"Badlands" (1973)

"You're quite an individual, Kit."
"You think they'll take that into consideration?"

They will but they won't be able to -- the law doesn't allow them to make concessions. Because a movie is still limited to the laws of movieness and good guys get forgotten and bad guys stay remembered; and good-bad guys are the subjects of movies that are bound by laws of time and not by those of morality. That is, as movie (as opposed to being a "film") it is a piece of sculpted time usually cut down to 90 mins of fine storytelling (Badlands is 96 mins, but discounting the end credits, really, really close to the perfect 90). The perfection of Badlands has to do with how well-edited and how well-acted and how well-balanced everything in its composition really is -- and it has to do with its movie-length perfectionism, its 90 minute sphericality. The totality of it amounts to being a movie containment more so than a film escapement: one which is in league with those "instant classics" that feel as if they were made long before you ever saw them; because almost every line is memorable (because every line is spoken with the carefree deliberation of people on the run who want to make themselves remembered before they disappear into the night, into the solitude of the Montana Badlands where nothing grows) and because Martin Sheen, after all, was a nobody until he made this film, that is, until he started shooting people because he was in mad love and people and the Law (the law of movieness) started trying to catch him and make him explain why he is so likable when he was so bad. And because Sissy Spacek was a nobody too, who made TV movies before Terrence Malick picked her (maybe because she was 24 but she could pass for a 15-year-old and maybe because she was a redhead and her large light blue eyes made you think she could read your mind while living hers privately in ways that could not be foreshadowed or guessed at by any amount of divination, unless you could hear her speak in voice-over).

Terrence Malick was blessed and cursed when he made Badlands. He was blessed because his 1st film turned out to be an instant classic, it was almost too good for its own good, as handsome and wise and cool as Martin Sheen, as insightful and private and pure as Sissy Spacek. It is a film as much of the 50s as it was of the 70s, and it ran forward with the resolve of a short-distance runner who knows how to reach the end of a narrative by following along the track lines, contained within the sphericality of the narrative, the memorable lines, the handsome actors, the "mad love" or "love on the run" rationale that could speak for a generation or make sense of a confused but quite innocent time in which America meant the liberty to bear arms and buy shells at gasoline stations, drink soda pop instead of water, drive cadillacs across desert terrain, and elope with an underage girlfriend on the way toward heaven (or Montana or wherever wide open spaces were) and throw all the rest to the devil. But Malick was cursed because Badlands turned out to cut his career short, to stifle it, to make him want to never make Badlands again. From the perspective of Badlands, Malick's 2nd film, Days of Heaven, seems more of a failure or a pained lurch forward, a self-aware composition that was in search of a cinematic lexicon which could go beyond the contained sphericality of Badlands but which turned out to be more confused and hypothetical than assured and well-defined. Even though Days of Heaven still retained a 90 minute length, it was no longer spherical, no longer a movie; it was a film, an escapement, it was trying to do something different within 90 minutes. And indeed, some 20 years later, Malick made The Thin Red Line, which turned out to be 170 minutes (and probably could have gone longer), and he was definitely no longer interested in making movies, he wanted to make films, a new kind of art that people would associate with his name. It would not be until The New World when he would perfect the technique that began with Days of Heaven, and each film since then has been an escapement that mimicked Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek's escapement from the laws of movieness which, ironically, was an attempt on the part of Malick to escape the sphericality of an american classic like Badlands, a film so good and so american that it could make a director never want to repeat it again.