DVD Review: Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven on the Criterion Collection

To hell with equivocation: Days of Heaven is the greatest film ever made. And let the word “film” be emphasized, since Terrence Malick’s sophomore feature earns this exalted designation from its position as a work of pure cinema, a concoction of sound and image so formally sumptuous and yet effortlessly poignant that, when I first saw it as a high schooler, it shattered my previous preconceptions about the possibilities afforded by the art form.

To an extent far greater than in his exceptional 1973 debut feature, Badlands, what Malick does in Days of Heaven is convey virtually everything of import through visual and sonic means, his tale, often denigrated as sketchy, left purposely simple and slender so that it might be elevated to the realm of timeless archetype via plaintive aestheticism. Malick’s directorial gestures wholly meld with the story, as every dramatically tangential stare at the vast 1920 Texas panhandle landscape, like every montage set to Ennio Morricone’s unbearably melancholic score, carries in it the narrative’s mournful, tragic emotional essence. It is, ultimately, nothing more or less than the definitive proof of film’s status as an inherently sensory medium.

Take, for example, the way that Malick subtly uses a cutaway to a whirling rooftop wind gauge to signal impending danger for his main characters: Bill (Richard Gere), a Chicago manual laborer; Abby (Brooke Adams), his girlfriend; and the wealthy, ailing farmer (Sam Shepard) whom Abby marries as part of Bill’s scheme to escape their drifters’ life. Or his similar employment of a quick snapshot of stream water rolling over rocks to express the fleeting calm and peace felt by Bill and Abby during a clandestine nighttime rendezvous.

Also of note if Malick’s orchestration of Abby and the farmer’s wedding night, in which the figurative distance between them is suggested by their relation to the camera (she facing the lens, he with his back to it), and the tender precariousness of their arrangement is communicated by the subsequent shots of the mansion bedroom’s exterior (its stained-glass window is practically an extension of the farmer’s preceding statement: “You’re like an angel”) and a delicate leaf covered in droplets of dew. These superficially nonchalant moments are ecstatically evocative, and often enhanced by the unavoidable impression that capturing such seemingly artless images must have required near-Herculean determination and patience.

Days of Heaven’s title is biblical (a phrase taken from Deuteronomy 11:21), and so are the undercurrents of its plot, which charts Bill’s flight from a hellish Chicago factory—after, in an act of original sin, he semi-accidentally murdered his foreman (Stuart Margolin)—to the expansive plains of Texas, a paradise of endless land and sky that, by film’s conclusion, will itself be engulfed in a swarm of end-times locusts and roaring flames. Bill’s kid sister, Linda (a wondrously strange Linda Manz), narrates this saga with references to God and Satan, but if the tale is told from her perspective, it’s nonetheless an unreal, detached one, with Linda recounting events and anecdotes as if she had witnessed them from a remove, and been forced to imaginatively make up those portions from which she was denied firsthand access.

The resultant atmosphere of simultaneous intimacy and disconnection is haunting, as well as harmoniously attuned to Malick’s portrait of man’s tense relationship with nature. Throughout, environment is prone to reflect peoples’ sadness in a storm cloud or their swelling peril in the sound of galloping horses, and yet just as likely to aloofly stand apart from them, such as in myriad shots of faceless silhouettes set against the sunset horizon.

Lyrical sorrow springs forth from Days of Heaven’s paradoxical juxtaposition of poor, filthy, hungry humans with the majestically beautiful countryside, which in turn is given iconographic majesty by Néstor Almendros’s Oscar-winning cinematography. Drenched in “magic hour” twilight (and frequently filmed with only natural illumination), his compositions have a lustrous quality both earthy and ethereal, veiling the action in an otherworldly glow that’s nonetheless always rooted in the tangible feeling of its milieu. It’s hard to think of a film more visually intoxicating, with Almendros’s work so painterly and thrumming with vibrant, roiling life—not to mention innately entwined with Morricone’s musical accompaniment, equally elegiac and alive—that it’s difficult to fully appreciate it on first glance.

This is also true of Malick’s deftly suggestive editing. Just as he’s fond of transiently turning attention away from character-driven goings-on to glimpse a herd of buffalo or wheat fields swaying in the breeze, he frequently begins scenes midway through a tracking shot and ends them (sometimes with a cut to black, other times with a dissolve) before it’s finished. The effect, of floating in and out of events like a visiting specter, is dreamlike.

Malick’s post-production creativity is likewise responsible for the film’s resonant emotional depth. Detractors’ most familiar criticism—that everything is insufficiently dramatized—is in a certain, limited sense valid. However, Malick’s story and characters are thinly conceived precisely because his intention is to impart sentiments and tensions through nonverbal channels. This is never clearer than with his handling of the cast’s performances, which are habitually reduced by the director’s edits to ephemeral motions and unheard statements.

