Badlands

Badlands is a dark 1970s existential road oddity through the Badlands of the midwest with fugitive Kit and his 15 crush Holly. The story, which is set in the 1950s, seems to exist in a fairytale, and this element is one of the reasons I love this film. The film is mostly spoken through the internal monologue of Holly, delivering the film as a tale or fable. She encounters a war veteran who collects garbage, a man with images of grandeur, who has nothing to live for and nothing to lose. When the two social misfits hit it off, her protective father disapproves and kills her dog, bags it and dumps it into the river as punishment; a rather drastic measure. It does go some way to explain why Holly, who we must remember is 15, seems to be benevolent to the actions of Kit when he starts to murder people who pose a threat to Holly and their survival. Both father and lover seem to resort to vicious, violent acts to protect her. He naivete does not survive the whole film though, as she tires of their time on the road, she dreams of the man she will marry, what he looks like, and where he might be right now.

While it is important to note that the film was inspired by the real-life serial killer Charles Starkweather and his lover-or captive-Caril Fugate', one should not assume the script is a retelling of their story. Malick does not reference them in the movie, and it must be said Charles Starkweather's story was more horrific in every detail. Badlands is more a coming of age story for Holly, a fall from grace for Kit, and the fairytale they lived in the moments in between.

I must admit that I adore the dialogue from this film, the subtle interactions, often littered with dark humour, and an air of altruism fill the film with a poetry that is complemented by the exquisite imagery of the Badlands, nature and the most incredible shot of Martin Sheen holding his rifle over this shoulder as the sun sets. The soundtrack further accents the mood of the film, bringing the entire atmosphere to one that envelopes you.

The serial killer genre is the most overdone in modern cinema, but director Terrence Mallick took a real life story to make his powerful debut, 'Badlands'. He even toned it down, his interest being not in presenting a picture of pure (and wholly artificial) evil but rather in portraying a wholly human story. Murder is depicted here in all its banality - people shot (off-screen) through locked doors, by a young man acting for wholly normal motives but without the customary restraints on behaviour that we term morals. The result is a haunting, though occasionally pretentious, study of individuals drifting beyond the bounds of civilisation, their physical location (America's still-wild west) symbolically matching their mental isolation. Sissy Spacek is particularly good as the ordinary girl just along for the ride. A fine film, 'Badlands' is also genuinely disturbing, in a way that Hannibal Lector could only dream of.

BADLANDS is an intelligent little film. We're given characters and situations and left to make our own conclusions. Based on an actual young couple who went on a killing spree across the southwest in the late 1950s, the story has two young people doing their own thing with precious little in the way of ethics to guide them. It's interesting to note that both these kids substitute their own fantasies for any sense of order or responsibility that society may have to offer. The turning point comes when Kit and Holly decide to shuck their semblances of normal life for whatever their fantasies provide which, unfortunately, can't sustain them. Sheen's Kit is full of swagger and bravado; it's almost easy for someone to see him committing robberies and serial murders. Spacek's Holly is more intriguing: a soft, vanilla, invisible girl from a respectable, emotionally detached home, she seemingly possesses little in the way of what one would associate with a violent criminal. Yet, she accompanies Kit, with nothing in the way of reservations or regret. The chance to fulfill her vapid, movie magazine fantasies, if only by hiding out in the woods and applying makeup, seem infinitely more palatable than her dull existence twirling batons in her yard(it's interesting to note that one of the few things she takes away from her home is a highly romanticized, Maxfield Parrish print). These misguided illusions, along with her adolescent love for Kit, keep her going to the end. A worthwhile exploration of the bland, vacant American sensibility that values appearances or passive, benign behavior over real ethics and personal morality. And definitely more relevant as the years have passed.

Is it really possible that this luminous masterpiece is a first feature film? It is as though Mozart had started his career in composition with one of his mature symphonies. What is totally special about 'Badlands' is the visual control that Terrence Malick applies to the story, and his use of fabulous music to embed his amazing images in our mind. The 'Bonnie & Clyde'-ish story could have been turgid, but Malick turns it into a mythic journey.

