1980 Week: Heart Beat

          Given the endless fascination that people have for 1950s beatnik culture and especially for the work of Beat author Jack Kerouac, it’s surprising that no one’s attempted a proper biopic about the man. In fact, cursory research suggests this middling melodrama includes the first fictionalized onscreen depiction of Kerouac, who is played by the underrated actor John Heard as an earnest young man striving for meaning and recognition while also trying to reconcile the gap that exists between those two things. Yet Heart Beat isn’t primarily about Kerouac, who is merely one prong in a romantic triangle. The other people involved are Kerouac’s notorious pal Neal Cassady, an inspiration for one of the major characters in Kerouac’s classic 1957 book On the Road, and Cassaday’s wife, Carolyn, who wrote the memoir from which Heart Beat was adapted. The way that Kerouac gets lost in the shuffle is indicative of the narrative problems that plague Heart Beat. Although clearly made with care and conviction, the movie is indecisive and unfocused, trying to tell several stories at the same time and therefore serving none of those stories well.

          In the broadest strokes, Heart Beat explores the friendship between Jack (Heard), a straight-laced guy fascinated with the way Beats ignore the restrictions of Establishment culture, and Neal (Nick Nolte), a wild man who lives the Beatnik lifestyle to an extreme. Caught in the middle is Carolyn (Sissy Spacek), a society girl who impulsively joins Jack and Nick for an adventure into the unknown. Although Jack falls hard for Carolyn, he waits too long to make a move, and Neal swoops Carolyn into a torrid romance that later resolves into a conventional marriage. Before that happens, Carolyn is present for the creation of On the Road, which occasions a parting of the ways between Jack, who longs for mainstream success, and Neal, who resents having his life transformed into prose. Other friends drift in and out of the main characters’ vagabond existence, including Ira (Ray Sharkey), a loudmouth poet based upon the real-life Beat icon Alan Ginsburg. (Ira’s principal shtick involves screaming “cocksucker” in public places, which has the effect of reducing Ginsberg to a vulgar caricature.)

          During the first half of Heart Beat, in which writer-director John Byrum tracks the emergence of the romantic triangle, the movie is dull and meandering. During the second half, things get spicier, because Jack experiences success around the same time that Carolyn, Jack, and Neal attempt living as a threesome, with Carolyn moving between the beds of the two men she loves. Perhaps because of limitations in the source material (meaning Carolyn Cassidy’s book) and perhaps because of a failure of imagination on Byrum’s part, Heart Beat fails to genuinely illuminate its characters, thereby falling into the trap of simply re-creating interesting moments as museum dioramas. At its worst, the movie is a lifeless frame showcasing Jack Fisk’s immaculate production design, and sometimes the shadows cast by venetian blinds are the most compelling things onscreen. At its best, the movie gives Nolte room to portray Cassady as a merry prankster high on exploration and spontaneity.

Heart Beat: FUNKY

1980 Week: Coal Miner’s Daughter

          Late in Coal Miner’s Daughter, the acclaimed biopic of country-music legend Loretta Lynn, there’s a telling remark about fame: “Gettin’ here is one thing, and bein’ here’s another.” That the line is spoken not by Lynn, played to Oscar-winning perfection by Sissy Spacek, but rather by her husband, Mooney, portrayed by Tommy Lee Jones, speaks volumes. In this particular story, the rise from dirt-poor roots to extraordinary success is hardest on Mooney, because once his wife’s career takes flight—thanks to years of hard work by both members of the couple—Mooney becomes superfluous in ways he never expected. This insightful take on the rags-to-riches formula that’s usually employed for biopics about music stars is just one of several commendable aspects of Coal Miner’s Daughter. Even though the film is quite ordinary in many ways, from the unavoidably predictable storyline to the way the title character is all but sanctified, delicate nuances of character and regional identity give Coal Miner’s Daughter an appealing sense of authenticity.

