Badlands

dir.: Terrence Malick

PG, 95 min.

Showing Saturday and Sunday at the Belcourt Cinema

In 1972, an MIT philosophy professor tried his hand at directing a movie for the first time. His subject was the 1958 murder spree of Charles Starkweather, a Nebraska layabout who corralled his 16-year-old girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate into a romance on the lam. The professor wrote a lean script, signed Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek to star, and started an on-again, off-again career in movies that would send critics scrambling for their auteurist superlatives.

The movie was Badlands, which screens Saturday and Sunday afternoon at the Belcourt as part of its “American Outlaws” series, and the professor was Terrence Malick, who has graced us with only two more films since that auspicious debut—Days of Heaven in 1978 and, after a 20-year hiatus in Paris, The Thin Red Line in 1998. All three of Malick’s films share common stylistic elements, although their subject matter could hardly vary more widely, from serial killers to migrant farm laborers to the Battle of Guadacanal. His signature touches—the brooding presence of nature, ironic and wise voiceover narration, an awareness of the distancing layers of artistic reflection—are clearly present, even highly developed, in Badlands. At the same time, the film’s deadpan irony and blackly comic aspects make it by far Malick’s most accessible and conventionally entertaining movie.

Sheen plays Kit Carruthers, a South Dakota garbageman who cultivates James Dean’s rebellious persona while courting Holly (Spacek), an inexperienced redhead with nothing to do. Although their “forbidden love” consists entirely of Kit’s posturing and Holly’s abashed silences, Holly’s voiceover describes the couple’s romance in terms borrowed from melodrama: “I sensed that my destiny now lay with Kit, for better or for worse, and that it was better to spend a week with one who loved me for what I was than years of loneliness.”

The first obstacle between Kit and outlaw fame is Holly’s father, played by Warren Oates, who winds up dead in his basement, exchanged for a broken toaster. The lovers flee to the woods, where they construct a hideout about on a par with what Survivor contestants usually manage. But when searchers get too close, the two have to come back into the open, and that means more dead bodies. As Holly puts it, “Kit was the most trigger-happy person I’d ever met. He claimed that as long as you’re playing for keeps and the law is coming at you, it’s considered OK to shoot all witnesses. You had to take the consequences, though, and not whine about it later.”

Holly’s naiveté and starstruck, “dear diary” narration provide most of the irony in Malick’s screenplay. But it’s enriched in the finished film by Sheen’s swaggering sense of self-importance. Kit clearly has no idea what he’s doing—he’s merely following the code he’s learned from outlaw movies in a bid for the only immortality within his reach—but infuriatingly, he’s right about nearly everything. When he passes a wrecked car and comments, “They’ll probably blame that on me too,” we’re meant to laugh at how his inflated ego imagines that the world revolves around his crime spree. But in the final half hour, we find out that it does—that the whole country has been following his story, partly in horror but mostly in admiration. A sheriff’s deputy willingly grants Kit his most cherished wish by observing, “I’ll kiss your ass if he don’t look like James Dean.”

In comparison with Malick’s two later movies, Badlands is most astonishing for its already mature visual sense. Malick would become celebrated for his passages of pure cinema, the juxtaposition of image upon image without dialogue—the field of locusts in Days of Heaven or the wind-driven grasses of The Thin Red Line. One might expect him to be feeling his way toward imagery in Badlands; most first-time writer-directors tend to depend on their writing to carry the story, not trusting the camera to speak for itself. But Malick scatters dozens of purely visual moments through his first film, buttressing his screenplay with indelible imagery: Holly twirling a baton in her desolate yard, Kit testing the carcass of a dead cow with his boot, Kit shooting a football that then refuses to deflate, the silent daily routine of their makeshift hideout.

The late, lamented Spy magazine once pointed out that America harbors two categories of major artists: those who rest on laurels earned years ago by a few great works (“coasters”) and those who simply don’t work, either out of fear or out of a sadistic desire to deny us their talent (“refuseniks”). As the decades-long hiatus between Malick films drags on, we’re tempted to wonder if he’s a coaster; then, after he proves his genius yet again, we can’t help but wonder why he persists in being a refusenik. Couldn’t he speed it up a little and give us the next one in, say, five years? As frustrating as Malick’s reclusive and idiosyncratic method can be, however, it’s hard to argue with the results: a trilogy of films that amount to the great American novel, three times over.

