Is it heaven yet?

Jan Lubaczewski

Many called it one of the most beautiful films shot in the 20th century. During the production, the cinematographer was gradually going blind and couldn’t finish the film. Its director was so dissatisfied with the shooting that at some point he threw the script away and decided to improvise his way through the film. After its making, he did not appear in public for over 40 years. There is not a single interview with him and merely a couple of photos are to be found online. The filmmaker in question is Terrence Malick, the film - Days of Heaven.

The story, set in 1916, begins in a factory. The main character, Bill (Richard Gere), gets in a row with his employer and kills him. He has to escape, so together with his sister Linda (Linda Manz) and his lover Abby (Brooke Adams), they find a job as farmhands in the estate of a nameless rich Farmer (Sam Shepard). To increase their chance of finding a job, Bill and Abby pretend to be siblings. Linda is the narrator and we can hear her voice throughout the film. Malick uses voiceover, a crucial element of nearly all his films, to tell a story from a character’s perspective. Here, it’s the perspective of a child - slightly naive, but at the same time honest and effortlessly profound. When they move to the farm, it seems that, after searching for quite some time, they have finally found their place on Earth.

Malick consciously starts his film in an extremely industrial setting; that way, the transition and contrast between the worlds in which main characters exist is striking. Malick’s fascination with nature is apparent in that sense - he juxtaposes the ugly, uninviting world of machines and cities, with the pastoral village, where everyone feels at home. They say that you can recognize an artistic voice in a film from the very first frame you see, and Days of Heaven is a radical example of that claim. Each shot causes you to gasp, each frame so exquisitely designed that you feel as though you could never look away.

Malick’s two biggest thematic interests in Days of Heaven, as well as in most of his films, are nature and metaphysics. From the first moments on the farm, it is clear that a spiritual element is present in the environment. It feels like a place where everything is as it should be, where the characters can finally be at peace. And then cracks begin to appear in this ideal picture. Firstly, a minor fight between Bill and a co-worker who claims that Abby is not really his sister. Then, Bill and Abby hatch a scheme that destroys the peaceful scenery. Malick paints an idyllic picture of a deeply American landscape only to wreck it a few scenes later. In a film so rooted in Biblical tradition, it’s only natural to expect the plagues to ravish the peaceful land, but Malick goes a step further - he comments on the material situation of the characters, painting a picture of America dismantled by the economic boom, generating more injustice than income. As Linda notices, when she talks about the situation of the main characters on the farm, “(...) they don’t need ya. They can always get somebody else.” It’s the world of both growing bliss and immorality.

The story reads a little bit like a parable. It ponders questions of greed, human nature, time, and God. It does so effortlessly, without ever crossing the invisible line of “too much”. Malick portrays a world in which the stars, the sun, and the harvest convey the characters’ feelings, in which man and nature are inseparable. Each character lives on their own marvellous planet. It’s a place where the things you see, hear, and feel are of greater importance than the uttered words. When I think of Days of Heaven, I see the vivid images and I hear Ennio Morricone’s music. It’s a film you experience with your senses.

Terrence Malick annoys many moviegoers. His tendency to overuse voiceover, to give in too much to a dream-like quality of the moviemaking process can cause many to look away. He has always created outside of the Hollywood system, consciously deciding not to appear in public for many years now. He finds inspiration in nature, almost every one of his films captures the nature of its characters through the lens of the natural world. He has made only 10 films throughout his 50-year-long career, with a break of 20 years in the middle - no one really knows why he stopped working for such a long time. For me, Days of Heaven is, by far, his best film. I hope you’ll watch it, I hope you’ll submerge yourself in Malick’s beautiful mind for a second.