Delayed Reaction: Days of Heaven

Premise: Two lovers, posing as brother and sister, working manual labor on a farm find themselves in a love triangle when the wealthy owner of the farm falls for and marries the woman.

 

I'm not a Terrence Malick fan. I'm not adversarial about him the way I often am with directors like David Lynch or Wes Anderson though. I feel like I see the appeal and dismiss it as not for me. He's made it pretty easy to dismiss him too. He's got the reclusive genius thing where he won't make a movie for 10-20 years. In recent years, he's taken to making "people twirling in a field" movies that somehow don't exist despite having stacked casts. My stance is that I'm glad actors like being in his movies and if some people want to call his films masterpieces, more power to them.

 

My opinion is that he makes gorgeous failures. His movies are all technically beautiful. If there's ever a movie that needs a scene set in a wheat field at sunset, I hope he gets the first call. I call the movies failures because they either don't make sense or have to be rebuilt in editing. You could make almost an entirely different movie out of all the scenes and actors cut out of The Thin Red Line. Days of Heaven was in the editing room for two years before a narration had to be added to make it work. The only reason he's been able to make so many movies in the last decade is because he's given up on the editing portion and decided that people will get it or they won't. I don't get the sense from Malick that any of the movies he's released are actually the movies he envisioned when he filmed them.

 

All that said, I kind of like Days of Heaven. It's only about 90 minutes, so even if it got self-indulgent, it was over quickly. The plot is very coherent. I don't know Brooke Adams well, but I'm all about mid 70s Richard Gere and Sam Shepard. The move does look beautiful. That location for Malick is like bringing a fish to water. I also really loved Ennio Morricone's score. In particular I loved the sampling of "Aquarium" from The Carnival of Animals. That music is mesmerizing. I'm shocked that it's not the music used for every scene in movies where someone stumbles onto something majestic.

 

The one negative note I made while watching this was "the little sister's narration is unwell." I don't know if Linda Manz was doing a dialect or if that's how she really talks, but something about her narration sounded like a stage kid trying too hard to sound a certain way. It didn't sound natural, and given how much narration there is throughout, that got distracting.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend