Paradise lost in ‘Days of Heaven’

It’s safe to say that the movies have never seen a career quite like Terrence Malick’s. After studying philosophy and working as a journalist, he enrolled at the American Film Institute in the late ‘60s. Upon graduation, he made two of the defining masterpieces of the ‘70s, then took a 20-year break. He resumed filmmaking a decade ago and has since made two more beguiling movies, “The Thin Red Line” (1998) and “The New World” (2005).

Malick’s second feature, “Days of Heaven” (1978), a turn-of-the-20th-century romantic tragedy distilled into the form of a nature reverie, has a well-deserved reputation as one of the most beautiful movies ever made. (It’s out on DVD this week in a restored edition from the Criterion Collection.)

As in his 1973 debut, “Badlands,” the central characters in “Days of Heaven” are a couple on the run and the prevailing flavor is rural Americana. But Malick’s insistence on subverting storytelling conventions is apparent here even in the opening minutes. In a sequence that flits by before one fully registers its implications, Bill (Richard Gere), a Chicago steel mill worker, gets into a fight with his boss, accidentally kills him, and flees town, accompanied by his little sister, Linda (Linda Manz), and his lover, Abby (Brooke Adams). Arriving in the fields of the Texas Panhandle (Abby pretending to be Bill’s sister), they work the wheat harvest for an ailing farmer (Sam Shepard), who falls for Abby, thus setting up a doomed love triangle.

The plot is fragmented and diffuse; the relationships often seem underdeveloped. And yet the movie takes on a powerful strangeness, an almost Greek-tragic intensity. As repressed passions bubble up, a biblical plague of locusts arrives and the suspended idyll evaporates; the days of heaven are swallowed up in a hellish conflagration.

The film’s oddest aspect may be the voice-over narration (a Malick trademark) from Manz’s character, a deadpan observer and an oddly logical viewer surrogate. The “Days of Heaven” combo of wide-eyed voice-over and mystical landscapes has become so common that it’s now practically a cliche (discernible, for instance, in the recently released “The Assassination of Jesse James” and “Into the Wild”). But Manz, a first-time child actor (who popped up again many years later in Harmony Korine’s “Gummo”), remains a unique narrator, at once dreamy and prickly, lyrical but not quite articulate.

An expansive epic that runs a tidy 94 minutes, “Days of Heaven” proceeds with an associative rhythm more common to music or poetry than movies. Some of the punctuation shots -- a faraway train on an elevated bridge, a dropped wine glass at the bottom of a river bed -- are jolting in their sheer unexpected beauty. The editor, Bill Weber, has worked on all four of Malick’s features as has the brilliant production designer Jack Fisk, who built the Shepard character’s home -- a lone, imposing mansion on the vast plains -- from the ground up.

Across the board, the film is a triumph of craft, from Patricia Norris’ period costumes to Ennio Morricone’s indelibly haunting score, which quotes a refrain from Camille Saint-Saens’ “Carnival of the Animals.” And there is of course Nestor Almendros’ Oscar-winning cinematography (Haskell Wexler, who took over at the end of the shoot because of scheduling conflicts, is credited with additional photography). Malick insisted that parts of the film be shot at “magic hour,” the brief window between sunset and nightfall when natural light takes on an almost otherworldly glow.

There’s some truth in the oft-repeated claim that you can only do “Days of Heaven” justice by seeing it on the big screen. But Criterion’s typically excellent transfer, supervised by Malick, is a more than satisfactory substitute. Extras include a featurette on the cinematography and a joint commentary track by Malick’s faithful collaborators (Fisk, Weber, Norris and casting director Deborah Crittenden).

Looking back from this vantage point, it’s clear that “Days of Heaven” stands as this singular filmmaker’s statement of purpose. It’s a crystalline expression of what Malick, like few filmmakers before or since, has striven for in his work: the possibility of a new language for narrative cinema.