Ryan McNeil
We want to believe that we are in control. A situation might come with all the earmarks of certain doom – perhaps stopping just short of a dude in a black robe and a scythe with a flock of crows. Still, so many of us feel as though we can look this sort of scenario in the face and say “I got this”.
We don’t. None of us do. As another film about thirty years later would say: “You can’t stop what’s coming”.
DAYS OF HEAVEN has that idea interlaced into it – that our problems can be outrun, or outsmarted. We sense it off the top as Bill escapes a sticky situation in Chicago and believes that he’ll be OK if he just packs his girl and her sister on to the train with him and finds a place to lay low. In an effort to stack the deck, they lie and hope their lie will help cover their tracks.
Unfortunately, the lie doesn’t work, and fate catches up with them anyway.
The forces of fate behind them remind me of this shot where the locust swarm begins to overrun The Farmer’s crop. They’ve been visible for most of the movie, often seen in smaller clusters. However, like Bill’s troubles they are always right there; always a threat, always capable of taking over whenever they are good and ready. So in this moment the trouble takes over, swirling around our hero like a cloud of ash. Soon he will try to fight them off. He’ll try to beat them from the bushes and smoke them out, but in this moment, all he can do is look on in awe. He’s never seen anything like this, and so very often that’s the case.
To complete the visual metaphor, the people around him who could possibly help are reduced to silhouettes…and the house in the distance that represented his safe harbour is beginning to fade from view. None of these harbingers will prevent Bill from continuing to run, hide, and fight of course, but if he was looking for a sign – it’s hard to get a clearer sign than a biblical plague.
We are not in control – Bill wasn’t, and neither are the rest of us. When consequence or fate wants to pull us to the centre of the floor and judge us it will, and it has ways of making sure we appear before the jury.
The neat twist of it all is that sometimes even inevitability can look so damned stunning on-screen.
Here’s three more from DAYS OF HEAVEN for the road…
This series of posts is inspired by the “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” series at The Film Experience. Do check out all of the awesome entires in their series so far
I was thinking just yesterday about how it isn’t possible to choose one best shot from this film. The one you chose is definitely one of my favourites. I also love the shots when they have to burn the crops.
When I create these posts, I run the film on my laptop and just keep hitting “screencap” whenever something cool happens. When the film is over I look at everything I snagged and whittle it down to four (and ultimately, one).
When the film finished last night, my desktop was littered with jpg’s
Remind me not to choose another Malick movie for this series.
Yup, that’s the frame.
The story is one in which the characters are impotent to change their fate, caught up in a world so vast they are overwhelmed, hence the power of the plague of locust imagery. Evokes the beauty and fatalism of the film in a single image as well as show how nature ultimately equalizes both the rich (represented by the house in the background) and the poor (those in the fields in the foreground).
You should choose another Malick movie for this series. The New World: Extended Edition! The Thin Red Line! You should see my aborted attempt to try to take on Days of Heaven a scene at a time. It became overwhelming rather quickly.
http://cinemasights.com/?p=2102
Well the point of the Freeze Frame series – as you specifically requested, actually – was to write about more classics. Hence the criteria for a post is that a film has to have been released pre-1985 (30 years or more).
So I’ll come back around to BADLANDS in a while, but the others are unfortunately out-of-bounds.
I will definitely be diggin’ into that series though, and consider it a massive badge of honour that you approve of my shot selection.
Love this film. I think you could pick about 30 choices for these, if not more. This is still Malick’s finest work for me.
Yep – like I pointed out to Nik, this was one of my harder titles to narrow down.
My favorite film by Terry Malick. I love that film. In fact, there will be a screening for the film in June at my nearest art-house theater 15 minutes from where I live. I won’t be able to go to the morning showing as I have an appointment with my shrink but I do hope to go to the Monday screening a few days later at 7PM. A Malick film has to be seen on the big screen.
They had a neat little retrospective of his at The Lightbox here in town in the run-up to THE TREE OF LIFE. Guess which one of his (at the time) five films remained the only one I didn’t get to see on the big screen?