          Opening in rural Kentucky circa the late 1940s, the picture introduces Loretta as the dutiful 15-year-old daughter of Ted Webb (played by real-life rock singer Levon Helm), a hardworking coal miner and father of eight kids. Life in the tiny mountain village of Butcher Hollow is hard, so when fast-talking World War II veteran Oliver “Mooney” Lynn woos Loretta with dancing and romance, she’s quickly swept off her feet. Marriage and pregnancy follow. Eventually, Mooney relocates his growing family to the city so he can find work, and he encourages Loretta to develop her singing talents by performing at honky-tonks. Though she misses her people in Butcher Hollow, Loretta realizes she’s got a gift for entertaining audiences, and things start falling into place. Mooney finances a recording session that produces a hit single, Loretta gets invited to perform on the Grand Ole Opry, and reigning country-music queen Patsy Cline (Beverly D’Angelo) becomes Loretta’s best friend, mentor, and touring partner. Despite exhaustion, marital tensions, and tragedies, Lynn soldiers on to become a chart-topping superstar.

          As written by Tom Rickman (from Lynn’s best-selling autobiography) and directed by Michael Apted, a versatile Brit who has spent his career toggling between documentaries and fiction films, Coal Miner’s Daughter feels heartfelt from start to finish. The scenes in Kentucky are especially good, with beautifully constructed accents and costumes and sets used to convey you-are-there verisimilitude. Although material depicting life on the road is pedestrian, the combination of D’Angelo’s sass and Spacek’s fortitude amply demonstrates the indignities and sacrifices that women had to make for music careers in the ’50s. Jones also delivers one of his liveliest performances, mostly suppressing his natural surliness in favor of good-ol’-boy warmth. Underscoring all of this, of course, is the fact that Lynn’s early life really did unfold like a country song—she’s the real deal, and the same can be said of this film about her amazing journey.

Coal Miner’s Daughter: GROOVY

Prime Cut (1972)

          If appraised solely for its attitude, style, and tone, Prime Cut would easily qualify as one of the best crime films of the ’70s. A Midwestern noir set primarily on a cattle ranch and the surrounding area—think county fairs and wheat fields—the movie boasts crisp low-angle cinematography, offbeat situations, rough violence, and tasty performances by actors including Gene Hackman, Lee Marvin, and Sissy Spacek. It’s hard to think of another action picture that features a hay-bailing machine as a potential murder weapon—or one that features a scene of a mob enforcer getting chopped up and packaged as a tube of sausages. Yet for all the things Prime Cut does well, the movie fails in the most important regard. The script is an absolute mess, with murky characters pursuing unclear goals based upon perplexing motivations.

          The narrative is so poorly constructed, in fact, that it’s often difficult to enjoy the movie’s amazing moment-to-moment texture. One gets the sense that director Michael Ritchie and his collaborators wanted to present a movie so cryptic and hard-boiled that it was devoid of clichés and easy explanations. If that was the goal, they succeeded. Yet the filmmakers sacrificed clarity on the altar of cinematic style. Having said all that, Prime Cut is pretty damn badass whenever it locks into a groove.

          The principal focus of the story is a Midwestern gangster nicknamed “Mary Ann” (Hackman), who has decided to cut ties with his former bosses in the Chicago underworld. Running a dugs-and-prostitution ring out of his cattle ranch, Mary Ann has become a beloved community leader thanks to his largesse and a feared opponent thanks to his cruelty—he’s the proverbial big fish in a small town. After several operatives have failed to rein in Mary Ann’s reckless behavior, Chicago bosses send hired gun Nick Devlin (Lee Marvin) to set Mary Ann straight. Immediately upon his arrival at Mary Ann’s place, Nick takes possession of Poppy (Spacek), a teenager whom Mary Ann’s goons have kidnapped and drugged for sale as a sex slave. That’s where the story goes off the rails. Instead of focusing on his mission, Nick spends a lot of time hanging out at his hotel, wining and dining Poppy (even though he seems not to have any sexual interest in her), and articulating vague plans for giving Mary Ann a hard time. Meanwhile, Mary Ann picks off Nick’s men with apparent ease.

