LGM Film Club, Part 492: Days of Heaven

For blog-based reasons that will become clear soon enough, I had reason to go back and watch some of Terrence Malick’s films. Badlands and The Thin Red Line are big favorites of mine, but I hadn’t watched Days of Heaven in years. And really, it’s so great. Starring Richard Gere and Brooke Adams as “siblings” working the harvest in the Texas panhandle on a farm owned by Sam Shepard in his first film role, it is like, many Malick films, hard to describe in terms of plot. In a sense, the plot doesn’t matter much, not as much as the elliptical narration or the meditation of the exploitation of labor and nature central to this picture and the broader filmography of the man. It was a weird production, even for Malick, in that Gere was a young arrogant kid who was a huge pain in the ass, Shepherd had not figured out how to act yet and that had to be worked around, and Adams had no idea whether Malick was pleased with anyone’s performance at all. And yet it works. Few directors in film history have an aesthetic style as identifiable with him as Malick and it’s all on full display here, in what is possibly his best film, even if I personally like The Thin Red Line a bit more.