Days of Heaven

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful.....
Review: This has been my favorite film, for as long as I can remember. Everything about it is masterful, incredible cinematography, enchanting score, amazing performances. Highly recommended

Rating:
Summary: Stunning.
Review: DoH is a visually stunning gem that absolutely must be seen on the big screen (or a large-format TV). Having seen it, you will soon be ranting to your friends, family, and neighbors about the artistic genius of Terrence Malick and about DoH as the most beautiful film you have ever seen. Period.

Rating:
Summary: A Secular, Religious Experience by Nick Kokoris
Review: An Aquarium Tragedy: Cinema's Greatest Challenge to Sight and Soul

DAYS OF HEAVEN, written and directed by Terrence Malick (released 1978)

By Nick Kokoris

In the opening frames of Terrance Malick's Days of Heaven, we are welcomed by the symphonic measures of the 1960 classic recording of Saint Sans' "The Aquarium." It is an introduction to this 95 minute long, peculiarly American masterpiece which is appropriate both in tone as well as in metaphor: for like creatures inside an aquarium, the characters in this evocative film are delicately set apart from our hearts, separated from our sympathy by the rigid transparency of their desperately understated lives. Like primitive creatures submerged in eerily familiar water, the characters suggest a rudimentary nature which will neither accommodate self-pity nor invite sympathy from onlookers peering through the glass. This separation is notable, since the audience feels little for the characters compared to the poetic resonance of the neutrality in which they are suspended. Perhaps it is the languid movements of these characters which remind us of the density of our own finite worlds, and while we can feel the solemnity of their turgid movement, the subjects and their world remain curiously out of our reach. Set in the fall of 1916 in the Texas Panahandle, Sam Shepard plays the role of a rich farmer who falls in love with a beautiful migrant worker, Abby, played by Brooke Adams. The migrant worker is really in love with another laborer, an impulsive but caring fugitive from the slums of Chicago, played with unnerving knee jerk desperation by Richard Gere. When Bill, the laborer, finds out the rich farmer has a terminal illness he encourages Abby to accept the farmer's affections and marry him, as a ruse to inherit his estate after his imminent death. The filmmaker manages to balance our sympathy and distance we feel for the sufferings of these characters through the voice over narration from Bill's sister, played with enduring genuineness by Linda Manz. In a series of chillingly untainted observations from this teenage girl, spoken with unaffected manner, we are put at an ease almost from the beginning of the movie with a serenity out of proportion to the desperate story. The sister reassures us throughout the movie as if she is whispering "It's not so bad, life goes on in this dense aquarium of life." Because we admire her lack of self-involvement, we trust the authenticity of her serenity, and the magic of Heaven descends from start to finish. I suppose trust is one of the things we humans will call "beauty."

The movie was filmed in the fall of 1976 in Alberta, Canada by a man who suggests the subtly shaped randomness of an open pasture. Born in Ottawa, Illinois on November 30th, 1943, Terrence Malick was the son of an oil company executive who spent his formative years in a suburb of Austin, Texas. He attended Harvard University graduating there in the late '60's summa cum laude in philosophy. After completing a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford, he returned to Cambridge to teach philosophy at M.I.T. Then, in the early '70's he incongruously left the ivy walls of academia and returned to Texas to make Badlands, a fictionalized account of the Charles Starkweather-Carol Fugate murders of the late 1950's. His only directed feature other than Heaven, Badlands first introduces us to Malick's legacy of emotionally detached characters made palatable by almost laughably natural narration of a teen-aged girl. Either by happenstance or divined fate, Badlands provided the twenty-eight year old maverick the clout needed to make a movie three years later far closer to his heart, one which unlike Badlands, offers no trace of a directorial ax to grind, whether commercial, comedic or philosophical. Days of Heaven is the heart and soul of the renegade philosophy professor who made it, and even today, twenty years after its release, the movie breathes with a mystery that defies definition, much less understanding. In twenty years Days of Heaven succeeds in transcending the classes of entertainment, statement and cinematic citadel. To call it anything, I suppose I would say it was a religious experience, and for that matter, a nondenominational one, in extremis.