          Much of what happens during the movie’s lugubrious middle section is interesting simply because of novelty—for instance, the shootout during a county fair—but the story gets particularly aimless whenever Spacek is on screen. Thus, when the movie finally trundles into a bloody final showdown at Mary Ann’s place, the dramatic stakes have become so dissipated that it’s hard to care what happens.

          Amazingly, the three leads manage to give interesting performances despite the script’s shortcomings. Marvin blends humor and a dash of romanticism into his signature ice-cold persona, so he’s frequently riveting. Hackman essays one of his most monstrous villains, and he’s terrific in small moments like the bit during which he capriciously buys a child’s pet cow and sends the animal to the slaughterhouse. Spacek struggles to figure out what purpose she serves in the movie, because at one moment she’s eye candy (Spacek performs a long sequence wearing a see-through dress), and at the next moment she’s the film’s soul (demonstrating anguish at the abuse of women). Even though all of this is quite perplexing, one is unlikely to find a better-acted or better-looking mess of an action flick.

Prime Cut: FUNKY

Katherine (1975)

          Clever and slick but also quite thoughtful, the made-for-TV feature Katherine depicts the radicalization of a rich white girl from Colorado during the heyday of the anti-Vietnam War movement. Beginning with her eye-opening experience as a teacher of impoverished farmers living near an American mission in Peru, Katherine Alman (Sissy Spacek) becomes more and more incensed about the social inequities of the modern world, which naturally creates estrangement between Katherine and her wealthy parents, Emily (Jane Wyatt) and Thornton (Art Carney). Meanwhile, Katherine’s commitment to revolutionary change brings her into the orbit of Bob Kline (Henry Winkler), a fellow teacher-turned-radical, and the two eventually join the Weathermen wing of Students for a Democratic Society. Writer-director Jeremy Paul Kagan, whose script was inspired by the exploits of real-life SDS activist Diana Oughton, exhibits a deft touch for blending entertainment and issues.

          The best scenes in Katherine feature direct human conflict that dramatizes class warfare, ranging from an early scene of a thuggish overseer whipping a farm worker to a pivotal re-creation of the riots surrounding the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Even in smaller scenes, Kagan effectively crystallizes major political strife into relatable disagreements. For instance, the sequence of Bob and Katherine receiving pressure from black citizens and white cops to close the school where Bob and Katherine teach African-American youths illustrates how many different battle lines were drawn in the late ’60s. Scenes set in the Alman house lack the same measure of authenticity, because Kagan’s choice to gift his character with a privileged background overstates the stereotype of part-time radicals who retain the safety net of running home to Mom and Dad.

          That said, committed acting elevates even the most contrived parts of Katherine. Carney embodies old-fashioned American decency so beautifully that he evokes the movies of Frank Capra, and Winkler—a long way from Fonzie thanks to his moustache and shaggy hair—imbues his character with the beguiling/maddening blend of messianic charisma and smug narcissism that plagued so many men in the antiwar movement. Holding the film together, of course, is Spacek, an actor nearly incapable of striking a false note. Even Spacek’s great powers, however, are tested by some of the strident speeches that Kagan’s script forces her to deliver. Yet stilted dialogue isn’t the only component of Katherine that feels wobbly, as Kagan’s storytelling involves three layers—documentary-style vignettes in which characters address the camera, fully dramatized re-creations of events, and eerie clips of Katherine telling her own story. Although the last of these three elements could have been discarded without much harm to the film’s dramatic power, Kagan sticks the landing with a beautifully cut final sequence that pulls all of the story’s threads together.

