Days of Heaven was a strange film. Not sure what I think about it yet. Very different film from Badlands.
Yeah I'm not sure what I make of it.
Beautiful to look at, though.
Yeah, interesting to read up on the troubled production. From Malick not liking the dailies after two weeks and tossing the script and improvising and letting the actors improvise and just shooting a ton and hoping to find the movie in the editing room to two years of editing before the finished product.
Like...it shows. But also it doesn't feel like a mess and works. But I feel like you can see some of that lack of cohesiveness as things just kind of jumps around. Also there's an essay by Néstor Almendros about how they basically filmed the whole movie with natural lighting for a realistic look (though overblown and muted because of exposure during the day). You can see it in the visuals, it's not a very tack sharp nice looking image quality movie. I wonder if they do a new 4k restoration at some point if it will actually look dramatically better or if there's not much more you can do with the source. Like Badlands recent 4k restoration looks amazing but it used normal film studio lighting for clear shots.
Also I don't think Richard Gere was that great. I feel like Brooke Adams and Sam Shepard carried it. Linda Manz was just a weird looking/sounding kid and Richard Gere in one of his first major film roles just seemed kinda of all over the place.
One thing that's different from Badlands is that Badlands followed very enjoyable leads with Martin Sheen/Sissy Spacek. It was also a tighter script that still had the poetic artsyness of Malick but grounded it in a more standard scenario which is very unlike the rest of Malick's career. Days of Heaven is more just floating through natural life with some story in the center but it's more about the world and life around it, which is more the usual Malick though it's not overly abstract like some his later career.
Which is all good, just without any characters like Sheen/Spacek to anchor it, it's less engaging (though still entertaining). I read a take that said since the movie is seen through Linda Manz character, the whole movie is purposely distant with just seeing snippets of the main characters and not fully developing them. Which sounds about right.
Definitely was a good movie and was entertaining, but probably would need to give it another watch to figure out if I really liked it. I think I just don't like Richard Gere in general much and with a better lead I'd probably have liked the movie more.
Also the epilogue stuff felt a bit derivative of Badlands
spoiler (click to show/hide)
Gere's whole living in the forest with his girl on the run from cops and then they show up and he chases them around the fields with a shotgun
Like I think maybe the movie's better without the epilogue going on and on. The epilogue doesn't even make much sense to me.
spoiler (click to show/hide)
So the house caretaker doesn't trust Gere/Adams and thinks they're running a con. The owner is stabbed to death and they take off. The caretaker gets the police and goes after them and kills Gere...but then they don't arrest Adams and she still gets to inherit the money and be free and rich? Seems sus.
