Days of Heaven

You know a masterpiece when you experience it. 

Think of a great performance of Shakespeare or Beethoven or yes, Days of Heaven. 

In some ways this is the exact sort of thing I usually can’t stand in cinema. It meanders, and it’s underwritten. Director/Writer Terrance Malick wrote a script and gave up on it. Instead, he encouraged his actors to improvise. 

And then he discovered he had real story problems (because it was underwritten and improvised) and spent two years editing it. He only solved his story problem by giving a child character a voice over narration.

That narration is not great. It’s a child with a deep, distinct Chicago patois. At times it made me giggle and I don’t think that was Malick’s intention. 

But it does what it must and connects the disparate parts of the story together. 

The story matters, the story always matters, but this is a visual experience first. 

We get a factory on the front door of hell, traveling by train, and then life and work on a farm in the Texas Panhandle. 

It feels like a pretty great nature documentary. Then it feels like a Cecil B DeMille biblical epic. 

And then it just feels like you are living through some of the actual things that took place in the Bible. 

It’s arresting and amazing.

It’s one of the few movies I have found that I would seek out a theater experience if one ever became available. It truly needs to be experienced in a big screen.  

For the rest of this I require spoilers so please go watch this movie first and then come back. 

Richard Gere’s Bill commits several crimes in this movie but his biggest is having Brooke Adams’, Abby, by his side and giving her away to another man. 

It seems like a solid plan, Sam Shephard’s rich farmer is dying anyway. If she marries him the wealthy farm will be theirs.

Malick presents this not as a horribly betrayal but rather as desperate people finding a way to a better life. Bill and Abby aren’t greedy con artists they’re just on the last rung of society and desperate to hold on. 

But it’s wrong. And eventually the farmer discovers that something is undone in his home. 

And then … there is a plague. 

In Shakespeare the weather often reflects the internal state of the characters. 

Certainly you can think of Shakespeare as the plague of grasshoppers destroy the farm shortly after the farmer learns he’s been betrayed. 

Then a second plague is visited on the farm as a great fire begins to destroy everything. 

And, for a movie that was underwritten I have to give it credit for one line. Abby turns to Bill in the middle of a firestorm and says, “He knows!” 

The line and the delivery and the visuals … perfect. 

So the plagues can represent internal strife but in the Old Testament these things were a punishment from God. 

Whatever their motivations Abby and Bill have committed a great crime. They must pay for their sins. 

Days of Heaven comes from a phrase in the Bible. 

You will recall that Abraham once gave his wife away to Pharoh by saying that she was his sister. 

In response, God visited a plague on Pharaoh’s house that made Pharaoh understand what happened and return Abraham’s wife. 

Here too, Bill and Abby pretend they are brother and sister. 

It all works out pretty well until Bill realizes what he has lost and the farmer seeks a reckoning.

Of course, in the Bible, Abraham got away with it.