Days of Heaven

Last night before Days of Heaven started at the NW Film Forum, the introducer was going on about how shooting took a full year and editing another two, and at some point they scrapped the whole script and so on and so forth. After watching it I feel like it's the sort of project that deserves itself.

Sure, it's full of beautiful images, but it seems to me that the editing and direction are both hamstrung by a devotion to creating a collection of gorgeous stills. Except for perhaps the very beginning, the entire movie is made up of disconnected close-ups for the rather poor dialogue and medium and long shots of the landscape, often full of people we know essentially nothing about.

The plot outline suggests that this could have been a strong, character-driven story, but in the little time spent on the characters, we mostly just gaze at their uncommunicative faces. The voiceover narration is similarly uninformative, poetic far less than it wants to be. [I was reminded of another beautiful film of the 70's, Barry Lyndon, in which Stanley Kubrick uses stunning, "painterly" images to effectively set up his scenes, in addition to telling the story.]

The progression of time and the seasons also feels rather odd, as it snows fairly early on in the film, although the characters run around in shirtsleeves and play in the river quite a lot between that and the actual coming of winter. Much, of course, is made of the fact almost all the shooting took place during the "magic hour" before sunset, but it seems incredibly unnatural for so much action to take place at the same time of day, not to mention such a dimly lit one.

I found myself a little unsettled that a lot (maybe nearly all) of the meaning in Malick's films comes from naive types who are either cruel themselves or submit themselves to cruelty, as if we will supposedly find enlightenment or purity or something there.