—Donna Bowman

Pros and cons

The Score is the third film since 1995 to star Robert De Niro as a master criminal in the twilight of his career. Critics and cinephiles often discuss the work of certain directors in terms of recurring themes, but actors can be auteurs too, and it’s hard not to see a connection between De Niro’s ascetic heister in Heat, his anonymous spook in Ronin, and the cautious safecracker he plays in The Score. Each man is a skilled professional, and each has stayed out of prison by being extremely careful—so much so that he’s essentially unable to enjoy the spoils of his crimes.

In The Score, De Niro is joined by two strong-willed actors who bracket him generationally. Working a variation on the untrustworthy hotshot he portrayed in Primal Fear and Rounders, Ed Norton plays a cocky young thief with an irresistible scheme; he’s a headstrong bastard who’s better than he should be, but not as good as he thinks he is. Marlon Brando makes a rare appearance as an amiable Canadian crimelord who finances jobs and makes connections with buyers. Brando’s performance is little more than a series of this-is-what-I-imagine-a-regular-Joe-with-too-much-money-would-do tics, but in a movie that’s often overly staid, his infusion of unpredictability is welcome.

There have been rumors that Brando was largely directed by De Niro, since the big man reportedly didn’t respect The Score’s actual director, Frank Oz. That bolsters the De Niro-as-auteur theory, but it shortchanges the solid work that Oz does here. The Score moves deliberately toward the lengthy climactic robbery, shot in a succession of precise, neatly framed takes that clearly establish the pitfalls ahead and create such an absorbing atmosphere of tension that the film’s final twists are a delightful surprise. The Score is neither flashy nor deep, but its team-written screenplay is well-plotted, and Oz crafts it into a mature, involving entertainment.

But if the film has anything richer to offer, it’s because of De Niro, whose interest in this sort of character may extend back to his take on Don Corleone in The Godfather Part II, or to the real-life veteran mobsters that he inhabited for Scorsese in GoodFellas and Casino. These are crooks looking to avoid risks, to make a steady income, and to retire in modest luxury. The irony that De Niro plays up in each of these performances is that everything these men want could be attained if they took a regular job, punched the clock from 9 to 5, and worked their way up to middle management. It’s not that crime doesn’t pay—it’s that it doesn’t offer a competitive benefits package.

—Noel Murray

Download of crap

If you’re generating a movie entirely from pixels, why use the same tired exposition, visual and verbal boilerplate, and static camera angles as cheesy live-action sci-fi? That’s the question raised by Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, an excruciating CGI fantasy adapted from the best-selling computer game. In the year 2065, on an Earth ravaged by translucent alien “phantoms,” Dr. Aki Ross must defy slithery monsters, her own fatal illness, and a mad general to summon the eight healing spirits that can save mankind.

The flimsiness of the plot isn’t the problem, since all anyone cares about are the visuals; the alien landscapes and squid-like phantoms are indeed the best part. The problem is that the movie squanders its resources duplicating the dumbest, deadliest clichés of live-action dreck—plastic heroes, cardboard villains, fatherly scientists. The computer-generated character designs aren’t just bland, they’re stubbornly inexpressive. And the voices may belong to celebrities, including Ming-Na, James Woods, Alec Baldwin, and Ving Rhames, but they might as well be issuing from sock puppets. There’s not a single shot in the movie featuring a synthetic actor that couldn’t have been done more convincingly with a human being. And because the photorealistic computer animation is so ponderous, the minutes pass like hours; everyone seems to be walking underwater.

The biggest cheat, though, is the filmmaking. In a movie where anything should be visually possible—new kinds of transitions, unimaginable camera movements, montage without cutting—the creative team deserves a G4 Cube upside the head for relying on spoken exposition. Or for using all these splendiferous technological tools to deliver stuff like a shootout in a big holding area—a scene that appears in every cheap-ass post-apocalyptic potboiler with access to a warehouse. As moviemaking, this is about as revolutionary as Atari Pong.

For transport to a truly alien universe, Final Fantasy can’t hold a cyber-candle to Hiroshi Teshigahara’s 1964 masterpiece Woman in the Dunes, which opens this week at the Belcourt. The plot is a sort of existential riddle: A man becomes trapped in a steep sand pit with an enigmatic woman; as he’s taunted and scrutinized by the villagers above, his rage intensifies into erotic obsession. The idea of life as a futile task resonates universally, but Teshigahara created visuals eerier, more unfamiliar, and more terrifyingly beautiful than most any sci-fi movie ever filmed. The shifting textures of sand, crystals, and grit on skin hot with desire are completely foreign, and still as tactile as sandpaper. They’re far weirder than the porcelain-slick surfaces of Final Fantasy—and all the more real for it.

—Jim Ridley