(Directed by Terrence Malick)
by Kevin Murphy
The last time I’d had a White Russian was July 1999. I had just turned twenty-one, and I worked in Yellowstone National Park.
Some friends and I decided to watch “The Big Lebowski.” We borrowed a television and VCR, hooked it to an extension cord that slivered out of my cabin to a nearby lodge, and settled in for the night.
Following the Dude’s second Caucasian, the desire to accompany him with a drink consumed us to the point of distraction. We had the liquor but lacked cream, and the stores had closed at seven.
Like sleuths we followed the extension cord into the lodge. We slipped past the front desk, through the dining room and into the kitchen. In the walk-in cooler we grabbed a box of coffee creamers, the tiny type usually dished-up at breakfast buffets, and managed to sneak undetected back to the cabin.
Meanwhile the night had grown cold. I had a wood burning stove, but a fire’s crackle would have drained the volume from our improvised theater. Agreeing to sacrifice warmth for sound, we shivered about and used our numb fingers to pry the lids from the creamers.
By the movie’s end we were drunk, and the floorboards were littered with crunched creamer containers. Soon thereafter, my friends held their bloated stomachs and grumbled home.
Four hours later I was unable to sleep. Wind rattled the cabin; purple vapors streaked across the sky, I dug through a crate of my friend’s movies and found “Days of Heaven.”
Within minutes I was reeled from the Dude’s unemployed Venice and cast into America’s Gilded Age, when Chicago’s industrial furnace blazed with iron-willed opportunity and workers of every stripe rubbed their blistered hands. A new cinematic vision filled the cabin, warming my fingers and soothing my swollen belly. I was now on the bed’s edge, settling in for a very different, yet somehow familiar experience.
Released in 1978, “Days of Heaven” was written and directed by Terrence Malick. Set in 1916, it’s a visually arresting timepiece that honors America’s blooming prosperity and scrutinizes the morality of an ambitious culture eager to achieve empirical greatness. The movie documents the disharmony of class structure, examines agriculture’s effects on nature, and sketches the portraits of three people whose goals are so close they threaten to flame, fan out, and burn everything in sight.
Unfolding with elegiac grace the movie travels from Chicago’s alleyways to the Texas panhandle like a heron gliding over water at dawn. Shot in 70mm film, scenes arrive unfiltered, ripe with natural beauty, and leave the branded impressions of a land appreciated for the first time. The progression of these scenes is strong enough to become part of the narrative; they, as much as the characters and plot, guide us through these rough, unhinged times, speaking in a secret dialogue that pokes at our instincts and foreshadows the trouble lurking in the grass.
Following the critically acclaimed “Badlands,” Terrence Malick returns with a movie that revisits his themes of love, class, and the American landscape. Like Kit and Holly before them, Bill (Richard Gere) and his girl Abbey (Brook Adams), intend to leave behind their sodden pasts. But when they find a means for salvation, they are forced to withstand the emotional storm that threatens to destroy their plans. Malick envisions his characters as distinctly splintered, suffering from the compromising intervention of good and evil. The heroes barely differ from the villains; set behind thunderous clouds, they are the sun ready to break.
He also prefers voice-over narration. Here the narrator is Bill’s little sister, Linda. With the detached charm of a resourceful waif, she tells Bill and Abbey’s story. Her dialect is cradled in the womb of the Chicago streets; she uses her smarts to stay outside the lines even as she remains embedded in the circumstances. Sometimes voice-overs can devalue a movie’s essence by smothering it with obviousness and colloquialisms. In “Days of Heaven,” Linda brokers the risk with a narrative she possesses from the beginning, a narrative that is stilted and crude but nonetheless stabs the truth like a poet with a broken bottle.
Malick seems to speak with his eyes, constructing tales with a visual medium that has a tight grip on us all. At the movie’s start, he uses weathered photographs of American workers, immigrants, and monuments to establish the relationship between this country’s forebears and this movie’s foundation. In a moment we’re swept into the pits and see Bill (Gere) shoveling coal into a furnace. The foreman is harassing Bill, Bill retaliates. The foreman falls unconscious, Bill gathers his sister and his girl; they hop a train and end up at a sprawling wheat farm in the Texas panhandle. It’s harvest season, there’s plenty of work for everyone; a dusty group of migrant workers has arrived and together they labor as consistently as machines do today. Sam Shepard plays the wealthy farm owner. He is a reserved, decent man; perhaps the richest man in the panhandle, but he’s dying. Soon enough, Abbey becomes the object of his desire. She’s quite possibly the last person who can help him enjoy his money and the rest of his life. When Bill catches wind of this, he encourages Abbey to marry the farmer. The hope being that after a few short months the farmer will be dead, leaving Abbey to inherit the farm. It’s a naïve, idealistic plan that stinks from the get-go. Bill can’t pin himself away from Abbey and the farmer becomes suspicious of their relationship (they’ve told everyone they’re siblings), soon enough the farm and everyone on it succumbs to a Season in Hell, a season from which only tragedy can survive.
Near the end, an invasion of locusts swarms down on the farm. Red flags are raised, alarms wail, workers scurry in the fields, trying to flush the pests away. The soundtrack arches over the landscape like a piercing crescendo. The farmer attacks Bill, horses gallop over mounds of burning wheat; Abbey’s guilt stiffens her gaze as the night unleashes its demons. The tension screams the end is near, and then…
I stood up and paused the movie.
I went to the door, opened it to the black Yellowstone night. Around me a dozen cabins, some chimneys blowing smoketrails. Beyond were the trees, miles and miles of cold hard land, thousands of hungry animal eyes prowling the wilderness for food. The sky a spotted blanket of stars, the moon a frozen snowball; the smell of sagebrush lingering from the warm afternoon; it was a beautifully strange place to be standing, and I stayed there awhile, cold in my bare feet, waiting for the sun to rise over the hills, for the employees to wake and the cut across the dew and head up to the bathrooms for a quick shower before work….
When I got back inside I spread a map across the table. I traced a route back to my home in Boston, then all the way across to San Francisco, where I’d head come fall. A pastoral of highways and skylines shuttered by, the sudden whip of a bison’s tall, afternoon thunderclouds, mosquitoes buzzing at dusk as the smell of wheat filled the air. It was all a movie I had yet to finish.
When I finally did finish “Days of Heaven” it was eight years later, this week, actually, at my house in Charleston.
Afterwards, I walked to Vickery’s.
I saw Joey. Concerning the movie he blurted, “Lyrical siege! Sensual sucker punch! I heart Richard Gere!”
We sat down and I told him about Yellowstone.
“You didn’t watch the rest of it that night?” he asked.
“They unplugged the cord.”
“Fucking Lewboski,” he said, and hollered for two White Russians.
