Days of Heaven
Directed by Terrence Malick
Despite its complexity and open-hearted spirit, Terrence Malick’s The New World became one of the most divisive studio movies in recent memory. Even some of the filmmaker’s admirers rejected it as opaque, choppy, unstructured, too sentimental in depicting its central love triangle and too enamored with nature photography and Transcendental sentiments.
Thanks to what The Village Voice’s J. Hoberman called “the cult of The New World,” critical consensus is already shifting in Malick’s favor. Film Forum’s repertory screening of Malick’s 1978 masterpiece Days of Heaven should push that process along. Detractors cite Heaven as an honorable example of Malick’s talent and dismiss the The New World as devolution. But a close viewing confirms that The New World is in many ways an enlargement of Days of Heaven that revisits its situations, themes and filmmaking vocabulary from a fresh vantage point.
Both films are built around migrations/immigrations—England to America and back in The New World; Chicago to the Texas Panhandle to an unspecified small town in Days. Both movies anchor otherwise free-floating narratives to a couple of spectacular music-and-image driven montages—the Wagner-scored arrivals in The New World, the acoustic guitar-scored train and boat journeys in Days.
And both are period pieces about doomed love triangles. In The New World, the lovers are John Smith, Pocahontas and Pocahontas’ eventual husband, John Rolfe. In Days of Heaven, the triangle consists of furtive lovers Abby (Brooke Adams) and Bill (Richard Gere)—who flee Chicago after the hot-tempered Bill accidentally kills his foreman during an argument—and a rich but sickly young wheat-farmer (Sam Shepard) whom Abby marries so that she, Bill and Bill’s kid sister (Linda Manz) can inherit his property after he dies.
In both movies, the female romantic lead becomes the movie’s de facto protagonist. Both Pocahantas and Abby are torn between rugged social outcasts to whom they’re physically attracted, and more genteel, powerful men they latch onto for survival’s sake. Most significantly, Pocahantas and Abby trade one culture and social strata for another and, by film’s end, they’ve truly become different people.
Filmmaking choices that New World detractors have described as vexing new additions to Malick’s vocabulary are used all through Days of Heaven. In both films, Malick often cuts into a pan or dolly shot after it’s begun and cuts away before it’s finished. And he rarely shows us the beginning or end of a conversation. What matters are gestures, expressions, symbolically charged images (a crystal goblet on the bottom of a riverbed, locusts scuttling across the surfaces of a kitchen), and most of all, the ironic contrast between individual desires and nature’s indifference to humankind.
April 14-20. Film Forum, 209 W. Houston St. (between Varick & 6th Ave.), 212-727-8110; FilmForum.org.
