THE FILM-DVD "BADLANDS" : A REVIEW

BADLANDS
Directed by: Terrence Malick - Written by: Terrence Malick - Starring: Martin Sheen, Sissy Spacek, Warren Oates
Released: I973

Watch enough movies and you begin to get a bad case of deja vu. Plot device from one married to theme from another with new actors and new location. What’s really new? Not much - except the audiences - a new group every year coming up, green as grass, to whom the discovery of an amazing plot twist is to them amazingly original. As in war, in film everything is the same, except that new technologies each year put more power into younger hands. George Lucas is a billionaire because he dared to rehash the old Buster Crabbe Flash Gordon serials of the nineteen-thirties, using new computer-graphics, into a movie that was hailed by a generation as its signature film - Star Wars. As the writer Joe Gillis said in Sunset Boulevard, “I wrote the screenplay as a baseball picture, but by the time it reached the screen it played on a PT Boat.”

Terence Malik’s Badlands is a marriage of teen idiocy to old-west fantasy, in an authentic west. For this, thank the fact that the film is based roughly on a real story. The badlands of the title are the semi-arid flat plains of the western Dakotas and eastern Montana and some parts south of there. You can see forever to the horizon, broken only by the creeks with their attendant cottonwood trees hugging the banks.

This flat country is the backdrop for two young lovers, Kit (Martin Sheen) and Holly (Sissy Spacek), from a small town who decide to take off in his James Dean-style black 5I Mercury. The open road means hundreds, even thousands of miles of open, flat country. Filming in this environment may have led to the later films of Malik’s where the landscape is obsessively observed.

Leaving is an easy way out of the terminal boredom of the their small town; they set-up in a grove of cottonwoods by a river in a kind of Tarzan and Jane mode. Somewhere Kit has picked up some native-american or survivalist lore; he constructs amazing tree houses in the cottonwoods as well as chicken cages and even underground pits for quick concealment. Between the chickens and the fish he catches in the river, they’re set-up in a Badlands Arcadia. The sex has been had already, to which the young ex-virgin cries, “Gosh, what was everyone talking about?” But she’s excited by the change of view and begins keeping a journal, which will provide the running narration through the film.

Kit has to keep an eye out, because the law may be looking for them. See, when they left town, the father objected, so Kit shot him with his revolver and set the house on fire, an act to which neither Holly nor Kit nor even the viewer will have much real depression about. But we do know these aren’t your everyday thrill-seeking teens. Eventually someone sees them and some deputies show up at their camp. Kit gets the drop on them and shoots them all in the back. But you get the feeling that if things had gone differently, Kit wouldn’t be sour about it. May the best man win - no hard feelings.

They move on, this time to an old stone homesteader house out on the prairie where Kit’s only friend lives. They stand around for a while exchanging pleasantries, but when the friend makes a run for his truck Kit nails him with a deer rifle at I00 yards. The man staggers back through the front door so he can flop in bed. Holly exchanges pleasantries as he slowly bleeds to death. When a young couple comes calling, Kit takes them on a little tour of the place; Holly asks the girl if she’s in love, Kit meanwhile forces them into an outdoor root cellar, closes the lid and fires two shots through the door. By this time we know Kit's not playing with a full deck. All this happens in the vast open plain; any armed man’s drama can play out here, and the way he wants it; and only the sun and stars for witnesses.

After further adventures Kit decides to leave the highways and to drive off-road on the prairie itself in a general northwest direction in a stolen new black Cadillac. A trademark shot has Kit tending a fire on the open prairie, the Cadillac positioned to the right, while a huge sky looms overall; homage to the western film genre. Mallick learned that the topography can be your friend and partner. His following films are visually gorgeous in a manner not matched by any director other than Kubrick and some of the Italians.

Kit starts getting poetic, and even mopey Holly is in a good mood as they leave a personal time capsule on the prairie and the two dance to Nat King Cole music on the car radio under the stars. They know there’s not much time left to them on their last sweet trip. By now we know that this film is not what it seems. Badlands is a Western; the outlaw rides a Cadillac instead of a horse. ©Features-on-Film.Inc