Badlands (1973)

United States, 1973
Directed by Terrence Malick

 Here's a review I wrote for Badlands a while back:

I am currently enrolled in a film class – for our film screening this week we watched Badlands. I was pleasantly surprised, as Badlands is the debut film of my favorite living director, Terrence Malick. It is the film of his I am least familiar with, as I had only seen it once previously and several years ago – watching it again on a theater-sized screen was a wild experience. I was captivated by it. Yet writing a review of any Terrence Malick movie intimidates me. All of his films are wholly unique and deceptively complex, and their peculiar magic must be experienced and cannot be captured or summarized in words – but I’ll give it a try anyways, and hopefully won’t butcher the attempt horribly. Also: keep in mind, while Malick’s movies are not very traditionally plotted and thus difficult to “spoil”, I might discuss plot and narrative details that could be considered spoilers. So, be warned.

Badlands is loosely based on the real-life murder spree of 20-something Charles Starkweather and his teenage girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate in the late 50′s, or more accurately “inspired by” – the names and many of the events were changed, and the true story inspiration is not even mentioned or acknowledged in the film. Badlands belongs in a tradition of “criminal lovers on the run” movies, such as Bonnie and Clyde which was released to enormous controversy and popularity several years earlier. Despite the similarity of their narratives, the approach of Badlands and Bonnie and Clyde to their subject matter is starkly different. Bonnie and Clyde forthrightly romanticizes the two killers – they are played by gorgeous sex-symbol actors, and their passion is portrayed as pure and beautiful. Bonnie and Clyde perhaps doesn’t condone their murders, but it certainly glamorizes their violent us-against-the-world attitude and turns the infamous duo into tragic, sexy rebels. It is a very exciting and aesthetically amazing movie, but its attitude is amoral. Badlands bluntly refuses to make its young killers at all cool or desirable. They are sad, pathetic, even laughable. Kit is a charismatic but aimless young man who believes himself to look like James Dean, who spouts out advice and witticisms that increasingly reveal themselves to be irrelevant noise used to disguise his lack of purpose, and whose slightly “off” geniality barely conceals his bottled-up rage. Kit does all the killing, yet his girlfriend Holly is, in her own quiet way, just as frightening. She is an utter blank slate, someone who apparently never developed a personality or moral compass, who follows Kit into horrible situations just because he pays attention to her. They fall into their status as serial killers casually, with no visible motives aside from boredom and moral obliviousness. Kit and Holly are not motivated by hate, but by general purposelessness in life. If you have spent any time around restlessly angry kids with violent tendencies, Kit and Holly’s moral vacuousness and lack of awareness of other human beings as actual human beings will ring frighteningly true. The violence in Badlands is presented with similar un-romantic bluntness. The murders are nonchalant, neither exciting nor immediately horrifying, but anticlimactic and clumsy. Violence here is not a grim spectacle or a thrill – it is sad and stupid, an obvious and avoidable waste of life. While the off-kilter approach to violence makes Badlands less thrilling than Bonnie and Clyde and multitudes of violent Hollywood films, it makes for a haunting, unnerving experience. This is a vivid portrait of the banality of evil.

I admire Badlands for its deliberate refusal to sensationalize or glamorize violence, but what elevates it to a classic (and a surprisingly easy-to-watch film considering its disturbing content) is the remarkable artistry. Normally, director’s debut films, even the great ones, have amateurish edges or undeveloped ideas. This is not the case with Badlands, which is brilliantly crafted and hugely creative on every level. Some aesthetic techniques appear here that become staples of all of Malick’s works. One is voiceover. All of Malick’s films have narration, by one or multiple characters, that reveals their sometimes profound, sometimes mundane thoughts and is not always reliable. Badlands is narrated by Holly, in a flat, emotionless tone of voice. Her thoughts are innocent and guileless, replete with mundane recounting of day-to-day events and clumsy attempts at poetry. Holly's narration reads like the average diary of a naive, fanciful young girl, excepting the dreadful events they describe. The disconnect between the form and the content of Holly's narration creates eerie irony. The music is similarly ironic. One repeating theme is a jaunty, peppy classical music piece that would seem more at home over a montage of “this is what I did at summer camp today” than the events of Badlands. Yet the irony in both the voiceover and theme music is not smug or jokey, but a chilling way to contrast the dumb naivete of Holly and Kit and the wretchedness of their actions.

In what would become another recurring feature of Malick's films, Badlands always calls attention to the environment surrounding the characters. After their first murder, Kit and Holly flee into the woods and build a treehouse to live in. This is the most idyllic stretch of the film. They raise chickens, fish, laze around, and dance to rock music on the radio like two regular teens. Terrence Malick’s films often focus on characters discovering or trying to recreate lost, Edenic states of being, in innocence, peace and simplicity, before their own sinfulness snatches it away. While his later, more religious films are more explicit about this idea, the dreamily gorgeous woodland hideout scenes in Badlands are an early example. Later in the film, Kit and Holly aimlessly drive through the vast badlands of Montana to escape police. Their lone figures are constantly contrasted to the vast landscape and skies that overwhelm them – their foolishness seems almost inconsequential in the grand scope of the universe.

I’ve gotten this far into my review without even mentioning Martin Sheen or Sissy Spacek. Neither were famous at the time, and both are outstanding – Sheen in particular, making his character equal parts charming, comically absurd, and scarily amoral. Their very odd but very human performances, along with Malick’s sensitive, thoughtful direction and the beautiful photography, make Badlands a masterpiece. It is definitely not my favorite of Malick’s works – it is less spiritual and emotional than anything else he’s made, and too bleak to watch as often, but is just as accomplished and preternaturally perfect.