This isn’t to say that the trio of Gere, Adams, and Shepard are utilized merely for their own physical beauty. Rather, it’s simply to contend that our ability to recognize, and empathize with, their characters’ passions is due largely to Malick’s decision to boil scenes down to their poignant essence: Bill’s wounded look upon realizing that Abby has fallen in love with the farmer; the farmer’s taut visage upon witnessing a romantic exchange between Bill and Abby; and the farmer’s eyes, full of desperation for love and companionship, as well as a desire for self-deception, when he asks his farm’s foreman and surrogate father (Robert J. Wilke), who’s suspicious of Bill and Abby’s motives, to leave the homestead.

As with Badlands and The New World (and, to some degree, The Thin Red Line), Days of Heaven is about a transformative journey. Abby is forever reconfigured by her experience as the object of both the wild Bill and the safe farmer’s affections, and Malick’s recurring motifs of movement—train rides, boat trips, wagon trains, flowing water, rolling clouds, cattle processions, and Linda’s convivial strolls with an older friend (Jackie Shultis)—speaks to a prevailing notion of impermanence. More than the luxury that the farmer’s wealth affords, it’s stasis that brings Bill, Abby, and Linda the most joy during the film’s halcyon middle section.

Similarly, a sense of patience, of allowing things to unfold without hurry or any nagging requirement that straightforward narrative conventions be addressed, helps to bestow a languorous poeticism to Days of Heaven. That cinema has the potential to overwhelm one’s senses like no other art continues apace, and the fact that the director wholeheartedly fulfills that potential with this, his rapturous pièce de résistance, helps explain why it took 20 years to complete his follow-up. It’s tough to top something this close to perfection.

Image/Sound

The most valuable reason to reinvest in Days of Heaven after Paramount’s serviceable, bare-bones 1999 release is this Criterion disc’s new, impeccable 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer. Under the supervision of Terrence Malick, editor Billy Weber, and camera operator John Bailey, Criterion has not only produced the finest presentation of the film to date, but they’ve actually thoroughly reworked its visual make-up. Colors appear subtler and richer than ever before, while blacks are as deep as one might reasonably hope for-which, despite some noticeable grain during night scenes, is pretty deep. Furthermore, the image is free of virtually all edge enhancement or print blemishes save for one conspicuous scratch that runs down Brooke Adams’s face during a third-act scene. Though it truly deserves to be seen on the big screen, this is about as good as a home-video version is likely to get. The new Dolby 5.1 track also improves upon the prior DVD’s stereo mix, but its upgrade is more modest, delivering clearer dialogue and, during the brushfire finale, a decent amount of surround sound action.

Extras

While Malick may have played a role in the film’s restoration, the legendarily reclusive director is nowhere to be found on the disc’s supplements. Editor Billy Weber, art director Jack Fisk, costume designer Patricia Norris, and casting director Dianne Crittenden pop up on the audio commentary track, which is convivial but more anecdotal than analytical in nature. All exude pride about having been a part of the production, discussing Malick’s experimentation with narration and praising the performances and directions while recounting a handful of interesting stories, like John Travolta being Malick’s first choice for Bill and the fact that most of the “nature shots,” even when not specifically mentioned in the script, were intended from the outset. It’s hit-or-miss stuff a lot of the time, and primarily focused on behind-the-scenes decisions. For Days of Heaven aficionados, however, there are enough noteworthy tidbits to warrant a listen.

Elsewhere, camera operator John Bailey is featured in a 20-minute video interview in which he discusses Malick’s New Wave-influenced shooting techniques, his own working relationship with Néstor Almendros, and the calm, tranquil temperamental similarities shared between Almendros and Malick. Most interestingly, he refutes a familiar contention (made elsewhere on the disc by Richard Gere) that the entire film was shot with natural light, as well as reveals that they extended “magic hour” by moving shooting locations ahead of the evening’s encroaching darkness. Stranger is cinematographer Haskell Wexler’s explanation of how he joined the production after Almendros left to honor a prior commitment, mainly because he begins with a crazy rant about his intention to talk about things that are both true and untrue—and then spends most of his 11 minutes recounting ho-hum technical anecdotes before addressing how he and Almendros came to a decision regarding the way he’d be credited for his contributions.

After all this production-specific stuff, the rest of the disc is devoted to the actors. Alas, no Linda Manz or Brooke Adams in sight, but there is a new 22-minute audio interview with Gere. Set to scenes from the film, the actor reminisces about the difficulty of Malick’s drawn-out creative process (he suggests that the director “can’t make a decision”), Almendros’s masterful work (despite the DP being, at that point in his life, nearly blind), and his unhappiness at first discovering that Malick had cut away most dialogue and fashioned a new, more silent version of the film. Meanwhile, Sam Shepard, in a 12-minute 2002 video interview, confesses that Malick’s work is most fully understood viscerally, and then proceeds to discuss its themes of urban-rural tensions and encroaching modernity, as well as the nature of its three main characters and Malick’s unparalleled attention to detail. A typically thorough Criterion booklet, with a strong critical essay by Adrian Martin and a Days of Heaven-relevant chapter from Almendros’s autobiography, round out the superb extras, though it remains somewhat puzzling that the theatrical trailer—which is included on Paramount’s original release—is nowhere to be found.

Overall

A DVD fit for a masterpiece.