Katherine: GROOVY

Ginger in the Morning (1974)

The early ’70s were rotten with low-budget dramas about middle-aged men hooking up with hippie chicks, because the prospect of exploiting counterculture “free love” attitudes for quick no-strings nookie seemed like an evergreen premise for lurid stories. Among the least distinguished entries in this mini-genre is Ginger in the Morning, the only noteworthy aspect of which is an early performance by Sissy Spacek. (Ginger in the Morning was released between the actress’ early breakout in 1973’s Badlands and her star-making role in 1975’s Carrie.) Spacek is, by far, the best thing about this shoddy flick, demonstrating dignity and poise while playing a free-spirited Southern girl—and thereby neutralizing the potentially exploitive nature of the storyline. Whereas many similar films end up feeling slightly pornographic, with their wink-wink scenes of mature men seducing innocent hotties, this picture flips the premise simply by virtue of Spacek’s gravitas. Her character seems formidable right from the beginning, even if her flower-power belief system leads her to see more potential for good in people than she should. The nominal star of the picture is prolific B-movie/TV actor Monte Markham, a preening he-man who tends to arch his eyebrows for dramatic effect on nearly every line of dialogue. He plays Joe, a recently divorced man traveling through the Southwest after a business trip. Joe picks up hitchhiker Ginger (Spacek) and treats her like a gentleman throughout a day of driving—until he senses she’s game for a tumble. Taking her home to his pad in Santa Fe, Joe prepares to score until his best friend, Charlie (Mark Miller), shows up unexpectedly. Ginger overhears Joe telling Charlie that all Joe wants from Ginger is sex, so she gets affronted. Also thrown into the mix is Charlie’s estranged wife, Sugar (Susan Oliver). As a result, much of the movie comprises intercut melodrama as the two couples work through their issues. The scenes with Spacek are generally watchable because she acts with such sincerity, but everything else in the movie is a drag. The production values are cheap, the lighting is ugly, and the acting by Markham, Miller, and Oliver is, at best, ordinary. As for the story, it never rises above superficial and trite.

Ginger in the Morning: FUNKY

3 Women (1977)

          Deliberately opaque and sluggishly paced, 3 Women represents maverick auteur Robert Altman’s filmmaking at its least accessible. With its clinical depiction of weird behavior and its cringe-inducing storyline about an odd young woman coveting the existence of a fellow misfit, 3 Women is a cinematic cousin to Ingmar Bergman’s personality-transfer psychodrama Persona (1966). The difference, of course, is that Persona makes sense. Written, produced, and directed by Altman, 3 Women a thriller with heavily surrealistic elements, so the actual narrative matters less than the sick stuff crawling beneath the surface. Further, Altman has said that the film came to him as a dream, and these roots are evident in the way Altman strings together bizarre signifiers—the movie’s random components include a speechless woman who paints epic murals on the base of a swimming pool, a middle-aged dude whose claim to fame is having been the stunt double for TV cowboy Hugh O’Brien, and a pair of bitchy twins.

          Set in a dusty town in rural California, the picture begins when spooky-eyed young waif Pinky (Sissy Spacek) shows up for her first day of work at an aquatic rehab center for seniors. (Cue grotesque shots of aging thighs descending into water.) Assigned to mentor Pinky is gangly chatterbox Millie (Shelley Duvall), who inexplicably believes herself irresistible to friends and suitors alike, even though she’s constantly mocked and rebuffed. Pinky gravitates to Millie, and the two become roommates. (Cue weird sequence of touring a semi-abandoned Old West theme park near Millie’s apartment building.) As the story drags on—and on and on—Pinky covertly studies her roommate and does little things to screw with Millie’s existence, until finally the women arrive at some strange new level of understanding.

          As for what exactly that new level of understanding comprises, your guess is as good as mine; even Altman has admitted he doesn’t know what the picture’s ending means.

          3 Women is filled with ominous textures, such as guttural music cues and, at one point, an extended, impressionistic montage of murder scenes and trippy artwork. There’s also a recurring motif of vignettes seen through a veil of water, as if the story’s events occur at some unknowable depth of consciousness. 3 Women is catnip for viewers who crave ferociously individualistic cinema, because there’s no mistaking this ethereal symphony for an ordinary movie. And, indeed, the picture has many respectable admirers: Roger Ebert is a fan, and after a long period in which the film was commercially unavailable, it was released on DVD by the Criterion Collection.

