Word: malick
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DAYS OF HEAVEN Directed and Written by Terrence Malick...
Like Badlands, Director Terrence Malick's remarkable first film, his new work is a bleak and unstinting attack on America's materialistic culture. But Malick is an artist, not a polemicist; his scabrous ideas are expressed in the elegiac terms of a fable. In Days of Heaven he tells of a migrant worker, Bill (Richard Gere), who travels from Chicago with his lover Abby (Brooke Adams) and his kid sister Linda (Linda Manz) to harvest wheat for an aristocratic Texas farmer (Playwright Sam Shepard). Tired of "nosing around like a pig" and infuriated by his employer...
...this slender tale, which pointedly recalls Theodore Dreiser's novels of the period, Malick constructs a complex web of moral ambiguities. He invites us to sympathize with the criminal Bill and Abby, who have a right to revolt against poverty. But he also arouses our affection for the privileged farmer, a kind and sickly man whose riches pay off only in loneliness and boredom. To Malick, all these people are victims of their innocent faith in a warped American dream. Their tragedy is that they blame themselves, rather than their false ideals, for the misery of their lives. Though...
...help carry out his spellbinding vision, Malick has turned to some of the most talented figures in European film making: Cinematographer Nestor Almendros (Claire's Knee) and Composer Ennio Morricone (1900). Their work is stunning; yet there is no mistaking Days of Heaven for anything other than an American movie. Malick's ability to capture the terror in plain, homespun settings recalls the spooky vistas of Painter Edward Hopper. The film's naive narration-recited in deadpan colloquialisms by the teen-age Linda-is right out of Ring Lardner's sardonic stories. In the tradition...
...farm to a bustling nearby town of 1917. Suddenly we are in the death throes of oldtime America: smiling dough boys hop on trains to the blare of brass bands. At that moment Days of Heaven effortlessly transcends its own story to prefigure the history of an era. As Malick's characters lost their innocence on a ravaged wheatfield in Texas, so would a nation on the bloody battlefields of the first World War. - Frank Rich