At the heart of Malick's method is the fabulous interior monologue by Holly explaining and ironically commenting on the story. "Kit made me take my schoolbooks so I wouldn't fall behind with my studies...". This has been characteristic of each of Malick's films - Linda in 'Days of Heaven' and Witt in 'The Thin Red Line' have somewhat similar monologues - and 'New World' is monumentalised by the haunting monologue/montage with which it ends. Here it totally sucks the viewer into the story and makes the montages that it accompanies into, just about, the high-point of seventies cinema.

Alongside this, Malick uses some of the most haunting music in existence. Whether it is Carl Orff or Nat King Cole, Malick transports us with fabulous romantic imagery that perfectly balances it.

I started on this comment determined not to use the word 'poetry', but I just can't avoid it. With nearly all filmmakers, including very great ones, the style that they present is very much prose - great prose, perhaps, but firmly rooted on the ground. With Malick, we are taken, emotionally, to the stars by the lyric magnificence of the totality of his vision.

It is said that Welles learned cinema by watching John Ford's 'Stagecoach' before embarking on 'Citizen Kane'. Every young filmmaker should watch this amazing masterpiece again and again and again and inform their work with Malick's matchless sense of true cinema.

It's really a shame that Terrence Malick didn't have the brilliant career he deserved at Hollywood. Shot with a nearly shoestring budget, "Badlands" remains one of the most dazzling debut movies of all time. Malick's legend based on his (long) absence has helped it to become a cult-movie. Inspired by a tragic short news item which took place in 1959 (a young couple who decides to commit a series of free murders to leave a mark in history), the odds are that Malick's first feature-length movie inspired Oliver Stone and Quentin Tarantino for their dangerous and irresponsible "Natural Born Killers" (1994). Concerning Tarantino, I read an interview about him in which he expressed his admiration of Malick's work. It shows that the author of "Pulp Fiction" (1994) has a great esteem for this talented and mysterious film-maker. At the same time, we can also note down that Malick's work inspired Bruce "the Boss" Springsteen two songs: "Badlands" on his "darkness on the edge of town" album (1978) and "nebraska" on the eponymous LP(1982).

An American journalist had written that "Badlands" was the best mastered movie in the history of cinema since "Citizen Kane" (1941) by Orson Welles. One can judge this affirmation as exaggerated but it is nevertheless indisputable that Malick's opus strikes on numerous aspects: an assertive and opaque story, a fluid making, a relevant screenplay, an original photography which gives to the landscapes an image of desolation and lost paradise perturbed by a free violence. The work is also strongly steeped in a certain poetry.

Concerning the two main characters, a French critic had written that it was difficult to feel liking for these two irresponsible. I think that this critic badly analyzed the film. Terrence Malick doesn't try to make them likable to us. He describes them without kindness and condescension. They haven't got an imposing personality and live only through an intermediary myth. It is particularly obvious for the young man (Martin Sheen) who is obsessed with James Dean. One can also say that Sissi Spacek's voice-over which tells this dramatic story is of an amazing neutrality. Then, unlike many criminal lovers, Sheen and Spacek will live at the heart of this violence and the latter won't bring them together or take them away.

With "Badlands", Malick was judicious for the choice of the actors. In a way, his first movie enabled to put Sheen and Spacek on the map and it also launched their respective careers. Then, what happened to Terrence Malick after this sensational debut movie? A second movie, "Days of Heaven" (1978) starring Richard Gere as successful as "Badlands". After that, for twenty years, nothing. However, in 1998, Malick made a rather successful come-back with "the Thin Red Line" (1998). According to the latest news, he would currently shoot a movie about the first years of America's colonization in the beginning of the seventeenth century. If my memory serves me well, the movie will be released next year. Let's hope so...

Like this?try these....

"gun crazy" ,Joseph H.Lewis ,1950

"you only live once" Fritz Lang,1936

"Bonnie and Clyde" Arthur Penn,1967