          That said, is the movie actually worth watching for mere mortals? Depends on what rocks your world. I found 3 Women pointless and tedious, little more than self-indulgent regurgitation of personal dream imagery. Yet I admit that I rarely enjoy movies lacking grounded narratives, and that I have mixed feelings about Altman’s tendency to pick the scabs of human strangeness. However, the strength of a movie like 3 Women is that it’s a different experience for every viewer—where I saw only ugliness, you may find beauty.

3 Women: FREAKY

Welcome to L.A. (1976)

          After making a pair of schlocky horror flicks, writer-director Alan Rudolph finally got to make a proper film with the help of A-list auteur Robert Altman, who served as Rudolph’s producer for Welcome to L.A. Given the “Robert Altman presents” imprimatur, however, it’s hard not to perceive Welcome to L.A. as Altman Lite, especially since Rudolph emulates his producer’s filmmaking style by presenting a loosely intertwined mosaic of cynical stories. Yet while Altman’s best ensemble movies sparkle with idiosyncratic humor, Welcome to L.A. is monotonous, a downbeat slog comprising vapid Los Angelenos doing rotten things for unknowable reasons.

          The character holding everything together is Carroll Barber (Keith Carradine), a self-absorbed rich kid who fancies himself a songwriter and who spends the movie accruing sexual conquests. Some of the uninteresting people orbiting Carroll are Ann (Sally Kellerman), a pathetic real-estate agent given to humiliating displays of unrequited affection; Karen (Geraldine Chaplin), a spacey housewife who spends her days riding around the city in taxis; Linda (Sissy Spacek), a ditzy housekeeper who works topless; Nona (Lauren Hutton), a kept woman who takes arty photographs; and Susan (Viveca Lindfors), an insufferably pretentious talent representative in love with a much-younger man. Harvey Keitel and Denver Pyle appear as well, though Rudolph is clearly much more interested in the feminine mystique than the inner lives of men.

          Rudolph structures the film like a concept album, using music to bridge vignettes, and this arty contrivance doesn’t work. Part of the problem is that singer-songwriter Richard Baskin, who provides the song score and also performs several numbers onscreen, prefers the song form of the shapeless dirge. Which, come to think of it, is not a bad way to describe Welcome to L.A. While Rudolph obviously envisioned some sort of Grand Statement about the ennui of modern city dwellers, he instead crafted an interminable recitation of trite themes. Worse, Rudolph employs juvenile flourishes such as having characters stare at the camera, as if viewers will somehow see into the characters’ souls. Sorry, but isn’t providing insight the filmmaker’s job? (Available as part of the MGM Limited Collection on Amazon.com)

Welcome to L.A.: LAME

Carrie (1976)

          It might be exaggerating to call Carrie a good film, since it’s unabashedly campy and lurid, but there’s no arguing with results—among other things, the movie earned two Oscar nominations, elevated director Brian De Palma to A-list status, turned leading lady Sissy Spacek into a star, initiated an epic relationship between Hollywood and novelist Stephen King, and became one of the most popular horror movies of the ’70s. Considering that the flick is so trashy it features beaver shots beneath the opening credits and culminates with a blood-soaked teenager using telekinesis to slaughter her classmates, that’s quite a list of accolades.

          Based on King’s first novel, Carrie tells the sad story of Carrie White (Spacek), a misfit American teenager so ignorant to the ways of the world that she freaks out upon getting her first period while showering in the school gym. Her vicious classmates, led by instigator Chris Hargensen (Nancy Allen), taunt Carrie mercilessly, pelting her with sanitary napkins, so Carrie is excused from school for the rest of the day. Once she returns home, we discover the source of Carrie’s troubles—her lunatic mother, Margaret White (Piper Laurie), is a Bible-thumping abuser who considers sexual development sinful and tortures Carrie with long imprisonments in a closet.