Days of Heaven, page 2.

Through the years, I have heard many people comment on the so-called "beautiful" photography of this movie and I feel like accusing them of the same gushing pretension with more vigor than anyone could ever accuse moi. To call this movie "beautiful" is by the opinion of this polemical reviewer, creating a kind of blasphemy, like calling Abraham or Jesus Christ a really "beautiful" guy: a description one might expect from a Saturday Night Live parody of a seventies style disco promoter. Speaking of night club promotions, there was the 1979 Oscar ceremony in which the Academy thought the film was simply mahhhh velously "beautiful" too, granting it a single statuette for the late, great Nestor Alamendros' (d. 1994) stirring cinematography while giving best picture to The Deerhunter, a movie about a hero good guy and a bunch of Vietnamese bad guys with a real sad and well, deep man, ending and check out that russian roulette scene. By contrast, Days of Heaven doesn't need a clever plot, a russian roulette scene or a Hollywood hero to overwhelm us with its native power. Days of Heaven is a cosmos in which human experience, large and small, from chicanery to charity, from romantic love to arbitrary pestilence, grows and dies and grows again like flowered weeds in a Texan pasture. It is a film that moves with the soul of virtue and the dull, yet life affirming ache of its absence.

In a haunting yet reassuring way, Days of Heaven emerges as if it was created posthumously- as if the director was some philosophical farm hand who one day died, went to heaven, and decided to make a movie about the difficult world he left behind. The cryptic title could be explained in this vein, that one's days of heaven are spent recollecting events in a generous and patient way, no matter how migrant worker harsh the subject of the recollection. Heaven perhaps, is not what is, but with how much love we look upon it. The span of our Days of Heaven is only as long as the supply of love we have to spread over the window of our own recollections, like a filter over the heartless and sometimes lifeless neutrality of our circumscribed world.

Billy Wilder once said great movies are movies with three good scenes. I could probably count as many as 100 "good" scenes in this movie, many are as short as a mind's breath, and because of the movie's fluidity, difficult to disect and call "scenes": the camera focuses on a shadowed gazebo in the middle of a dark pasture; an abandoned parasol shakes on a knoll incapable of making an ominous sound; a scarecrow blackens at dusk, and says more than any of the characters; Bill's sister cries goodbye to her best friend, facing the poignancy of finding out that she wasn't needed back; decked in their Sunday best, the farmer, Abby and Bill wave to a passing train carrying President Woodrow Wilson in a whistlestop tour through a vast, desolate plain, as the Aquarium plays for the second time in the film, suggesting that even Presidents are reducible to passing sideshows. Bill's sister escapes from the boarding school while the Aquarium sounds again for its third and final reminder, and as the neighbors pick up their clanking, glass, milk bottles at dawn, life goes on; Bill, Abby and the Farmer watch a Charles Chaplin movie as Bill's sister narrates how the devil will come and "eat our eyes out..." just as we see Chaplin being tied up in ropes and only moments before the fraudulent marriage farce is uncovered. My favorite was the outdoor liturgy, as the camera focuses on a migrant worker, teen-aged boy with Downs Syndrome, who impassively stands and listens as the priest intones and then we see the rich farmer whose eyes narrow with pious reflection at the same moment, and we come to realize that the poorest among us, a migrant worker with Downs Syndrome and the rich, deceptively healthy farmer are equally humbled before the eternal. Then while God smirks the pasture says, " Get on with it!", we agree with the God, the pasture and the congregation.

Days of Heaven, page 3.

