Warming up for the new Terrence Malick film The Tree of Life (which I will hopefully see in theaters next weekend!), I sat down a few hours ago and watched Malick’s 1978 film Days of Heaven. Gene Siskel once admitted that the film “tests a film critic’s power of description.” I came away from a first viewing with a similar feeling, but buoyed by the naïve thought that all I needed was a second viewing to clear my head. Everything would be crystal clear after a second time through, right? Right!?
Wrong. The film remains (as the more mature parts of me expected it would) fantastically aloof from any attempt of my descriptive powers. And yet I’ll stick my head out there. An outline of the plot: A migrant worker (Richard Gere), his girlfriend (Brooke Adams), and his younger sister (Linda Manz) look for work in the American Midwest of the early twentieth century. They find field hand jobs on the land of a wealthy farmer (Sam Shepard), who soon enough falls in love with the migrant worker’s girlfriend. Upon learning that the farmer is seriously ill with only a year to live, the worker convinces his girlfriend to marry him for the money…and…well…it’s a tragedy. I’ll say no more.
But (of course!) just putting plot points on the page is the wrong approach (as countless critics have already discovered). The film really isn’t about any of that at all. Rather, the film is an attempt to tell a story using mostly symbolic imagery and the plaintive voiceover of Linda Manz, who plays the worker’s younger sister.
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The core of the film, as previously mentioned, is image and sound. Malick provides expert twilight views of the plains and sets up eerily suggestive shots: the farmer biting into an apple, the farmer’s lonesome house sitting on hill in the prairie, the worker and his girlfriend huddled against a pile of wheat in a snowstorm. Added to the mix is Manz’s voiceover—a mix of oblique observations about her surroundings, important narrative points, and ideas about human nature (“Nobody’s perfect. There was never a perfect person around. You just have half-angel and half-devil in you.”). The result is a beautiful, confusing story that tells the plot described above, but is certainly not limited to it or even really about it. It has the characteristics of a mesmeric dream.
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But in telling the story this way, the emotions seem to get lost; the jealousy and anger of the tragic love triangle seem subdued by the beautiful imagery and the careful soundtrack. We don’t hear most of the arguments that take place; we hear only snatches of conversation between the main characters. Most of the film concentrates on the careful set pieces of life around the farm.
Writing about the film in his “Great Films” collection, I think Roger Ebert hits the nail on the head when he discusses the so-called “muted emotions” in the film that some writers often criticize:
“Days of Heaven has been praised for its painterly images and evocative score, but criticized for its muted emotions: Although passions erupt in a deadly love triangle, all the feelings are somehow held at arm’s length. This observation is true enough, if you think only about the actions of the adults in the story. But watching this 1978 film again recently, I was struck more than ever with the conviction that this is the story of a teenage girl, told by her, and its subject is the way that hope and cheer have been beaten down in her heart. We do not feel the full passion of the adults because it is not her passion: It is seen at a distance…”
I think Ebert is sensible to assume that the story belongs to Linda. The film falls into place once we view it through the lens of memory. The story maintains a nostalgic grandeur from the opening credits—shuffling through faded, yellow photos, as if the viewer had found an old family photo album and were thumbing through it. The credits over, Malick plants us firmly in a world characterized by warm colors (sometimes even verging on sepia-toned) and Ennio Morricone’s haunting score, featuring quotations from Saint-Saëns’s “Aquarium” section of “Carnival of the Animals.”
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While focusing on Linda’s experience is engrossing, I think that such an interpretation is also somewhat limiting. I think something ought to be said for the way in which the characters (besides Linda) are virtual nonentities. The wealthy farmer is never even given a name; when discussed in conversation or in Linda’s voiceover, his presence is always understood implicitly. When I described the plot earlier, I omitted the names “Bill,” “Abby,” and “Linda” because I felt that the names weren’t important. I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest that they are archetypes, but rather that they are mysteries; we have no idea who they are. Where does Bill go in his time away? Does Abby really love the farmer? But even reduced to mysteries, they are still identifiable by social class.
In one short scene, Bill converses with the farmer and admits to the moment when he realized he wasn’t intelligent like some other people. The farmer says nothing and the gap between them—intellectual, personal, what-have-you—perceptibly widens. The unspoken tension of that moment is echoed in various ways throughout the movie. When Abby first arrives as a field hand, she is not permitted to go near the farmer’s mansion. By the time the migrant workers return for the next year’s harvest, she lives in the mansion as the farmer’s wife.
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Is the film then Marxist? The opening scenes of the steel factory in Chicago have a proletariat tinge to them…should we see Bill’s entrance into the life of a migrant worker as a return to serfdom, as if in retrograde motion back to the Middle Ages? What about his subsequent move into the mansion and, later, his abandonment of it?
But regardless of how we choose to read Malick’s masterpiece, it remains both a beautiful and elusive film that asks of the viewer more than does the typical film. I expect The Tree of Life to be much the same.
See more:
Ebert, Roger. “Days of Heaven.” Great Movies.
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