          As Carrie reels from the shower incident and her troubles at home, she discovers the ability to move objects with her mind. Meanwhile, Chris is banned from the upcoming prom—indirect punishment for tormenting Carrie—so she plans grotesque revenge. Adding a final thread to the story is Carrie’s sympathetic classmate Sue (Amy Irving), who persuades her dreamboat boyfriend, Tommy (William Katt), to take Carrie to the prom. One bucket of pig blood later, it all goes to hell.

          De Palma and screenwriter Lawrence D. Cohen took relatively few liberties with King’s narrative, so they delivered his signature combination of gore and pathos intact, and Carrie zooms along at tremendous speed. Excepting two ill-conceived comedic sequences (both of which feature cringe-inducing music), Carrie is laser-focused on developing empathy for the protagonist and setting up a Grand Guignol climax. Generally speaking, Carrie is an efficient movie, and some of the picture’s elements exist on an elevated plane. De Palma’s trademark tracking shots manifest in full force, for instance (though the shots are akin to guitar solos in overwrought hard-rock songs, flamboyance for the sake of flamboyance). Additionally, De Palma uses the supporting cast like an orchestra, getting exactly the right single note each from Allen, Irving, Katt, Laurie, and others (including Betty Buckley and John Travolta).

          Spacek’s Oscar-nominated performance holds Carrie together, since her character’s emotional journey drives the story. As played by Spacek, Carrie is fragile during early scenes, ferocious when assaulting her enemies, and poignant once she realizes the tragic fate to which she has been consigned. De Palma’s ending represents his biggest departure from King’s book, and while the film’s concise denouement is more cinematic than the protracted conclusion of King’s narrative, it’s a bit much, right up to the notorious “gotcha” coda. Once again, however, there’s no arguing with results; Carrie made such an impression that it earned a Broadway adaptation in 1988, a low-budget movie sequel in 1999, and big-budget movie remakes in 2002 and 2013.

Carrie: GROOVY

Eraserhead (1977)

          Back in my film-school days, a fellow student who favored experimental cinema encouraged me to watch David Lynch’s directorial debut, Eraserhead, which at that point I knew only by reputation. (This was around the time Lynch was enjoying a vogue thanks to his TV series Twin Peaks.) I took the plunge and watched Lynch’s 90-minute ode to oddness, which explores the world of crazy-haired weirdo Henry Spencer (Jack Nance), who lives in an industrial wasteland with a shrewish female companion and a caterwauling mutant baby. More of an audiovisual experiment than a traditional narrative, the movie is an endurance test for viewers—not only is the film virtually incomprehensible on the level of storytelling, Lynch utilizes so much sickening imagery and thundering noise that it sometimes seems his only goal is inducing nausea.

          Immediately after watching the movie, I was quizzed about my reaction by the Eraserhead fan, and I estimated that about 80% of the movie made sense to me. My friend said that meant I “got” the film, and, indeed, I vaguely recall articulating a fully formed interpretation. Collectively, however, the fact that I can’t remember a single word of what I said, the fact that I’ve never wanted to see the movie again, and the fact that failing to understand the entire movie was considered par for the course indicate how Eraserhead works: It’s like a drug. The movie is such a straight shot of Lynch—replete with his usual tropes of alienation, degradation, mutation, and stylization—that it’s either a sensation you need a fix of every so often, or a sensation you’re content to experience just once.

          There’s no denying the film’s power, because once you’ve seen Lynch’s grainy, black-and-white images of the putrid baby squirming in its crib, ooze glistening all over its misshapen body, you’ll never be able to erase the sight from your memory. Accordingly, Lynch deserves credit for putting his subconscious directly onto the screen; for better or worse, this is auteur filmmaking at its most idiosyncratic and indelible. And, as years of subsequent disturbing movies from this iconoclastic director have demonstrated, it’s not as if Eraserhead represented a juvenile stunt or a weird developmental phase—the man’s first feature is pure Lynch, unencumbered by the dead weight of a plot.

