Badlands.

Review #2496: Badlands.

Cast: 

Martin Sheen (Kit), Sissy Spacek (Holly), Warren Oates (Father), Ramon Bieri (Cato), Alan Vint (Deputy Tom), Gary Littlejohn (Sheriff), John Carter (Rich Man), Bryan Montgomery (Boy), Gail Threlkeld (Girl), and Charley Fitzpatrick (Clerk) Written, Produced, and Directed by Terrence Malick.

Review: 

"I tried to keep the 1950s to a bare minimum. Nostalgia is a powerful feeling; it can drown out anything. I wanted the picture to set up like a fairy tale, outside time, like Treasure Island. I hoped this would, among other things, take a little of the sharpness out of the violence but still keep its dreamy quality. Children's books are full of violence. Long John Silver slits the throats of the faithful crew. Kit and Holly even think of themselves as living in a fairy tale. Holly says, "Sometimes I wished I could fall asleep and be taken off to some magical land, but this never happened." But she enough believes there is such a place that she must confess to you she never got there." - Terrence Malick

I suppose there's no better way to start with a director as curious as Terence Malick than to just go with their debut. Born in Illinois but raised in the South, Malick studied at Harvard for philosophy and graduated with a bachelor's degree before electing to study further at Oxford University's Magdalen College. However, he left without a degree due to a disagreement over his thesis, which soon saw him travel back to the States to teach philosophy at MIT and do freelance journalism. However, he apparently felt that he wasn't a good teacher when it came to "the sort of edge one should have on the students", so he decided to focus on studying at AFI because of his liking of movies "in a kind of naive way". He made his first short film with Lanton Mills in 1969. Malick's agent got him freelance work revising scripts, which saw him do uncredited drafts for Dirty Harry (1971) and Pocket Money (1972). Malick raised half of the money by approaching people outside of the film industry (alongside using $25,000 of his own savings) while the other half was raised by Edward R. Pressman. Malick described in an interview prior to the release of the film that books such as The Hardy Boys and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, had influence on the script (at least one that he realized influenced him after doing the script). The movie was more a critical darling than an audience hit at the time, but so it goes. Malick continued his career with Days of Heaven (1978) before curiosity reigned over exactly what he was doing before his next film with The Thin Red Line years later in 1998; at any rate, he has directed nine features and one experimental documentary in over five decades as a filmmaker. 

The real events were curious in themselves: Starkweather murdered eleven people in Nebraska and Wyoming in 1958 at the age of 19 that saw him accompanied by his 14-year-old girlfriend in Caril Ann Fugate (with Badlands, Sheen was 32 and Spacek was 22). Fugate claimed she was a hostage, not knowing until later that her mother, stepfather and sister had already been killed by Starkweather. Sentenced to life, she served 18 years in prison* while Starkweather (once quoted as saying dead people were all on the same level) got the electric chair. Those events have inspired a few other movies such as The Sadist (1963) and Natural Born Killers (1994)*. With Badlands, you get a pretty curious film because it isn't so much just a violent film as it is one that has a strange nature to looking out of time within what actually is seen and heard, mainly because it is more Spacek's film than anything. How else would one understand the type to string along with Sheen unless you hear the underlying journey told by Spacek? There is a haunting nature to the way she navigates the film in terms of passivity that isn't merely just naivety but instead is something that seems removed from, well, you or me. With Sheen, it's much easier to look at him and understand how he could corral certain things to go his way with his magnetism of nonchalance (incidentally, he believed it was the best script he had ever read). They are two empty souls that think the gun as a magic wand (okay that came from Malick) that traverse through the landscape with the same kind of weary nature that we can only hope we don't see in ourselves. They end up as doomed figures hurtling through oblivion that can only be understood by actually viewing the film rather than just seeing images of it and its landscapes. The drama isn't in the chase or in the conflict between these people, nope, instead it is a movie of people who are just in their own element of actions and impulses, which for some might be spookier than a straight-crime movie. But so it goes. As a whole, Badlands is a curious film to see unfold in all of its interesting elements that come from what you see and hear in a spree of morbid curiosity. 

Overall, I give it 8 out of 10 stars.

*Fugate is still alive, as evidenced by a not-too-distant documentary about her: ‘It’s about more than just a crime’: what if a teen killer was actually a victim? | Documentary | The Guardian

*And even a Springsteen song.