Katie, Kelly and I saw the new 35mm print of Days of Heaven tonight at the Film Forum. Terrence Malick is the J.D. Salinger of directors: reclusive, revered (often overly so) and with few finished works to his name, having only cranked out four features in my lifetime. After completing Heaven in 1978, he wouldn’t direct another film for 20 years, The Thin Red Line.
Heaven’s dialogue could fit into a short story and the editing is choppy. Much of this has to do with Malick’s infamous style of rolling for miles of film, sometimes without a script, then creating the story in the cutting room. As such, his films aren’t as much plot or character driven as they are expressionistic meditations on life and death, alternating between carefully composed widescreen landscapes and the minutiae of nature, and culminating in sudden manmade savagery.
As for that plot, Bill (Richard Gere, when he was a strapping, handsome lad) and Abby (the oddly pretty Brooke Adams) are iterant laborers harvesting wheat in Texas in the days before World War I. Although they’re lovers, they pretend to be brother and sister, which leads to an entanglement with the farm’s sickly owner (Sam Shepard), who fancies Abby. Linda Manz plays Linda, a chain-smoking tomboy in her early teens who may or may not be Bill’s kid sister. The length of the film features her voiceover, like a New York-accented version of Huckleberry Finn, grammatically askew but clear-eyed and frank, meditating on her and the other laborers’ station in life. The movie winds down with plagues of fire and grasshoppers of Biblical proportions and concludes with a pair of inevitable deaths.
This is a film truly made to be seen on a large screen, with shots of trains traversing the countryside, herds of buffalo, infinite stalks of wheat undulating in the breeze, the sprawling fields dotted with workers at dawn and dusk. The background of most of the harvest scenes features the overseer’s looming farmhouse, lonely in the distance and lit at night, with the angle and Gothic shape of the one in Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World. Much of the dialogue seems poorly recorded, but it may just have to lend even more weight to the sounds that serve as themes in the film: the spinning meteorological whirligigs atop the farmhouse, the whirling white noise of the mechanical threshers, the buzz of insects descending, the wind.
After the film, we wandered the neighborhood to find a quiet place to enjoy a drink. Kelly chose Jekyll & Hyde Pub on Sixth Avenue and although she’d been there before, Katie and I hadn’t. It’s like T.G.I. Friday’s of the Damned inside. The menu is generic burgers and fries, but you go for the funhouse ambiance. Televisions mounted near the ceiling loop trailers of old black-and-white B-grade horror films, and all around on the walls and shelves are skeletons, macabre artwork, preserved insects, phrenology busts, and other carnival curios. The restrooms are hidden in a back hall behind a long wall of bookshelves and the staff isn’t supposed to tell you where they are exactly. You end up full of drink and addled, with a desperate need to pee, then find yourself fumbling with the book-lined walls for a secret latch or lever and pining for the aid of Nancy Drew.
To decide who would pay for the first round, I challenged Katie without warning to an arm wrestling duel right there at our table. She’s surprisingly strong. The matched ended in a draw, although to Katie’s credit, she partially lifted me out of my seat with the power of her mighty forearm.
Kelly ran into an actor friend of hers named Jason who works the pub part-time as the voice of several monster heads mounted on the walls. To explain, much of the décor at Jekyll & Hyde’s—skeletons, mummies, werewolf heads and such—is rigged with hidden cameras and speakers, and has eyes and a mouth that can be animated remotely. In a secret control room upstairs are video monitors, animatronic controls and microphones to make the things “speak” at just the right moment. What this boils down to is you’re some Australian tourist trying to eat your $12 hamburger, when suddenly the werewolf head mounted to the wall above your table comes to life and starts making fun of your accent and taunting you to get up and dance along to Christina Aguilera’s “Genie in a Bottle” until you finally just get up and do it.
After his Australian taunting, Jason came back downstairs and told us a bit about his acting career. For one of those true crime programs on cable, he’d played a Missouri teenager who bludgeoned his parents to death with an axe handle. But his most recent gig was starring in a Troma Entertainment film called Poultrygeist!, billed as “the world’s first horror-comedy film to feature zombie chickens, American Indians and a bit of singing and dancing!”
After a plate of curry fries and several beers, we left around midnight, disappointed that the previously agreeable temperature had dipped to near-winter levels.