          As Lynch himself remarks in the so-so documentary Great Directors, “Eraserhead is my most spiritual film, but nobody has ever picked up on that.” (Whether that remark was coy or sincere is debatable, since I’ve never been sure how much of Lynch’s persona is a put-on.) Still, whatever the movie’s virtues and/or shortcomings, Eraserhead represents a cinematic artist finding success without compromise.

          Lynch started making the movie while a student at the American Film Institute, acquiring end money from a school grant and from actress Sissy Spacek, the wife of Lynch’s classmate/collaborator Jack Fisk. An adventurous distributor put the movie onto the midnight-movie circuit, where it became a sizable cult hit, earning $7 million despite costing only a reported $20,000. The film’s whacked-out artistry made a deep impression on Hollywood—Mel Brooks, of all people, hired Lynch to make The Elephant Man (1980), and Lynch’s career was off and running.

          So, although it’s deeply unpleasant to watch and although many viewers find it to be a pointless exercise in outré excess, Eraserhead is one of a kind—and that’s why it remains an inspirational touchstone for maverick filmmakers everywhere. Mutant babies of the world, unite!

Eraserhead: FREAKY

Badlands (1973)

          Cinematic poetry is hard to achieve in narrative films, because the normal grinding work of developing plots inevitably requires the inclusion of perfunctory elements that make pure artistic expression difficult. As a result, even the best movies enter the poetic realm for only a few minutes at a time. One notable exception to this rule, however, is writer-director Terrence Malick. His scripts are so spare, and his visuals are so elegant, that poetry is the only word that really describes his style. This was never truer than with his directorial debut, Badlands, which has occupied a treasured place among my very favorite films since I first watched it at film school. In fact, Badlands is one of the few movies that I wish I made, not just because the end result is so quietly overwhelming, but because of the sense I get that making the picture was a rarified experience involving like-minded artists helping Malick express something unique. Even though Badlands is a violent crime story, it’s also a  sensitive statement about directionless youths in the American heartland; few films balance savagery and soulfulness with this much grace.
          Malick’s script is a fictionalized take on the real-life odyssey of Charles Starkweather, who murdered 11 people during a 1958 trek across Nebraska and Wyoming, accompanied by his 14-year-old girlfriend. Badlands changes the names and locations, so instead of a docudrama it’s a meditation on the intersection between American wanderlust and the unknowable darkness in the human soul. Martin Sheen plays Kit Caruthers, a handsome but unstable garbage collector living in late-’50s South Dakota. When he meets sheltered teenager Holly Sargis (Sissy Spacek), his latent psychosis and fascination with James Dean’s live-fast-die-young mythology prompt Kit to embark upon a murderous odyssey with Holly as his hapless traveling companion. From the first scene, Malick creates an otherworldly mood, with airy musical compositions, Spacek’s plainspoken narration, and startling audiovisual juxtapositions communicating the idea that Badlands exists somewhere in the limbo between dreams and reality—when Kit and Holly camp out in a remote forest partway through the killing spree, it really does seem as if they’ve escaped the normal world for someplace else.
          Sheen is remarkable in a performance that sits comfortably alongside his acclaimed work in Apocalypse Now (1979); not only does he convincingly play a man far younger than Sheen was during production, but he believably personifies the idea of an twitchy loner who can’t find the right outlets for his angst, charisma, and curiosity. Spacek is unforgettable in a difficult role, because Holly is in some respects the blank slate upon which the audience projects its reactions—it’s to her great credit that we accept her wonderment at Kit’s force of personality, and her slow realization of the horror she’s witnessing. Invaluable ’70s character actors Ramon Bieri and Warren Oates appear in supporting roles, each contributing gritty texture and bringing out different colors in the leads’ performances.
          Although Malick’s subsequent career has produced some of the most beautiful images in American film, he has yet to recapture the focus he demonstrated with Badlands, and that’s part of why it’s the consummate example of his poetic approach: For an intoxicating hour and a half, Malick matches his filmmaking artistry with narrative economy in a gorgeous film without a single wasted frame.

Badlands: OUTTA SIGHT