The movie ends when the aquarium glass shatters and the most bounded fish in the fable drowns in a river after being shot in the back by the Law. We see his face pierce the water, and even in death we are not sure what he is feeling, but we are made aware that when he finally leaves his aquarium and enters the eternal medium, one other distant character comes to life to weep. At last the most limited character in the film enters the "heaven" from where the director has so bravely and successfully held the camera. When a woman weeps at last, we can feel the pain of these antique renderings, and finally the audience joins these primitive souls in a 90 minute delayed, emotional unity- not a catharsis, but at least a kind of unity. It is made more poignant that this limited emotional reaction

Rating:
Summary: The Greatest Movie Ever Made?
Review: It very likely is the greatset film ever made. The imagery is beyond comparison to any other film. Some people see the use of imagery as a defect, implying that it subtracts from the expression of the film's theme. Has anyone ever responded emotionally to a piece of art, to a photograph, to a poem? Of course they have, in fact these media tend to be among the most profoundly affecting influences on individual lives. Terrance Malick is an artist. The movie is a work of art. If I hear another person complain about Malick's lack of dialogue and plot, I'm going to go f@#!!*ing crazy. This movie, along with all of Malick's work addresses itself to the unconscious, and the fact that he doesn't provide any answers to the questions he raises is because he has respect for the people who'll see his films. All works of art only exist in a relationship to the individual.

Rating:
Summary: Horrid Movie
Review: The Days of Heaven is a badly acted movie about people cheating on each others and then people getting shot. There was no point to the thing except what people want to believe the point was. This is a no buyer.

Rating:
Summary: Terrence Malick at his best !
Review: Wonderfully photographed by Nestor Almendros and exquisitely directed by the acclaimed director of THE THIN RED LINE and BADLANDS, comes a brilliant movie. I reccomend this movie to everyone, even if you are not a Malick fan. Absolutely superb and unmissable.

Rating:
Summary: A Beautiful Dream
Review: I had been turned on to Terence Malick before 'The Thin Red Line' was released after viewing a laserdisc of 'Badlands'. Althought Badlands was a great film, nothing prepared me for the visual and aural splendor that is 'Days of Heaven'. Early on in the film, Gear and others hop a freight train. Shortly after there is a wide shot of a train trestle against a perfect blue and cotton-cloud sky as the train passes over trailing a billowing cloud of steam. I remember saying "Oh My God". The image seemed to have peeled itself off of an early American landscapse painting and was almost surreal in it's beauty and stopped just short of abstraction. What follows is a film that is a true gift to anyone who appreciates great filmmaking.

Rating:
Summary: Truly one of the greatest films ever made
Review: A truly great work of art can change the way you see the world. Offhand I can think of only a handfull of films that have so affected me: 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, CITIZEN KANE and VERTIGO, to name but a few. Add to that list DAYS OF HEAVEN. It's hard to believe now, but this was only the second film director Terence Malick ever made (after BADLANDS, another great one). Most directors go through their whole career and never come close to making a movie this awesome. I cannot rave enough about DAYS OF HEAVEN. Just see it. Trust me on this -- if you have any real appreciation at all for great cinema (or great art, period) you will not be disappointed.

Rating:
Summary: Malick's masterpiece
Review: Nothing can compare to seeing this film in a theater, but if the DVD looks anything like the excellent laser disc version, it is well worth owning. Visually stunning, philosophically brilliant, Malick crafted one of the true masterpieces (and one of the last) of the (in my opinion) greatest, most fecund period in film history, the seventies. He even achieves the impossible, getting an emotionally effective performance from Richard Gere, using the actor's natural lack of expression as a believable character trait, as well as an aesthetic device, rather than what it usually comes off as, contempt for the audience. Linda Manz is brilliant; unfortunately, she seems to have dropped off the face of the earth, resurfacing only for minor parts in detritus like "Gummo."

Rating:
Summary: ONE OF THE MOST BEAUTIFUL FILMS EVER MADE
Review: The 'Thin Red Line' is haunted by Mallick's earlier, better film. Cinematography, music and mood all unforgetable. This film is perfect for DVD - can't wait.