Amber waves of celluloid

Terrence Malick, one of America's greatest directors, has made only four films. His first, "Badlands," (1973) stars a young, James Dean-idolizing Martin Sheen in a classic lovers-on-the-run picture. His middle child, the somehow lesser-known "Days of Heaven," (1978) was such a masterwork that he didn't endeavor to make his next, the more recent "The Thin Red Line," (1998) until 20 years later. It's easy to see why.\n"Days of Heaven" stars a dreamy young Richard Gere as a "Chicaga" steel-mill worker on the lam, his girlfriend and little sister in tow. For reasons only alluded to, he and his girlfriend masquerade as brother and sister, and the three climb atop a smoke-billowing locomotive packed with other hobos heading south in search of a better life. When they find work for a pittance as shuckers on a sprawling wheat farm in the north Texan panhandle, the stage is set. The rich farm owner falls for Gere's girlfriend, initiates a love triangle and a dazzling pandemonium of Americana ensues: flying circuses, plagues, devastating wildfires, biplanes, Model Ts and shootouts. \nThrough an onslaught of gorgeous panoramic shots, Malick depicts America at its most operatic, making the Great Plains seem like a place out of the Bible or ancient Greece. Characters are bathed in perennial golden sunlight, their wind-cracked faces shot from below. This is mythic America, seen before in Thomas Hart Benton and Edward Hopper paintings. Here, even Gere's hellish steel-factory labor seems meaningful and heroic. Ennio Morricone channels Aaron Copland for the score, and a story emerges from a backdrop of laboring humans dwarfed by endless Texas horizon. The wind is so fierce that it drowns out conversations and so omnipresent that we're treated to hypnotic extended shots of it simply blowing the wheat around. Generous dissolves make dreamlike scenes seem to melt into one another.\nSound and visuals aren't the only artistically exploitable facets of the film -- Malick has the thick-accented, cigarette-smoking 13-year-old little sister, played by Linda Manz, carry the dreamy narration, and her distant commentary provides a surreal perspective on the very adult events that surround her. In the picture's larger effort to unite the two, her words drift between the commonplace and the poetic. \nThe lamentable thing about "Days of Heaven," though, is that it tries to pack the depth and complexity of a great novel into an impossibly short 90 minutes. Where many directors will take 10 minutes to explore and convey a character's reaction to something pivotal, Malick packs it into a fleeting facial expression and presses on. This obligation to be economical ramps up the film's melodrama and, as a result, will turn some viewers away. The constant stream of major events is so unlike the pace of real life that it overstimulates to the point of disorientation. But the overall effect is mesmerizing. Viewers will either be lost in "Days of Heaven" or lost to it.\nLike the characters it depicts, the film takes itself seriously and employs little restraint. That said, this is not a slow, ponderous European art film. There's something quintessentially American about it; something colossal seems to happen every 10 minutes. In turn, the hyper-romantic Gere over-acts as if he's on stage. (One of the few points of comic relief is a moment where the little sister, a quintessential sarcastic Midwesterner, effortlessly mocks her brother's grand self-image). These times are both heroic and dire. Though there are lighthearted moments, there's not much room for joking around.\nCompared to most nations across the pond, America's history is only a brief, poignant moment, but this film shows just how powerful and epic any fraction of that moment could have been. This is a story of larger-than-life people in a larger-than-life nation. The revelation of the film's final minutes is that this story, with all its weight and allegory, is a mere chapter in these characters' much longer lives. \nLike America, they're still young, and plenty of history remains to be written. By the time the credits roll, the world feels new, electric and bursting with possibility. After all, in 1911, our country might well have seemed like a dream world -- incomprehensibly vast, with promise of new life. The film's greatest achievement is making that century-old feeling so palpable to us today.