039 - Days of Heaven, 1978, United States. Dir. Terrence Malick.

Wednesday, February 8, 2017

039 - Days of Heaven, 1978, United States. Dir. Terrence Malick.

Here we are again:  Every frame a Vermeer.

Or every frame a Hopper.

Once I was looking through a book of Edward Hopper paintings and I came upon the painting House by the Railroad.  I thought, That looks amazingly similar to the Psycho house.  Later I found out that, indeed, Alfred Hitchcock had used the house in the painting as a model for the Bates house on the hill above the Bates Motel.

And now eighteen years later Terrence Malick has used the same Edward Hopper painting as a model for the farmhouse in Days of Heaven.

This is a beautiful film to watch.

Imagine shooting a film almost only during magic hour.

What is magic hour?

It is that time of day when the sun is about to set or the sun has just risen, when the light is soft and golden, or reddish.  The sun is lower in the sky and the intensity of direct light is diminished, leaving more indirect light, dispersing the blue end of the spectrum, and casting long, soft shadows.

Cinematographers tend to call it magic hour.  Still photographers tend to call it golden hour.

It is the most beautiful time of the day for film lighting.

So let us say that magic hour gives you somewhere around twenty to thirty minutes of shooting time, and you decide to shoot only during that time.  You are going to take your time making the film.

Now imagine you are an electrician, or "juicer," on the film shoot, and every time you set up a light the director asks you to turn it off.  He is shooting only in natural light, even when it appears to you to be too dark or too backlit.

Some of the crew walked off the set and quit.

But Malick knew what he was doing. 

The editors of the film claim on the film's commentary that Malick knew more about the film stock he was using than Nestor Almendros, more about it than Haskell Wexler, and more about it than Kodak.   That is quite a statement.  Apparently, he did not need the crew members who walked off the set.

The film was shot by two legendary cinematographers: Nestor Almendros and Haskell Wexler.

Almendros was Spanish and had been working for years in Europe, including for New Wave directors Francois Truffaut and Eric Rohmer.  Malick brought him to Hollywood after having seen his work on The Wild Child.  Almendros would film Kramer vs. Kramer, The Blue Lagoon, The Last Metro, which we have already seen, Sophie's Choice, and Places in the Heart, among others.  He was nominated for four Oscars and won one for this movie.

Haskell Wexler was American and has been acclaimed as one of the most influential cinematographers in history.  His work goes back to the late 1950s/early 1960s and includes Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, In the Heat of the Night, The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), his own Medium Cool, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Bound for Glory, Coming Home, Other People's Money, and Mulholland Falls, among others.  In the case of both Cuckoo's Nest and this film he shared duties with someone else.  He was nominated for five Oscars and won two.  He was not nominated for this one, which won, because he was credited as "additional photography," although he demonstrated that he had shot more than half of what ended up on screen.

Frankly, the Oscar for cinematography could have gone to the director.  He drove the look.  The cinematographers did his bidding.  Almendros even credited Malick for teaching him what could be done.

The final look of the film is breathtaking.

In fact, you could watch this film for the images and not even follow the story.

But here is the story.

Richard Geere plays Bill, in one of the many roles he got when they could not get John Travolta.  Bill is in love with Abby, played by Brooke Adams, but they pretend they are brother and sister in order to keep people from talking.  Abby's younger sister Linda travels with them, as the three "siblings" travel by the roof of a freight car looking for work.  Bill has fled an iron foundry where he worked because he lost his temper and killed a man.  They will end up on a wheat farm in the Texas panhandle.  The young Linda provides the voiceover, and we see the film through her eyes.

If I tell you the premise of the film, you in return can tell me the entire story.  If you do not want to know it, then skip the premise.

Here is the premise:

The terminally ill Farmer will fall in love with Abby, and Bill will encourage her to marry the Farmer so that she will inherit his fortune upon his upcoming death, so that Bill and Abby can then live happily ever after.

If you follow the logic of the story, you now know the entire movie.

But that is okay.  You are watching it for other reasons as well.  For the cinematography.  For the landscapes.  For the Ennio Moricone score.  For the costumes.  For the look and sound of the farming equipment.  For the acting.  For the romance.  For the emotional journey.

The story is told in a mystical way, almost as if in a dream.  Intimate moments are shown in wide shots.  Love is shown through montage, through quiet looks with music and not with dialogue.  The Farmer himself is passive and often watches from a distance.  Cuts are made to skip ahead in time.

As an actor, I know Sam Shepard as a playwright.  I have acted in his work and watched my friends act in his work.  He came in like a force in the 1960s and 1970s with his absurdist, surrealist dismantlings of the America mythos.  So when I see him on screen as an actor, it still surprises me, even though he has been acting for decades and has been so prolific.  I see him here as the baby-faced, earnest, trusting Farmer and think, "This is the guy that asks actors to pee on stage?  Or bring a lamb with maggots on stage?  This is the guy who created the character Lobster Man?"  He looks like he couldn't hurt a maggot.

Or a locust.

Be prepared for the plague.

Bill and Abby have shown up like Abram and Sarai, or Isaac and Rebekah, pretending to be brother and sister, and now the plague comes.  The plague of locusts.  The plague of fire.  The plague of blood in the river.

Uh oh.

This film was made when there were no digital effects created in post-production, so whatever you see on the screen was present in front of the camera.  Including the plague.  The locusts.  And sycamore shells.

Terrence Malick is a director to know.  He started out as a philosophy major.  After his prep work at St. Stephen's Episcopal, he graduated summa cum laude from Harvard and won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford.  He did work on Heidegger, Kierkegaard, and Wittgenstein, and he published a translation of Heidegger.  After teaching philosophy and working as a journalist, he shifted gears and went to the American Film Institute for his MFA in film.  We are grateful that he shifted to film.  His knowledge of theology clearly informs his filmmaking.  He has given the world quite a few gifts.

In the 1970s he made two movies: Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1978).  Then he disappeared for twenty years.  He came back in 1998 with The Thin Red Line and has not stopped since.  We will see several of his films this year.

Roger Ebert gives him high praise when he says Malick is a director who seems to aspire to make a masterpiece with every film.

That is a goal worth having.

Every film a masterpiece.