It's the fifth Letterboxd Season Challenge! Theme seven, part two - one of Spike Lee's essential films for aspiring directors!
(Chosen by Jackie!)
The conventional approach to discussing Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven is to focus on its visual aspects. Rightly so, given its award-winning cinematography with the oft-noted golden hour exteriors emblazoning silhouettes against a gorgeous sky, and the freeform editing techniques at play affording a higher number of beautiful shots than your average movie without sacrificing its deliberate pace or contemplative tone. One could easily write a review doing little else beyond listing off the film's best shots one after another, and still communicate a good deal of what makes Days of Heaven such a gripping work of visual fiction. To get at what grabs me about Days of Heaven, though, we'll need to set aside its famed visuals, and focus on the sonic, for it is through the sound design that I think the film finds its greatest cohesion and meaning.
It is, after all, through a deafening cacophony loud as the world that we enter the picture, in a Chicago steel mill where the clatter crash clack racket bang thump of enormous machines completely swallows the particulars of an argument between Richard Gere's Bill and a foreman before the former kills the latter. Following sequences of Bill, his sister Linda (Linda Manz), and girlfriend who pretends to be his sister Abby (Brooke Adams) fleeing via train, starting on as hired hands on a wheat farm, and working the fields amongst an expansive cast of background players are equally devoid of specific information, with the camera frequently too far away to capture conversation, the voices in a crowd too numerous for total comprehension when we can hear dialogue, Ennio Morricone's score too busy with its swells and strings and swirls to give diagetic sound its due. When we are privy to spoken words, they are frequently brief, terse snatches, words exchanged in a free passing moment or divorced from the larger context by a cut to later. Our only consistent human voice throughout belongs to Linda, whose narration is as enigmatic and breezy as the editing, occasionally providing bits and bobs of inner thought we might not gauge from what we see, but most often engaging in its own form of contemplating a distant house rising above the wheat fields or staring at a grasshopper munching away at a corner of wheat by musing about esoteric matters of the heart and mind.
From the word go, Days of Heaven impresses itself as a film unconcerned with specificity, one with a far keener interest in the in-between moments of its plotted happenings. Approached like a conventional story, I doubt there's more than five concentrated minutes for the love triangle between Bill, Abby, and the sickly farmer they intend to con with a disingenuous marriage. Prior to the second act wedding, Malick's eye is on the community of workers, their hard work in the fields, their blessings upon the crops, their lines to get paid, their celebrations of a harvest well reaped, with equal weight assigned to Linda's friendship with an unnamed older girl as Bill and Abby noticing the farmer's interest in her. Afterwards, domestic drama and fears of cuckoldry are of secondary importance to the now-isolated group functioning as budding family, bedding down for winter and eventually preparing for the next harvest; even scenes where characters directly confront one another about their suspicions or toy with the possibility of murder are more about the place and mood than what the actors are doing or the characters thinking. The twin climaxes reflect this, first with the spark between natural disaster of the locust swarm and manmade disaster of the wheat fire coming with the exact moment of the farmer's rage finally breaking getting lost in the flurry of both, and then with how casually and lengthily it moves past Bill's final fate despite his actions causing every major plot development in the film. Malick's attentions are elsewhere. He's out here to explore life and experiences beyond the rigors of a Spartanly slight plot.
And yes, the vistas of characters against a dusky sky with their features darkened to nothing yet their outlines visible as midday and the wandering editing system concerned just as much with a man tapdancing to entertain a crowd as the farmer watching Bill and Abby steal away precious moments in righteous jealousy are primary means of communicating to the audience an intent to do more than bunker down on character development and traditional storytelling. This noted, I do very much believe the sonic landscape as crafted by Malick's audio engineering crew pulls a great deal of weight in getting you into the right headspace for appreciating the visuals' effect. I've already noted how cacophonous the sound of machines and crowds and raging fire can become, and how they drown out individual voices in moments of celebration, blind panic, and total indifference, but the swallowing effect really becomes complete and all-encompassing with how much the silent moments do the very same. Days of Heaven often dives so deep into its contemplation of minute detail, even Morricone's score is nearly lost to the emptiness of a room absent its usual figures, or a country sky stretching along for miles upon miles. The wind rolls along the plains, tickling stalks of wheat as it goes, captures a voice, and blows right on by without a second thought. A lone thought dances upon the breeze, its words and ideas as scintillating yet enigmatic and uninvolved as the currents it rides. Whether the world roars with the voice of a million locusts lit aflame, musically mirrors the exultation of a mass of persons rushing for a train, or falls to all-encompassing silence so total even thought itself becomes dull and distant, the individual, traditionally recognizable human experience stands as the farmhouse often does on the horizon: identifiable as itself, still significant by its presence, but rendered a smaller part of a larger whole by all that threatens to envelop it from every side.
I'd go so far as to say my own interpretation of Malick's open-ended cinematic landscape is highly dependent on viewing it as a reflection of how I read his soundscape. Those characters who skulk beneath the breeze's touch, who plan and plot and secret away all manner of hidden reasons for being, who refuse to speak for fear of not being understood, are effectively torn to shreds by the slicing force of the world around them roughly gashing their unwillingness to flow freely. In simpler terms, Bill and the farmer, our most traditionally active characters, adopt attitudes of deceptiveness and righteousness respectively the face of fates that threaten to toss them about, plant their feet too firmly, and allow their unexpressed passions to broil beneath the surface until they explode into fire and murderous rage and unfocused flight. By contrast, Linda is a decidedly uninvolved character, tossed from place to place by the decisions and failings of others, and merely tries to keep herself afloat and engaged wherever the winds may take her. Her status as weaving, winding narrator indicates this quite clearly, and the way her final words sound as if they're meant to lead into another statement before the film fades to credits casts her as a leaf who'll continue her travels whatever they mean. Abby, caught between the two states of being as one who engages in the shifting modes of living more than those around her while still entangled in Bill and the farmer's plotting, finds herself a far more ambiguous end, taking a train full of soldiers on the wings of swelling music rather than walking away of her own power to the sound of her own voice like Linda does. They who can adapt and flow through tumultuous times and settle where they settle are afforded far kinder fates than those who strain or fight against the voice-taking wind, in effect.
Speaking briefly on the film as it relates to Spike Lee's recommendation to aspiring directors, I think the primary takeaway should be one of willingness to step back and flow. Replicating Malick's exact process for crafting Days of Heaven is suicidal folly in the modern industry (hell, even in the New Hollywood days falling so vastly behind schedule with no plan for the look or feel of the final result after a year in the editing bay would likely cost most other directors the job), but the driving philosophy of being like wind, appreciating the world from a perspective alien to most persons, with a willingness to lose out on hard cognitive detail now for the sake of capturing a richer texture makes for an admirable, enviable mindset. You see this across all levels of Days of Heaven, the visual and the audio and the intangible, and it speaks to a deep enough confidence in technical craftsmanship to strive for an achieve something open and mutable and beautiful. Can't quite advocate anyone go full Malick unless they've already proven themselves or are exceptionally willing to take on a nightmarishly heavy risk, but considering the results he achieves here, a little stylistic adoption couldn't hurt.
4.5/5
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