Another of the movies that I had the chance to record thanks to one of the DirecTV free preview weekends was Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven. It's going to be on again tomorrow (April 17) at 1:15 PM on The Movie Channel, or three hours later if you only have the west coast feed. It's got several more airings over the next few weeks as well.
The movie begins in 1916 in Chicago. Bill (Richard Gere) works in a factory there, and he gets into some sort of argument with his foreman. We don't quite hear what the argument is about, since it's a loud steel mill, but it's plain to see that this is an argument, even before we see the result of that argument. Bill hits his foreman on the head, and the foreman falls to the factory floor, fatally injured. Bill, knowing that the police are going to be after him, finds his girlfriend Abby (Brooke Adams) and his sister Linda (Linda Manz), who also serves as the narrator of the film, and gets on a freight train out of town, hobo-style.
The three wind up in the Texas panhandle, where Bill and Abby pass themselves off as brother and sister. They, along with Linda, find work at a farm growing wheat, one that's owned by a relatively young farmer (Sam Shepard) and run by an unnamed foreman (Robert J. Wilke). Bill and Abby are supposed to be brother and sister, but they really don't make much effort to hide the fact that they're in love with each other, although at least Bill has the good sense not to get Abby pregnant. However, some other farm workers do wonder whether Bill and Abby are really siblings.
The farm work goes moderately well, although the foreman thinks Bill could do better. Bill, for his part, shows up just outside the farmhouse one day when there's a doctor's truck outside the house. Bill eavesdrops and overhears snippets of the conversation that suggest that perhaps the farmer might be terminally ill, even though he never really looks it over the course of the movie. But this gives Bill an idea.
Bill thinks that perhaps Abby should marry the farmer. After all, the farmer has already seen her and obviously thinks she's nice looking. The farmer need not know that Abby is taken in the moral sense but not the legal sense, so if the farmer and Abby do marry there could be no hint of bigamy. But the big point is that, since the farmer is presumably going to die fairly soon, if Abby marries him she won't have to be married very long before she becomes a widow and inherits the farm, leaving her free to marry Bill and live happily ever after with a modicum of wealth, or at least until the Dust Bowl hits in another 15 to 20 years.
Needless to say, this scheme isn't going to work, as the foreman has his own suspicions. And eventually the farmer also cottons on, leading to the climax and denouement of the film.
As I was watching Days of Heaven, I couldn't help but think of Malick's earlier film Badlands, which also has a pair of lovers on the run. But where Badlands is fairly direct in its storytelling, Days of Heaven is rather more indirect, relying on Linda's narration as well as things seen and heard in fragments and snippets. It's a form of storytelling that's deliberately different, and it may not work for everybody.
Days of Heaven is also incredibly slow-paced, with Malick deciding to focus on a lot of shots of the agricultural process, such as amber waves of grain waving in the wind, or the smaller animals that one would see in the undergrowth. The movie only runs 94 minutes, but for some people it will probably feel like it runs a lot longer. The cinematography, however, won an Academy award, which it probably deserved. For all the narrative flaws one might find in the movie, it's a stunningly beautiful film to look at.
But is sheer physical beauty enough? In the silent screen days, absolutely. In more recent years? Maybe not for some people.
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