Shepard gives a touchingly sincere performance as the straight-as-an-arrow farmer, a gentle ruler who has never questioned his right to rule.  Linda Manz’s dirty, angular face will stick with you.  Only Richard Gere seems a little out-of-place; Pauline Kael complains of him giving a bad James Dean impersonation.  Maybe Bill is the man of the future one era too early.  It’s not just that he returns to the farm by motorcycle and can’t ride a horse, he’s also more cunning than the farmer and able to see more sides of things.

Okay I’m done.  Because I don’t seem to be leading anywhere, any concluding paragraph which just seem artificial and tacked-on.

Finished Thursday, September 8th, 2005