Days of Heaven in the second film Terrence Malick made. It follows the same ideas as his brilliant first film Badlands but with a different story and a looser narrative. Whereas Badlands seems hard and objective from start to finish, matter-of-factly showing two people destroy, murder and drift around a beautiful western landscape as if in their own private storybook, Days of Heaven almost entirely dispenses with story, and it's almost as if the film is directed by wind forever, which sounds like crap unless you've actually seen the film. There are multiple beautifully photographed shots of vast fields, wheat blowing in the wind, a weathervane blowing. The way it's shot too is less static and more free flowing and scattered. I can't really describe it adequately but the genius of this film is in the way it feels like it's happening forever, beyond time and space. It's set mostly in this vast field somewhere in America with a big house in the middle of it. Having left Chicago, an itinerant trio consisting of a guy (Richard Gere), his girlfriend (Brooke Adams) who pretends to be his sister which raises eyebrows, and his young sister (Linda Manz, narrator) come off a train packed with people who all gather in this field to work for the rich guy (Sam Shephard) picking berries or something. Everyone seems to drift in and out of the film like in a dream, and the narration (the young sister) tells how they just drifted around looking for nothing in particular and having adventures and entertaining themselves. What people do basically, but like Spacek's cold narration in Badlands Manz' narration here is really flat, matter-of-fact and unpretentious so everything seems undefinable, cosmic and endless and yet confined to a child's perspective. Malick's films are great for this kind contradiction, the small existing in the absolute and vice versa, and his artistry and eye makes it work, as does Ennio Morricone's great score.
What story it has is simple. The wealthy young landowner has only a year to live and the couple overhear this. He takes a fancy to her, and hoping to get a stake in his fortune, the couple encourage his advances, until he takes them all into his home and they don't have to work any more. He suspects the "brother and sister" of foul play at some point, but intervention in the form of biplanes puts it off. It's like there is some tragedy in the film, but it's downplayed and takes a back seat for things to just happen which is more interesting. Instead everything in the film is like intervention usurping the hopes and dreams of the characters. The wealthy man is beset upon by the workers who helped make him, who hover around him like vultures awaiting his death. His wealth is not in his hands. All of a sudden a swarm of locusts eat all his crops. All the crops end up burning. He dies and the trio go on the run and drift again, before Richard Gere is killed. Linda is sent to a school so she can build a better future for herself yet ends up running way down the tracks with a friend anyway. Nothing in the film lasts and yet it has no time, and things just happen.
It's a great film with great, natural performances, and I love it. It doesn't have the same haunting, uncanny quality as Badlands but it's still great and pretty amazing that someone managed to make a film with just people, land and wind.
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