Film

Badlands (1974)

Director: Terrence Malick

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

One of the most impressive directorial debuts ever. On the surface, it's merely another rural-gangster movie in the tradition of Bonnie and Clyde, with its young 'innocents' - a James Dean-lookalike garbage collector and his magazine-addict girlfriend - first killing her father when he objects to their relationship, then going on a seemingly gratuitous homicidal spree across the Dakota Badlands. But what distinguishes the film, beyond the superb performances of Sheen and Spacek, the use of music, and the luminous camerawork by Tak Fujimoto, is Malick's unusual attitude towards psychological motivation: the dialogue tells us one thing, the images another, and Spacek's beautifully artless narration, couched in terms borrowed from the mindless media mags she's forever reading, yet another. This complex perspective on an otherwise simple plot, developed even further in Malick's subsequent Days of Heaven, manages to reveal so much while making nothing explicit, and at the same time seems perfectly to evoke the world of '50s suburbia in which it is set.

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