50 Days 50 Films - #21 "Badlands" (Terrence Malick)

Both sort of a companion piece and response to Arthur Penn's 1967 classic "Bonnie and Clyde," Terrence Malick's debut film "Badlands" (1973) similarly takes a true-to-life romantic crime duo (in this case, Charles Starkweather and Carol Fugate) and fashions an existential parable about love, violence, detachment, and the American West.

The first thing you notice about "Badlands" is just how beautiful it is. Every frame is a perfectly composed little painting on celluloid. This emphasis on aesthetic beauty would become a hallmark of Malick's career (famously, every exterior shot in his followup, 1978's "Days of Heaven," was shot at magic hour), but it's also interesting to note how spare this film is in comparison to Malick's other work. There is little to none of the immersive swooping camera that would come to typify late-period Malick (this trailer for 2011's "Tree of Life" is practically a work of art unto itself). Instead, "Badlands" holds us at a very purposeful distance, relying heavily on static wide shots and forcing the action to play out almost in a proscenium arch. The camera rarely calls attention to itself, and when it does it does so to a very specific purpose.

Likewise, Malick's treatment of his characters and their motivations is completely opaque. He is not at all interested in psychoanalyzing Kit (Martin Sheen). Rather, Malick seems to accept him as an inevitable — perhaps even fundamental — fact of life. We get a bit more from Holly (Sissy Spacek) in the form of voiceover, but she's as much out in the audience as we are, watching the action unfold at a distance and with, at best, a sense of mild curiosity. There is no self reflection or insight to be had. Rather, her thoughts come to us as jumbled poetry that is as luscious to the ear as it is transient.

This is all to a purpose. Malick is a legitimate philosopher, having studied at Harvard under Stanley Cavell. Malick is concerned here with all the BIG IDEAS — language, life, time, self, community, and the nature of existence itself. Kit and Holly are stand-ins, not individuals in their own right but reflections of all of Malick's intellectual cross examinations. He asks all the right questions, but is a smart enough thinker to offer absolutely no answers whatsoever.

This makes viewing "Badlands" a singularly disconcerting experience. Malick offers none of the typical comforts of psychological empathy or identification. Kit and Holly are as impenetrable at the end as they are at the beginning. Other filmmakers — Michael Haneke in particular — have taken a page from this playbook with their own work, but no one else has done it quite so beautifully.