Lots of filmmakers (maybe even too many) try to shoot at “magic hour,” that brief period in the day before night falls, when the sky often turns a rich, dark blue and the air glows with an otherworldly haze. Few have managed, however, to capture what Terrence Malick did with 1978’s Days of Heaven, among the greatest, most ravishing of films. What makes magic hour so captivating isn’t just its visual beauty, but the way it whispers to us of the ephemeral; humans have lived through countless sunsets, so we understand the fleeting mystery of this moment. And Days of Heaven, now back in theaters in a 4K restoration and also available through the Criterion Collection, is a film all about the fact that things don’t last, about lives lived in windswept impermanence on the Texas prairie.
Even the story is a wisp of a thing. Plot points don’t occur in Days of Heaven; they drift by like memories. Set in 1916, the film follows Bill (Richard Gere) and Linda (Linda Manz), a brother and sister traveling as migrant workers alongside Bill’s lover, Abby (Brooke Adams), who pretends also to be his sister. We briefly saw Bill (probably) kill a man in Chicago, so we assume he is (sort of) on the run. They arrive as seasonal laborers at a vast Texas ranch owned by a melancholy young farmer (Sam Shepard) who has just been diagnosed with a fatal illness. The wealthy, doomed farmer spies Abby across the fields and falls for her. (“This farmer, he didn’t know when he first saw her, or what it was about her that caught his eye. Maybe it was the way the wind blew through her hair.”) When the two finally meet, he emerges from the twilit fields after she wanders too close to his house, which itself sits alone in the center of the vast prairie, like a transient piece of architecture. Malick shoots this exchange and others in snatches, as if the moment were gone before we even saw it. Bill convinces Abby to marry the farmer, knowing that the man doesn’t have long left. “The man’s got one foot on a banana peel, the other on a roller skate,” he tells her. “It’ll all be gone in a couple of years. Who’s gonna care that we acted perfect?” His words sounds like a philosophical statement.
A key story development could be announced with a simple blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot, or a barely heard line of dialogue. We have to lean in to catch the moment when the farmer finds out he’s dying. We never really see him sick, either. There’s just one shot of him twisting in agony on a bed, dissolving from an image of Linda looking at a book about dinosaurs as she mulls, in voice-over, “Sometimes I feel very old. Like my whole life is over. Like I’m not around no more.” Extinction is the way of this world.
We think of Days of Heaven as an epic, but it’s only 94 minutes long. It feels like a grand vision, but the director apparently came to it via desperation. Malick’s original script was elaborate, verbose, an intricate period piece. Some compared it to Dostoevsky at the time. Brooke Adams, in a fascinating recent interview, likens it to a Thomas Hardy novel. (The plot also has overtones of Henry James’s Wings of the Dove.) But the director started excising material during rehearsals, and continued to do so as he shot. He was frustrated with his own writing, and maybe even with the performances; Gere and Adams (who are fantastic in the film) were reportedly replacements for his original choices, John Travolta and Genevieve Bujold. Nobody was buying any of it. The production was running behind schedule and over budget and it looked headed toward disaster. Cinematographer Nestor Almendros (who would win an Oscar for his work) departed after a while, to be replaced by the great Haskell Wexler. Some of the finished picture was also shot by Paul Ryan, whom Malick sent off to capture cutaways of the landscape and of surrounding wildlife; anybody who’s seen Days of Heaven can tell you these images constitute a major part of the movie.
Somewhere along the way, as he cut reams of dialogue and plot, Malick realized he needed to replace all that with something, so he decided to give young Manz a voice-over narration. She was a mouthy, New York oddball, and he let her improvise ideas and thoughts and offer her unique take on the plot. The result isn’t a movie seen or told from her perspective, however — as it was in Badlands, the director’s previous film, which featured narration by Sissy Spacek — but rather a movie in which the images and the music and the offbeat voice-over combine to create a completely new point of view, like that of an innocent god discovering the world anew.
Slowly, out of all that trial and error, the magnificent film emerged. For months, editor Billy Weber screened cuts of the movie every Monday night at the Cary Grant Theater at MGM Studios in Culver City. “There’s a spot in the theater where you can stand and watch the entire audience watch the movie,” he told me years ago. “You can see their faces because the light from the movie illuminates them and they have no idea anyone’s standing there. I could see when they were completely locked into certain points in Days of Heaven; it was almost like biofeedback. And it wasn’t a narrative thing, they were responding to its rhythms and its style.”
Even the director’s career, for years, seemed to reflect the impermanence he’d made a film about. After Days of Heaven (which won awards and accolades but didn’t really make any money), the already publicity-shy Malick basically disappeared. He worked for a year on a massively ambitious project called Q (which decades later became both The Tree of Life and The Voyage of Time), then pretty much abandoned Hollywood, not returning behind the camera for two decades, until 1998’s The Thin Red Line, an ambitious World War II movie, another masterpiece that feels like it was made by someone for whom the 1980s in American cinema never happened.
With the production of The Thin Red Line and his subsequent pictures, Malick seems to have embraced the working methods he’d stumbled into on Days of Heaven: lots of improvisation, lots of wandering narration, and an almost ruthless (and now legendary) willingness to excise entire characters and story lines in the editing room. His work remains sublime — I’d argue that The Tree of Life might be an even greater film than Days of Heaven — but it’s hard not to look at his career and feel like he’s trying to find his way back to that fleeting moment, to those rolling meadows and twilit skies and days of infinite possibility. Sometimes, I wonder if he thinks he dreamt it all.
