Right Now, Wrong Then
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.
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.
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’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 6
