Badlands
by Terrence Malick
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Alan Vint, Martin Sheen, Ramon Bieri, Sissy Spacek, Warren OatesDirector: Terrence Malick
DVD: 2 Sides, Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 5.1; French (Original Language), Dolby Digital 1.0; English (Subtitled); French (Subtitled)
Format: AC-3, Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD-Video, Full Screen, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: Anamorphic Widescreen, 1.85:1
Running Time: 95 minutes
DVD Release Date: 1999-04-27
Audience Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Studio: Warner Home Video
Movie Reviews of Badlands
Movie Review: Revisionist history + good acting = interesting movie.
Summary: 3 Stars
Badlands (Terrence Malick, 1973)
I've never understood the mystique attached to Terrence Malick. I assumed this was because the first Malick film I saw was his 1998 desecration of The Thin Red Line, to this day one of the worst films I have ever had the displeasure to sit through in a theater. I figured that in order to give the guy a fighting chance, I'd go back and watch his earlier movies. Badlands was his first, and hey, Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek playing Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate? Okay, I'm sold. And it is certainly a much better film than The Thin Red Line, though I'm still not quite sure I've figured out the whole "mystique" bit.
The movie is a loose (very loose; everything from the names of the protagonists to the locations is changed-- Starkweather and Fugate never made it to Montana) adaptation of the Charles Starkweather story. Starkweather, here called Kit (Sheen), a garbageman, meets Fugate, erm, Holly (Spacek), a schoolgirl ten years younger than he. He falls in love with her. Her father (Warren Oates) is dead set against it, not because of the age difference-- Holly is only fourteen-- but because of the class difference. When Kit loses his job, he arrives to take Holly away with him so he can go find another one; after her father adamantly refuses to let her leave, Kit shoots him. Holly shows some emotion at this but not a great deal; she leaves with him, and the two travel from South Dakota to Montana, leaving a trail of bodies for which Kit has very easy explanations. After all, if he left anyone alive, they might tell the police where the young lovers (though how much love there is between them is always in question) are. They flee for Canada, an ever-growing legion of law enforcement officers on their back.
It's hard to deny the power of the source material; people have been wondering for decades what on earth possessed Caril Ann Fugate to tag along on Starkweather's killing spree (she claimed she was held hostage, but that never really rang true). And what Malick has done with it here is interesting. Spacek and Sheen are, of course, excellent actors almost every time they hit a screen, and the cinematography is fantastic, all the more so because it seems to have been done by committee (three cinematographers are named in the credits). Perhaps the faint dislike I felt of it simply stems from my dislike of The Thin Red Line, because, short of nitpickiness that's not really appropriate for such a fictionalized narrative of the events, I can't find any other reason for it. Still, I'm not entirely sure it deserves all the raves it's gotten, but that doesn't make it any less a good movie. ***
Summary of Badlands
Still one of American cinema's most powerful, daring filmmaking debuts, Terrence Malick's Badlands is a quirky, visionary psychological and social enigma masquerading as a simple lovers-on-the-lam flick. Inspired by the 1958 murders in the cold, stark badlands of South Dakota by Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, the film's plot, on the surface, is similar to that of other killing-couple films, like Bonnie and Clyde and Gun Crazy. Martin Sheen, in an understated, sophisticated performance, plays the strange James Dean-like social outcast who falls in love with the na?ve Sissy Spacek--and then kills her father when he comes between them. The two flee like animals to the wilderness, until the police arrive and the killing spree begins.What sets the film apart from others of its genre is Malick's complicated approach. Gorgeous, impenetrable images contrast sharply with Spacek's nostalgically artless narration, serving as ironic counterpoints, blurring concrete meaning, and stressing that nothing this horrific is simple. Malick observes, rather than analyzes, the couple in a manner as detached and apathetic as the couple's shocking actions. No judgment or definitive motivations are offered, though Malick's empathy often leans toward his senseless protagonists, rather than the star-struck society that makes killers famous. Compared with the interchangeable uniform cops who hunt them and the film's other nameless characters stuck in suburban banality, the couple are presented like tarnished, warped and frustrated results of squelched individuality.
Badlands, on one level, views America's suffocating homogeneity and, conversely, its continued obsession with celebrities (individuals considered different but adored) as hypocritical. Ambiguous and bold, the movie hints that society may be as guilty as the killers. --Dave McCoy
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