5/31: Badlands
This is probably the Terrence Malick movie for people who hate Terrence Malick. I do not hate Terrence Malick; I find his work fascinating (with one exception, The Thin Red Line, which I have now attempted three times, falling asleep at the 20-minute mark each time). I acknowledge that he disappears up his own butthole, frequently and at length, but in my view, he finds some cool stuff up there.
Badlands is relatively spare compared to Malick’s other work. He does get into a little nature/soundtrack collaging, and in the case of the fire, it seems more self-indulgent than usual given the tightness of the rest of the film, but overall, it’s straightforward and paced well.
The real magic here is in the performances, particularly at a distance. Martin Sheen is amazing as Kit, even more so when you see bits and glimpses of President Bartlet — and bits and glimpses of his sons (the scene where Kit freaks about behind the hangar after Holly has checked out of their lam is like a highlight reel from St. Elmo’s Fire and Wall Street…and here we are at today’s Sentence I Never Thought Could Be Typed, Much Less Would Be By Me entry). Strange to say about the father, but he’s a better-looking composite of Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen, and if you add their acting talent together, you get the father, too.
Sissy Spacek’s flatline Holly, though, is the most notable and unsettling aspect of the story. You can tell right away that something about Kit is off; his affect isn’t quite right, and his volatility is a red flag an older girl would see waving from some distance away. But his observation — conveyed via Holly’s incurious VO — that Holly talks like a grown-up both hits it and doesn’t. Her disaffection and control could seem like maturity at first, but by the time you reach the treehouse sequence, it’s clear that it’s something else, something more in something less: an absence of light. She doesn’t really care about anything; you can never tell what’s going to set Kit off, but nothing sets Holly off at all. She’s tired, or she doesn’t want steak, or she’s mildly irritated that she almost stepped on a dead chicken, or she wants Kit to drown while she watches, and the cumulative effect of her dispassion is the feeling that it isn’t Kit who should get the chair, come the day.
The film is partly based on the Starkweather-Fugate crime spree from the fifties, but a grounding in that case isn’t necessary, and Malick gets at the larger themes with a firm editing hand and excellent lead performances. A bona fide, if likely minor, classic.
Tags: 31 Days 31 Films Badlands Caril Ann Fugate Charles Starkweather Charlie Sheen Emilio Estevez Martin Sheen movies Sissy Spacek Terrence Malick
I totally agree about Spacek. She plays sociopathy that’s delightfully chilling. I remember reading a book by a profiler who insisted Fugate was way badder than Starkweather, so maybe that’s why I see it in Spacek. Or maybe it’s just Spacek.
Also: Martin Sheen was teh foxx back in the day.
And one other thing: I’m one of those that haaaaaaaaaate Malick films. I wanted to drop a depth charge on TTRL, it and its languid pace made me so angry. I lasted 20 minutes of The New World before throwing a shoe at the screen. I’ve finally learned to give myself permission to skip The Tree of Life, and just chalk him and his oeuvre up to: Not my cup of tea.
My first Malick ever (I haven’t actually kept up), and I still remember its effect on me. It’s a riveting document of the banality of evil, or in evil; Sissy Spacek twirling her baton, or saying “I realized Kit and I were growing apart” (paraphrased) after mad, abrupt violence. Much, much creepier to me than, say, Natural Born Killers. This is more like Kate Millett’s The Basement–where it’s the eerie creep of deficit into normality that to me makes the violence so unsettling. It’s also a great use of non-Carmina Burana Carl Orff. (Days of Heaven also some fabulous uses of music and narration from Malick, while we’re there.)
Amen to the foxiness of young Martin Sheen. Another striking difference between Kit and Holly is that while Holly sometimes comes off as naive, Kit often seems just plain dumb (the suggestion of smashing his finger with a rock, the never-fails-to-crack-me-up “I found a . . . toaster” line).
There was a brilliant B movie called The Sadist made about the Fugit-Starkweather case starring Arch Hall Jr. and Marilyn Manning of Eegah! fame. Marilyn’s character is like the distillation of Spacek’s–she doesn’t say one word through the entire movie, except to whisper in Arch’s ear when she gets an idea of what violence she’d like to see, and her blank, little child with no soul affect is ten times more terrifying then Arch’s rantings could ever be–and he’s a scary sonofa, lemme tell you.
Spacek’s on record as saying that her mom hated her first movie because of the nudity but loved this film. Serial killers who keep their dresses on? No prob.
“I acknowledge that he disappears up his own butthole, frequently and at length, but in my view, he finds some cool stuff up there.” – The BEST description of Terrence Malick ever!! I’m going to steal it the next time I defend him if you don’t mind.
Anyway, I am a Malick fan. I’m one of “those” fans that will argue all day with someone over what they’re missing in his films. Although, I will admit that I couldn’t defend Tree of Life; that angered me most, that there was nothing in that film that was worth defending.
But Badlands, and to a lesser degree Days of Heaven, is a movie that I’ve never had to stick up for. I’ve really never encountered someone that didn’t feel the powerful effects of this film in one way or another. I haven’t seen it in over a decade, but it may be time to revisit it.
My post was eaten. I think.
It’s interesting that several of us who like Malick have an exception, and the exception varies. Mine is The New World. Watching that on its release, I worried that he had finally lost me. The things his critics had complained about, increasingly, with the earlier three were problems for me for the first time. I knew I was seeing something rich in beauty, poetry, and meaning, but also something glacial, rudderless, and uninvolving. I’ve never been able to get through it a second time, although I have the DVD and have tried.
Why I would feel that way about The New World but not The Thin Red Line (which is longer) and The New World (which is more…extreme?), I don’t know. Maybe it’s that Q’orianka Kilcher and Christian Bale carry a lot of The New World’s human burden (I hesitate to say “acting burden” about later Malick), and I don’t get enough from them.
I love his use of non-original music in all five of his films. He has reliably interesting taste there. Days of Heaven has one of the best titles sequences ever, and it isn’t just the old photos that get it over, it’s that haunting little Saint-Saëns piece, the ‘Aquarium’ from Carnival of the Animals (which Morricone then echoes and transforms in his score). The same piece was then borderline-overused elsewhere in media, but that titles sequence still does it for me every time.
Above, the one I meant to describe as the most “extreme” product of Malick’s approach was The Tree of Life, which I liked very much.
Todd, the “Aquarium” use was the prime example that I was thinking of on the music front.