Take One (Nov 1978)

a ee ee —OOCOCCOoOoooQBeoa ee eee ener ee ee ee nnn neee ene neeeneeeeeeeeee ee truly loves Abby, but upon hearing that the Farmer has only a year left to live, he urges her to accept the sick man’s offer of marriage. After the wedding, all four live in the big house as tensions mount, until the Farmer's suspicions about his “brother-in-law” explode during a plague of locusts. This sequence epitomizes the film’s simultaneous. glories and drawbacks: the storm is presented through achingly beautiful images—from the close-up of locusts clinging to branches before being burned off, to the majestic long shots of the raging fire that recall Gone With The Wind—but the storm is too overwhelming a consequence for the far-from-epic passions that seem ’ to engender it. The. discrepancies between breathtaking style and limited content are partly due to offbeat casting, low-key acting, and minimal character development. Gere seems a bit too contemporary for the part, looking and sounding more like the violent boyfriend he played in Looking for Mr. Goodbar than a laborer circa 1915. His first audible line in Days of Heaven—a belligerent “You talkin’ to me?”—links him more intimately to Taxi Driver, where Robert De Niro practices this phrase in the mirror, than to the Texas landscape in which Bill toils. Brooke Adams doesn’t appear to be acting much, but her husky voice is a delight to hear. Voice is also the most salient characteristic of Linda Manz, the young street-wise girl whose harsh accent and rasping tone accompany the luminous images. But the real surprise of the film is playwright Sam Shepard, who creates in his first screen role the most sympathetic, believable and sustained character. Most of the other people in the film exist as aesthetic objects rather than individuals—dark silhouettes against the golden wheat—symbolic less of political possibilities (4 la Bertolucci) than of cinematic ones like composition, lighting, color, texture, and scale. However, this criticism may be nitpicking—or more precisely _ lit/critpicking. Like Barry Lyndon, Malick’s creation resists critical attempts rooted in plot/character/message, and insists on being experienced in its own uniquely cinematic terms. Many viewers will be quick to point out Days of Heaven's deficiencies of content, as well as the “pretty” and potentially meaningless shots rendered overly romantic by Ennio Morricone’s melodic, sweeping score (not unlike his music for 1900). But Days of Heaven is closer to a poem than a novel, and invites an appreciative awareness of rhythm, texture, internal rhyme, and visual/oral counterpoint. As in Badlands, Malick’s inclusion of an unsophisticated female voice-over qualifies the polished image and adds another layer to the experience of the film. Linda Manz’s raw voice is like a salty, crunchy counterpoint to the aforementioned desserts. The narration disconcerts and distances the viewer, and defines the film in two significant ways: as a child’s vision—thus permitting the images to dissolve and flow with little concern for “chronological development” or “narrative coherence’—and as a memoir, with Piranha moments re-collected through the inherently romantic filter of nostalgia. At its worst, this is art for art’s sake. At its best, Days of Heaven is a rich and haunting cinematic experience whose power falls just short of—or lies beyond—film as narrative art. Annette Insdorf Please sir, they're eating the guests... My friends have always told me I have weird taste, that I like some of the dumbest and strangest movies. I feel I ought to warn you of that, before I suggest to you that Piranha is an absolutely dynamite horror movie, a tight old-fashioned hour-and-a-half movie with good acting, real villains, sharp editing, bright color, the whole bit. (I did feel that paying four bucks admission was a bit much, but that seems to be part of the legacy of Proposition 13 in California these days; as you'll see, that remark is not a very serious digression.) It’s a movie that is easy to take seriously, that is not When was the last time oe YOU went for aswim? just right on target but as we used to say, right on. The only thing wrong with it is that it’s making money. by showing carnage and encouraging people to be afraid of nature; but if you can deal with that, and like horror films in the first place, you'll have a great time. The genre (and co-producer) is Roger Corman. In other words, it’s a sendup from the word go, and also a successful example of what it’s sending up. It's directed and co-edited by Joe Dante. The cast list lets you know immediately that Dante and Corman, for all their jumping on the financial avalanche of Jaws I and 2 SM3IAId Wild